Welcome to the Circus of Baseball: A Story of the Perfect Summer at the Perfect Ballpark at the Perfect Time

by Ryan McGee

Overview

A gloriously funny, nostalgic memoir of a popular ESPN reporter who, in the summer of 1994, was a fresh-out-of-college intern for a minor league baseball team. Madness and charm ensue as Ryan McGee spends the season steeped in sweat, fertilizer, nacho cheese sauce, and pure, unadulterated joy in North Carolina with the Asheville Tourists.

"A sweet and funny book that reminds us it’s not just the game itself that draws us. It’s also the people." —Tom Verducci, MLB Network, Fox & Sports Illustrated, and New York Times bestselling author of The Yankee Years

In the spring of 1994, Ryan McGee (new college graduate) bombed his coveted interview with ESPN—the only place he ever wanted to work. But he did receive one job offer: to work for $100 a week for the Asheville Tourists, a proud minor league baseball team in the heart of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. McCormick Field, home to the Tourists, had once been graced by Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson. What could go wrong?

Welcome to the Circus of Baseball is McGee’s hilarious, charming memoir of his first summer working in the sporting world. He has since risen the ESPN ranks to national TV, radio, and Internet host, but his time in Asheville still looms large. Among the many jewels of his experience. . . McGee recounts one of the most entertaining on-field brawls you’ll ever witness (between the fourteen league mascots who had assembled for the all-star game—an eight-foot-tall foam-costumed crustacean, a pudgy red fox, a giant skunk . . . and they were really fighting), as well as the nervous moment he oversaw the game-day entertainer known as "Captain Dynamite and His Exploding Coffin of Death." Most important, McGee details a magical summer of baseball, of learning the ropes, of the ins-and-outs of running a minor league team, and of coming to understand how the pulse of a community can beat gloriously through a minor league ball club.

Welcome to the Circus of Baseball is a baseball classic in the making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385548403
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	225,650
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

RYAN MCGEE is a senior writer for ESPN and cohost of Marty & McGee on ESPN radio and the SEC network. He has won five Sports Emmys, including two for his scriptwriting and feature work on College GameDay. McGee has authored several books, including cowriting the New York Times bestseller, Racing to the Finish, with NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. He also works as a field reporter for ESPN's SportsCenter, and as a feature reporter for E:60. McGee lives in North Carolina with his family.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Pregame

Welcome to the Circus of Baseball

It was a cold mid-December Friday morning. I was hurtling southbound on I-85 somewhere between Clemson, South Carolina, and Atlanta and I was panicking. It was that most helpless kind of panic when everything is so silent around you that it only intensifies your dismay. Your brain sounds like a blender in your skull, and you can feel a hot pulse pounding through the side of your neck.

My anxiety was a sign of the times. My times as well as America’s. I was six months out of college and without full-time employment. My parents were well past the point of being happy to have me back in the house. I’d been handed my diploma and pushed out into the middle of a recession recovery. And, okay, if I’m being honest, I was being too picky. I didn’t want any job. I wanted a cool job. Now, with maybe, possibly, hopefully a chance to land said awesome gig—a job in professional baseball—I was in the process of having a mid-interstate panic attack.

Why was I so panicked? Because the skies were pouring an umbrella-useless icy rain, my brand-new Pontiac Grand Am was skating down the highway like a Zamboni, and I was running late. Why was I late? Because that morning I had crashed that brand-new Pontiac Grand Am, bending the right front corner, and now I feared that crumpled sheet metal was rubbing the tire beneath it like a cheese grater as I raced along the interstate. All this while I was also trying to decide: Should I lose even more minutes off the clock by pulling over at the next pay phone to call ahead with my excuse for being late, or should I wait and plead my case in person after I had already been late? Yes, a pay phone. It was 1993.

How had I ended up in this predicament? Because I’d spent the night in Clemson on the sofa of my high school crush, whom I was once again trying to convince to love me, even though I knew it was never going to happen. Just like in high school. I’d overslept on that couch of sadness and in my hurry to get on the road for Atlanta had immediately slammed my new car into the trunk of a much older car that was backing out of a parking space in the apartment complex of the girl who was never going to love me.

It had already been one of the worst days of my young life, and it wasn’t yet eleven a.m.

My destination was the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, host of the 1993 edition of the Baseball Winter Meetings, the annual December gathering of the wheelers and dealers who keep America’s Pastime running. For decades, the Winter Meetings had been the bunkhouse stampede of sports job fairs. There were no rules. Just a horde of baby-faced college graduates like myself, invading baseball’s biggest off-season business convention to hound front-office executives for jobs. A tidal wave of overeager twentysomethings endlessly walking the halls of the host hotel, desperately trying not to look desperate as they stalked those executives, résumés in hand and crazed looks in their eyes.

But this year, for the first time ever, that hunting and gathering process was being organized and corporatized, managed by a brand-new group called Sports Jobs Incorporated. Or maybe it was Jobs in Sports Incorporated or Work in Baseball Inc. Whatever. I forget the exact name now, but I certainly knew it at the time when I’d scribbled it onto the payee line of the $150 check that I’d mailed in with my registration form. The same form that had informed me that I absolutely had to be signed in at the Marriott Marquis by noon on Friday, December 10, no ifs, ands, or buts. But there was no question if I was going to make it by then. I wasn’t.

In the trunk of my just-battered Grand Am was my own box of résumés, a hot-off-the-Kinko’s-press two pages of illustrious life accomplishments (“Part-time high school football correspondent, Monroe Enquirer-Journal”), paired with a cassette tape. On that Memorex was a one-hour compilation of what I had determined to be my best broadcasting moments from the just-finished fall football season. Scratchy recordings made in poorly lit municipal stadiums of my Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent as the play-by-play voice of the Forest Hills High School Yellow Jackets of Marshville, North Carolina (“Welcome to the hometown of Randy Travis, country music’s finest!”) and NCAA Division II’s Wingate University (“Go Bulldogs!”). I had also thrown in a few minutes of my only baseball experience on a microphone, a not-great recording of me doing one game of public-address announcing at my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, calling out lineups and official scoring to the dozens in attendance for a midweek daytime game at the Volunteers’ home ballpark, Lindsey Nelson Stadium.

When I listen to that tape now, I hear a kid trying to sound like a man, a youthful Southern-fried voice pushed from way too deep in the back of my throat through the low-def filter of either a college ballpark PA system, a rural AM radio tower (WIXE 1190 AM, “Wixie in Dixie!”), or local cable access Channel 69, my voice used as the background audio for the want ads of the Union County Community Calendar (“Yard sale this Saturday at the Blevins’ house over on Magnolia Street!”).

But when I compiled that tape back then, I was convinced that on it was the sound of the next Red Barber, Mel Allen, or the namesake of my public-address location, Lindsey Nelson. Those Southern-raised gentlemen all managed to “overcome” their accents by charming their way into the ears and hearts of baseball-loving Americans. They had ascended from Columbus, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and Pulaski, Tennessee, to work in the press boxes of Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium, and Candlestick Park. If those guys could find their ways from those hometowns to the Baseball Hall of Fame, then certainly I could get to Cooperstown from my own birthplace of Rockingham, North Carolina, right?

I was convinced that my first steps along the path they had trailblazed were to begin now, in an Atlanta ballroom. My plan was to launch my career as a legendary baseball play-by-play man by leveraging whatever resources my $150 fee paid to Baseball Jobs of America Inc. (or whatever it was) to wow the general manager of some Minor League Baseball team with my wit, skill, and can’t-miss broadcasting potential. Who cared which of the 173 MiLB teams it might be? I wasn’t greedy.

Forget that earlier that fall I had already mailed that same résumé and cassette tape to one hundred of those teams, hand-scribbling their addresses and names that I had painstakingly procured from the 1993 Baseball America Directory and likely gaining a bout of glue poisoning from licking the stamps for all those manila envelopes. From those hundred letters, I had received precisely one response. It was from the gregarious Curt Bloom, voice of the Class AA Birmingham Barons, who said he figured (correctly) that I had already faced a ton of rejection and/or apathy, but to keep my chin up and get my butt to the Winter Meetings in December, airchecks in hand, just as he had done a few years earlier to get his big baseball break.

Also forget that I had started that same autumn by totally blowing a shot at my other dream job. The week after college graduation, I’d scored an interview with ESPN for an entry level production assistant (PA) position. PAs answered the phones, ran teleprompter, and cut highlights for the likes of Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter. I’d flown myself to Bristol, Connecticut, and was ushered into the office of Al Jaffe, an original 1979 employee of the Worldwide Leader in Sports and the man who was responsible for hiring everyone. Like, everyone, for real, from production assistants to anchors. To my unprepared surprise, it was less a job interview and more a sports quiz, with questions carefully selected by Jaffe to lean away from any natural regional knowledge. For a Southerner, that meant “Who do you think is the favorite to win this year’s Vezina Trophy?” I didn’t know what that was, so I assumed it was a hockey question. I made a joke that unless he had any questions about the 1980 USA “Miracle on Ice” team, I wasn’t going to be able to answer any hockey questions. I even tried to make a folksy joke about manure. “Hey, the only hockey we see in North Carolina is horse hockey we just stepped in.” I might as well have jumped up onto his desk and started clogging while whistling the theme from The Andy Griffith Show. When he asked me what I ultimately wanted to do for a career, I told him that I dreamed of becoming a play-by-play man. He responded coldly, “You need to know that’s not what this job and this career path in production is about.”

The interview went so poorly that when it mercifully ended and Jaffe pointed toward his door, I asked him how I would know if I’d gotten the job. He explained that he interviewed kids like me all the time and kept us ranked based on how we’d performed in our interviews. When a PA position came open, he’d start at the top of those rankings and make calls offering the job, working his way down the list until someone said yes. He never got past the first couple of names. Then he warned me that the names stayed on his list for only one year. Jaffe looked at his desk calendar and said that if I hadn’t heard from him by one year from that day, by August 19, 1994, I could safely assume ESPN had chosen to go in another direction and so should I. He then demonstratively flipped a couple of pages of paper before what I assumed was finally writing down my name. I wasn’t merely not at the top of any post-interview power rankings. I was barely on the clipboard. That night at the Radisson across the street from ESPN HQ, I slipped into the swimming pool so that no one could see me crying.

That fall, living back home with my parents in Monroe, North Carolina, I covered high school games for the local newspaper, where I’d sit atop the grandstand, far from anyone else, “broadcasting” play-by-play into a cassette recorder, simply for the practice and to have something on tape in case anyone wanted to hear it. That led to the radio gig at WIXE in Dixie. There I worked alongside fabled local sportscaster James “Foxx” Reddish. The Foxx was a subwoofer-voiced man who weighed at least three hundred pounds and would fling himself up onto the roof of the press box by swinging like a pendulum from the fire escape ladder until he built up enough momentum to go full Simone Biles. Foxx was a fantastic storyteller and during timeouts would regale me with tales from his time as the voice of the Monroe Pirates, a Class A Western Carolinas League baseball team who’d played a season at the same aluminum stadium where we now called small college football games. The Foxx also repeated what Curt Bloom had told me, that my best chance at landing a baseball gig was to get to Atlanta that December and, in his words, “sell yourself harder than an Avon Lady of the Night.” I still don’t know exactly what that meant. I just knew I needed to attend the Winter Meetings.

So, that’s how I ended up on a pay phone alongside I-85 in the pouring rain, scrounging up enough quarters from beneath the seats of my wrecked Pontiac to call ahead to Atlanta and let the people at the Get a Baseball Job Inc. sign-in desk know that I was going to be late. I thought that perhaps if I shared the story of my twice-brokenhearted trip (girl and wreck), they would take pity on me and allow me to check in late instead of throwing my nametag into the trash along with my baseball hopes and dreams.

“Hello, Sports Baseball Jobs Incorporated, how may I help you?”

“Yes, my name is Ryan McGee. . . .”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Sorry, I’m on a rest stop pay phone right off the highway and . . .”

“Who is this?!”

“MY NAME IS RYAN MCGEE AND I AM RUNNING LATE BECAUSE I WAS IN A CAR ACCIDENT THIS MORNING AND I AM RUNNING LATE AND I WANTED TO SEE IF I COULD CHECK IN OVER THE PHONE NOW OR LATER TODAY IN PERSON BECAUSE I AM RUNNING LATE! THE REGISTRATION FORM SAID I COULDN’T BE THERE LATER THAN NOON AND I AM RUNNING LATE.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever, Ron, that’s fine. Just get here when you can.”

Click.

An hour and a half later, a solid forty-five minutes past the check-in deadline, I sprinted into a side ballroom off the cavernous lobby of the Marriott Marquis, pointed there by a sign on an easel that read “Baseball Job Fair.” As I approached the sign-in table, the shoulders of my navy sport coat and the cuffs of my Dockers khakis were both saturated with cold rainwater. I also wore a very slick semi-silk 1990s necktie, featuring a high-concept design involving a collage of golden baseballs. I was very proud of that necktie. Out of breath, I ran to the table, and there was my nametag and arrival packet, along with at least fifty others’. Apparently, a lot of people were having days just as bad as mine.

I gathered up my lungs, clipped my nametag to my blazer, and stepped into the next room. It was like looking into a hall of mirrors. Dark-haired twentysomething college graduates as far as the eye could see, all wearing navy sport coats, Dockers, and their own funky, slick baseball neckties they were no doubt very proud of. One wall of the ballroom was lined with a dozen rolling bulletin boards, adorned with rows of brown manila envelopes. Each envelope had a number, which represented a job opening, and a sheet of paper containing a list of times and empty rows. Every single one of those envelopes represented a chance.

A sales position with the Arkansas Travelers . . . ​an assistant grounds crew opening with the El Paso Diablos . . . ​a concessions manager gig with the Beloit Snappers. Some had a salary posted in the description. Some. The majority had a salary “range” listed, and the diminutive size of those financial figures made all too obvious the importance of the next phrase written: “plus commission.” I was deflated by the fact that there were very few radio jobs posted. The overwhelming majority of listings were for internships, and the going pay rate for those foot-in-the-door gigs was $100 per week. Undeterred, we the Dudes in Dockers began furiously stuffing those envelopes with our résumés, and those of us looking for broadcasting jobs delicately rubber-banded those papers around our cassette tapes.

Then we waited.

“MCGEE!”

Editorial Reviews

"Evoking the shimmering green of Asheville’s sunny diamond, Mr. McGee’s chronicle is a celebration of baseball when it isn’t only the greenbacks that matter. The circus of baseball is still, despite all the problems, the greatest show on Earth."—The Wall Street Journal

"If you fell in love with baseball at some point when you were growing up, you will love this journey back to the scene of your first love. McGee clearly loves minor league baseball, and in reading his new book, you will, too."—Baseball America

"Every once in a while, every baseball fan should go to a minor league game to be reminded of why they love the game. And if you can’t get there, or don’t want to risk spilling nachos on your lap, Welcome to the Circus of Baseball is the next best thing. Ryan McGee has crafted a sweet and funny book that reminds us it’s not just the game itself that draws us. It’s also the people."
—Tom Verducci, MLB Network, Fox & Sports Illustrated, and New York Times bestselling author of The Yankee Years

“Ryan has captured the absurd and whimsical nature of one of the most classic forms of entertainment we still have around. Asheville, North Carolina—real life home to the Minor League Tourists, and fictional home of Major League's Crash Davis—is a perfect example of a place where it feels like time stops once the first pitch is thrown. I've taken pretty much every partner I've ever loved to see a game at McCormick Field to experience it, and now I might just recommend this book instead and save myself some money.”
—Clinton Yates, ESPN host and columnist

“Ryan McGee’s prose makes me yearn for the sights, sounds, and smells of a bygone era. Fortunately, this fast-paced, funny and deeply moving journey to the soul of baseball brings it all back to life.”
—Andy Martino, SNY Network analyst and senior writer, and author of Cheated

“You're 21 years old, have just graduated from the University of Tennessee. You put on your first version of grown-up clothes - a blue blazer, Dockers khakis, shirt and tie, sensible shoes - and wrangle a $100-per-week intern job in minor-league baseball. And away you go. We're watching you, Ryan McGee. What a bunch of fun. This book is a well-written joy, a romp through a grass-roots summer of snow cones and sunshine at the old ballpark. Except, of course, when the tarp is on the field. Terrific.”
—Leigh Montville, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Bam, Ted Williams, and Tall Men, Short Shorts

“If you fell in love with baseball at some point when you were growing up, you will love this journey back to the scene of your first love. Ryan McGee clearly loves minor league baseball. He's pulled the tarp, tapped the kegs and cleaned up after promotions that went awry. With Welcome to the Circus of Baseball, he'll help you understand why sometimes the best spot in the world is a small ballpark on a weekday night with your summer family.”
—J.J. Cooper, Editor-in-Chief, Baseball America

“Ryan McGee has done it again – a grand-slam home run. A book that will take everyone back to a time of innocence. It tugs at the heart, makes you laugh and cry all in the same sentence. This is simply a must-read book for all ages.’’
—Paul Finebaum, ESPN analyst, radio host, and author

"Ryan McGee is the kind of guy you’d be lucky to sit next to at the ballpark, telling entertaining tales from first pitch to final out. In WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS, he combines a deep well of baseball knowledge with a sharp eye for detail, a keen sense of humor, and empathy for everyone he met during a memorable year in baseball’s minor leagues. This is a perfect book about baseball, and like a day at the ballpark, the game is only a small part of the story. Best enjoyed with a hot dog and a cold beer close at hand." 
—Jay Busbee, Yahoo Sports senior writer

"[McGee's] unwavering appreciation for baseball warmed my heart and led me to recall my earliest memories of the game.... McGee gives me hope baseball contains an enduring core that will last.... His knack for weaving baseball lore into his writing will satisfy diehard fans."
—Chapter 16

"...Readers will be charmed by the gallery of owners, players, coaches, groundskeepers, concessionaires, (fighting!) mascots, fellow interns, and fans McGee paints with such vivid colors in this account of one small, all-hands-on-deck, minor-league club back in the beforetime."
—Booklist

"A picaresque, funny account of a side of lesser-rung baseball too little represented in the literature."
—Kirkus Reviews

"This book is a hilarious yet endearing account of McGee’s experiences during that 1994 season in Asheville. Readers who are baseball fans will enjoy the descriptive, picturesque scenes McGee paints."
—Library Journal

"A love letter to McCormick Field... [Welcome to the Circus of Baseball] is a fun, funny, and moving story of a young man trying to figure out what to do with his life, and getting some valuable lessons along the way. Plus, the story of the on-field mascot brawl that unfolded during the minor-league All-Star Game is worth the price of admission."
—Book & Film Globe

From the Publisher

03/10/2023

After finishing college, McGee (The Road to Omaha: Hits, Hopes, and History at the College World Series), whose lifelong dream was to become a sports announcer (and who now cohosts the ESPN Radio show Marty & McGee), interned with the Asheville Tourists, a Minor League Baseball team in North Carolina, for the 1994 season. He tells the story of the internship in this nostalgic memoir. While there, he performed a huge variety of tasks for the team, including handling tickets, manning concession stands, creating promotional materials, establishing good relationships with the local community, and running errands for the administration, especially the owner. When that season ended, he was hired by ESPN as a production assistant. In the nearly 30 years since then, he has risen in ESPN's ranks to become a senior writer, college football reporter, and five-time Emmy winner. This book is a hilarious yet endearing account of McGee's experiences during that 1994 season in Asheville. Readers who are baseball fans will enjoy the descriptive, picturesque scenes McGee paints. VERDICT Will likely appeal to and attract many sports fans and general readers. Highly recommended for public libraries and collections with a sports emphasis.—Steve Dixon

Library Journal

2022-12-20
ESPN writer and radio commentator McGee recounts a sentimental education in the front office of a minor league baseball team.

It was 1993, and McGee, fresh out of college and living with his parents, was desperate for a job. He auditioned for ESPN only to be dismissed by sports-journalism pioneer Al Jaffe. Nonetheless, McGee, author of The Road to Omaha and Sidelines and Bloodlines, was determined to find a career in sports, so he traveled to a “Baseball Job Fair” in Atlanta to make his case. He managed to sign on with the Asheville Tourists, who played in “a perfectly picturesque All American throwback minor league ballpark.” Though only paid $100 per week, McGee was pleased with his new job, especially since he had enjoyed minor league baseball since he was a kid. The author’s account opens with a very funny sideshow moment involving “Captain Dynamite,” who, for $500, blew himself up in his “Exploding Coffin of Death.” Among other colorful characters populating the narrative, McGee recounts the exploits of a 57-year-old former pitcher–turned-coach nicknamed Tomatoes for his florid complexion and known for “his legendary and unprecedented ability to eat an entire pizza while also gnawing on a plug of Red Man chewing tobacco while washing it all down with a beer.” Most of the team could have come out of Ron Shelton’s great film Bull Durham, with similarly grim chances of making it to the majors, while McGee himself chronicles his blundering from task to task, miscounting ticket sales here and cooking hot dogs there. Throughout, the author delivers entertaining set pieces, including an improbable dust-up between league mascots. Near the end, McGee has harsh words for the greedy MLB owners who, in 2021, cut 40 minor league teams “because they had been deemed unnecessary.”

A picaresque, funny account of a side of lesser-rung baseball too little represented in the literature.

Kirkus Reviews

Ryan McGee is an author who narrates his own work wonderfully. His memoir focuses on the year he was fresh out of college, when he worked for a minor league baseball team. The audiobook is a series of mostly laugh-out-loud moments, with McGee's creative turns of phrase equaling his narration. His welcoming Southern accent carries listeners from one episode to the next behind the scenes of a ballclub that requires all hands on deck all the time. From his serious tone when describing the ice cream and snow cone machines to his dealings with coaches and the stadium's cat, McGee provides his words with a clear narration that is heartfelt and humorous. Even those who aren't baseball fans will find this a fun listen. M.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile

Ryan McGee is an author who narrates his own work wonderfully. His memoir focuses on the year he was fresh out of college, when he worked for a minor league baseball team. The audiobook is a series of mostly laugh-out-loud moments, with McGee's creative turns of phrase equaling his narration. His welcoming Southern accent carries listeners from one episode to the next behind the scenes of a ballclub that requires all hands on deck all the time. From his serious tone when describing the ice cream and snow cone machines to his dealings with coaches and the stadium's cat, McGee provides his words with a clear narration that is heartfelt and humorous. Even those who aren't baseball fans will find this a fun listen. M.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile