Baseball in America has long sounded like a white man. But in San Francisco, baseball sounds like a Black woman
It was 2001, during Presentation High School’s career day. Renel Brooks-Moon, the San Francisco Giants’ public-address announcer, was the keynote speaker, Viñal said.
Each line of her address boomed with the same unbridled enthusiasm as when she belted out to 40,000 Giants fans, “Now batting, left fielder, number 25, Barrrrry Booooonds!” At most baseball stadiums, the public-address announcer provides the underlying soundtrack, the accompanying noise in between fans’ hot-dog bites and umpires’ strike-three calls. Though many announcers have their own distinct styles, there also tends to be a homogenous quality to the sound and rhythm of their narration.
A Bay Area baseball pioneerKate Scott said she was six months into her career as an on-air personality at KNBR-AM, the Giants’ flagship radio station, when she received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize. “Baseball is the ultimate good-old-boys network, like nothing else in any of the other major pro sports,” said Matt Pitman, the Golden State Warriors public address announcer since the team moved to Chase Center in 2019. “She overcame a lot and and not only broke those glass ceilings of being a woman and being a person of color — but she stayed, because she’s so good.”
Black people represented 6.2% of players on MLB opening-day rosters in 2023, a record low since the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at Central Florida began tracking demographic data in 1991. That year, 18% of major leaguers were Black. MLB, overall, received a B grade for racial hiring and a C for gender hiring across the league.
Doug Glanville has experienced dozens of baseball stadiums throughout his life — first as a fan, then as a Major League Baseball player for nine seasons. For the last 15 years, he has been a broadcaster for ESPN. He said Oracle Park has always stood out. He said Brooks-Moon has been part of that healing process for other families like his, coming from a historically disenfranchised community, who felt detached from a game that hasn’t always loved them back.
“You’ve got an entire generation of young women and young women of color, young people of color, who go to a Giants game, and it’s just normal for them to hear someone that looks like them, and sounds like them as as the voice of the Major League Baseball team in your city,” Pitman said.
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