From the day it was announced that Victor Rojas was leaving the Rangers to go work for the MLB Network, you haven’t heard anything about a replacement. Or at least I didn’t. I was surprised at how LITTLE you heard about this. All I heard at the time was that both Victor & Josh were up for the TV job in San Diego with the Padres. I still wish that Josh would have taken that to be “Mr. San Diego”, then bump Victor to TV and bring in someone new for radio. Didn’t get that, but we did get a new radio guy today.
It was announced this afternoon that Vic’s replacement in the radio booth is a guy by the name of Dave Barnett. I don’t have much to say about him, because I don’t know who he is. I IM’ed Jamey about it, and he replied with the fact that he used to do Rangers TV back in the 80’s, and national work since. I didn’t move to this area until the 1992-1993 offseason, so that was before my time. Jamey did call the hire “fantastic” in the IM chat with me, so that’s encouraging. He also spooged about the dude in an email update a few minutes before I wrote this. :)
Check out the story on the Rangers site for more details about him. Hopefully he shows up at the Winter Carnival in a couple of weeks. Be nice to meet him and say Hi.
I did get a small chuckle out of this quote from the Rangers site story. “Nadel, who has been the lead broadcaster on radio since 1995, had significant input into the hire.” If they made this move without major input by Eric Nadel, that would be a massive mistake!
While the broadcast didn’t say anything about it, one would assume that Barnett would pull the double duty that Victor Rojas did and fill in for Josh Lewin on TV when he’s off doing Chargers games. Scratch that. According to this story on the FTWST website, he’ll be doing the same thing that Vic did subbing for Josh. I’ve updated my broadcaster history page for 2009 with Dave Barnett, and assuming the sentence above is correct. Check it out.
The FTWST article does have this quote:
“For the last couple of years I’ve been looking for a situation where I could work with a team again and still work with ESPN,” Barnett said from his home in Denton.
Does this mean that Barnett will also be leaving to do work for ESPN during the season? I don’t like that about Lewin, he should be there for all 162 games. I don’t like these disappearances.
After posting this article, and looking at the picture, he looks like he could be Howie Long’s brother. :)