History was made Monday at Fenway Park — not on the field, but in the broadcast booth. Emma Tiedemann and Rylee Pay called the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays game, marking the first time a female duo broadcasted a Sox game in the historic park.
Tiedemann joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about the exciting feat. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: So, first off, to be clear — this isn’t the first time that you or Rylee had ever called a Sox game. Was it just the two of you together?
Emma Tiedemann: Yeah. We’ve been calling Portland Sea Dogs games for two seasons now, up in Maine. So this is the first time that we had called a Red Sox game together.
Rath: Was it your first Red Sox game as well, just ever calling a Red Sox game?
Tiedemann: Yeah, yeah.
Rath: First one. So, all around, that’s got to feel huge to you, right?
Tiedemann: Yeah. I mean, even at a deeper level, it was just our first major league game to ever call — so our MLB debuts, if you will. It’s still just an absolutely surreal feeling. I keep pinching myself today that it actually happened last night.
Rath: Well, first off, what was going through your head building up to it? Because [it was your] first major league game, and the fact that you were doing it in a historic way, what were your thoughts going in?
Tiedemann: There were a lot of different thoughts. There were a ton of nerves. Obviously, just being at our first major league game to call and then having to coordinate the historic side of it came with a lot of media attention [in] the week leading up to it, as well — on top of calling six Sea Dogs games up in Portland last week and having those games to prepare for as well.
You know, we didn’t have a whole lot of free time to really focus on the monumental aspect of the moment. But I think that it all really hit us once we sat down yesterday in the NESN booth and put the headsets on for the first time.
Rath: And then, in the moment, you’re doing a very demanding job. Does that kind of just take away the nerves when you’re in the moment?
Tiedemann: For sure. You know, I think that the years of practice that I’ve had in baseball booths across the country, the one thing that I have always really focused on is: As soon as you put on the headset, that’s your job. You’re locked into the game — not really checking social media, not really looking at your phone. You’re just in the moment, and I think that was really helpful.
You put on the headset, put the phone away, and just call a baseball game. And that’s exactly what we did.
Rath: You mentioned the years of broadcasting work getting up to this point. Tell us some more about your journey getting here. How did you get to this point?
Tiedemann: Well, it started when I was 15 years old. I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and my grandfather was a broadcaster. He had called the Texas Rangers, the Dallas Cowboys, the Chicago White Sox and World Class Championship Wrestling.
One day, he was calling a women’s basketball game and had an extra headset, and I just happened to go along, just to keep score for him. He said, “Hey, how about you try a play-by-play out and see how you like it?” And the rest is history.
I mean, I absolutely fell in love with it. Having to think on your feet, constantly analyzing things that happen in front of you. And then, the research part of it too — all of the background research that you do leading up to each game. So I was hooked.
I continued broadcasting through high school and college. I got my first job in baseball in 2014 in Palmer, Alaska, and have been working baseball ever since. It’s taken me from Alaska to Oregon to Lexington, Kentucky, to St. Paul, Minnesota, and now to Portland, Maine.
Rath: I also want to emphasize — just because, obviously, I’m a radio guy, and I love radio — that’s a real art to be learned. And you just took to it right away?
Tiedemann: I did. Everything about it — you know, obviously, last night was a TV game on NESN, but my dream is to be on the radio. I really don’t have any aspirations to be on TV. Calling a game on the radio, to me, is so special, especially with baseball.
There’s something nostalgic to it as well. But I just love the extra challenge that ... baseball games on the radio provide. [We’re] not only painting the picture of what’s going on in front of you, but letting the game breathe a little bit so your listeners can get a sense of what the ballpark is sounding like and some ambient noise.
And, you know, all those little nuances on the radio side of things absolutely had me hooked as a 15-year-old. I don’t know if a lot of people can say that in this day and age with social media and TV. But yeah, radio had me from the start.
Rath: Your background is in radio, but last night was a TV broadcast, and that’s kind of something big to also throw at you at the same time. I know from personal experience [that] it’s not easy to jump from one to the other. How was doing that as a TV broadcast?
Tiedemann: It was an interesting and kind of difficult pivot. Rylee and I talked about that after the fact. You know, that was Rylee’s first TV game ever. I had done a couple of TV games with the Worcester Red Sox, but not a ton of experience.
I think for each of us, after the top of our first inning of play-by-play, I think we kind of got a feel for it where we didn’t have to say that it was a right-handed pitcher facing a lefty hitter, and we didn’t have to say the count all the time and the score. All of those things that we focus on so heavily in radio, you can kind of take a back seat to it and focus on other things that the fans couldn’t see necessarily on the TV broadcast.
It was kind of pivoting on the fly as we went and seeing what worked and what didn’t.
Rath: So for a first TV experience, [it was] pretty good.
Tiedemann: Oh, yeah. You know, NESN is incredible. Their coordinating producer, Amy Johnson, was amazing back in the truck, setting this whole thing up and then really walking us through everything because, you know, there’s a lot of reads. As you heard last night — whether you’re calling a home run like Rylee did, and it’s an Audi sponsorship — little things like that getting out to break.
Rath: When it was done, and it was the end of the long day, did it really kind of hit you then?
Tiedemann: Yeah. I think once the lights went off at Fenway, the ballpark was dark, and after a couple more interviews post-game that Rylee and I had, it was pretty special. My husband and daughter came up to the booth, and once we all walked out of Fenway Park together, we were just like, “Wow, that really happened. We called a major league baseball game. We’re in the Red Sox history books.”
It finally did hit us after a very long day at the ballpark yesterday.
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