Renowned baseball broadcaster Jon Miller, who this summer received the prestigious Ford C. Frick Award at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, has been the play-by-play man for ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” broadcasts for the past 20 years.  He has spent more than 40 years broadcasting sporting events, starting with his first semester as a 17-year-old freshman at the College of San Mateo (formerly known as San Mateo Junior College) in 1969.

Image by Mario Ayala

“I had my sights set on San Francisco State University as the next step in my education,” he recalls. “One day, though, I heard a radio football broadcast from San Mateo Junior College. When I found out that I could get hands on experience with broadcasting at the college, but not at SF State, the decision was made (and junior college was free at the time, which made the situation even sweeter!).”

Miller was a self-starter, driven to pursue his passion for broadcasting even before he arrived on campus.

“In preparation, I bought a tape recorder and sat at every high school sporting event that existed and broadcast the games into the recorder,” he recalls.  “I had no idea then how much that experience would help me when I got to San Mateo College.”

Miller remembers his experiences at the college very clearly, and with a great sense of gratitude for opportunities found and lessons learned.

“My first semester in radio announcing was with San Mateo Junior College’s on-air program, which was very rare in those days. They had two former students assigned to broadcast games, but I was allowed to keep and announce stats. They gave me a microphone soon after… I was only 17 years old at the time,” he recalls. “Then I was assigned the opportunity of interviewing the coaches and providing sound bites to enhance the interview. After a few weeks, the former students suggested that I watch a game and practice by broadcasting that game into a tape recorder - a deja vu experience from my high school days! I got so excited about a touchdown I screamed and yelled into the recorder, and they loved my excitement.”

Miller was given the DJ role on different shows on the college station, including a classical music-only show when the sports season ended.

“I knew nothing about classical music, and at the time, the classical music audience included housewives, ages 38–54. [It] was run like a professional station rather than ‘loosey goosey’ like other radio shows,” he says now. “Our format was very respectable. I had to study the names of the composers and how to pronounce their names and song titles. Of course, at 17 I didn’t listen to this kind of music, but I did my best.”

By his second semester, he was hosting an on-air studio show in addition to working games, and he had to learn quickly.

“There was no script… your tool was the ability to use the English language to its fullest. In fact, we were competing with former players for this kind of on-air work, so we had only our ability to use language as our competitive edge.”

Miller credits his coursework at the college with giving him an edge on the air.

“I took an English class taught by Larry Stewart, an excellent professor I’ll never forget. He made the language exciting. I also took a course in literature. It made me, for the first time, interested in how words are put together.

“Speech, voice and articulation classes at the college taught me how to use my voice as an instrument,” Miller continues. “I learned that we have the ability to find our optimum voices and projection pitch that makes the most of our vocal abilities. To learn to actually make our voices sound the way they’re meant to sound and project our voices in the most impactful ways taught me skills that I use to this day.”

Today the newly-crowned Baseball Hall of Famer is the radio and television voice of the San Francisco Giants, where he has spent the past 13 seasons working for the team he grew up watching and listening to on the radio.

Miller came to the Giants after previous stints with the Oakland A’s (1974), Texas Rangers (1978–79), Boston Red Sox (1980–82), and Baltimore Orioles (1983–96), and has also broadcast professional basketball, hockey, and soccer at various points in his career. This is in addition to his weekly appearances on ESPN’s Sunday game of the week with longtime broadcast partner Joe Morgan, another California Community College alumnus (Merritt College) who had a stellar Hall of Fame career as a player prior to his broadcasting career.

Miller credits his experience at College of San Mateo with launching his career, and sees the impact the community college system has in California.

“It provides a low cost alternative to get started, get a degree or pursue a particular interest. It’s part of what makes California a good place to live,” says Miller, who today lives with his family in Moss Beach, not far from San Francisco.

“My father was a school teacher, and I was the oldest of four children, so we couldn’t afford college. Attending San Mateo College was the greatest gift I could have ever received.”