On a blazing July afternoon on the field at Dell Diamond, the home of Double-A baseball’s newest team, Mike Capps talks with Mark Persails, a relief pitcher for the Round Rock Express. Persails is just the kind of guy you would expect to find two rungs removed from the major leagues. A 6-foot-3, 210-lb. rock of an athlete, he can fire a baseball up to 97 miles per hour.
But in a one-inning appearance against the Arkansas Travelers the night before, the Express right-hander hit a batter with a pitch.
“I was flying open,” Persails says, indicating a hitch in his throwing motion that might have led to the hit batsman.
“I think you worry about that too much,” says Capps, the team’s radio play-by-play announcer. Capps chats with the players before each game for the sheer fun of it and to glean information for his broadcasts. “You do better when you just relax and let it go.”
As Capps and Persails visit, Express players take their daily batting-practice swings. Above center field, the Dell Diamond’s giant video screen shows a live broadcast of a Los Angeles Dodgers-Pittsburgh Pirates game. The play-by-play of Vin Scully, deemed baseball broadcasting’s poet laureate, reaches every part of the 11,500-capacity minor-league stadium.
The scene is full of meaning for the Round Rock players and Capps. They both want, as much as anything, to be among the men playing out the summer-afternoon drama on the enormous monitor: the Express as major league players and Capps as a big-league announcer.
The difference between the players and Capps is that none of the young men on the roster of the Round Rock Express earned an Emmy nomination, covered the Persian Gulf War for CNN, or did a 10-hour marathon broadcast of the end of the 51-day Branch Davidian siege in Waco.
Mike Capps is 49. And he has had his midlife crisis. Except it wasn’t a crisis. It was, in his words, “a new dawning” — a move from big-league television reporter to minor-league baseball announcer.
“A lot of guys chase women,” Capps says. “I chase baseballs. Some guys drive Corvettes. I just wanted to broadcast the game.”
On the same July day of the Dodgers’ game, Capps arrives at the sparkling new Dell Diamond in Round Rock at 3pm, four hours before game time. Sunglasses cover his narrow eyes. He wears a loud-print, short-sleeved shirt and jeans and pulls behind him a rolling suitcase. After taking care of some pregame duties, he stops outside the press box to talk with the scout for a major league team. Earlier in the season, a relief pitcher, baseball’s equivalent to a police bomb squader, got Capps attention.
“He has that closer mentality. You can see it in his eyes. You can see it from the bullpen,” Capps tells the scout. “His eyes are just glazed over; it’s all this energy.”
Capps should know energy. As sports director at WFAA television in Dallas in the mid 1980s, “He was very persistent and aggressive on getting a story and one of the fastest we had on turning a story,” says Marty Haag, senior vice president of news for Belo media and Capps’ boss at WFAA.
Capps served as the Dallas station’s sports director and helped break the Southern Methodist University football recruiting violations story that led to SMU’s “death” penalty: the banishment of the sport at the school for two years. The station received a Peabody Award for the effort.
Capps later landed at CNN and worked as a on-air correspondent for five years. He received an Emmy nomination and a Cable Ace Award for his coverage of Waco. He reported on Hurricane Andrew, the Midwest floods, and the overthrow of the Haitian government.
But there was always baseball.
A .360-hitting infielder for Hill Junior College in Hillsboro, Capps attended several major league tryout camps. He later did some part-time scouting for Red Murff and eventually wrote a book about Murff, the scout who discovered strikeout king Nolan Ryan.
On the final day of the Waco ordeal, which happened to overlap the first day of the major league baseball season, Capps says Dan Rather congratulated him on a job well done.
“It didn’t mean much to me,” says Capps, who wears a graying goatee and has features that give him an always-squinting look. “I remember walking up this road by the (Branch Davidian) compound and thinking, ‘This should be the pinnacle of my career.’ Instead I’m thinking, ‘God dammit, I missed Opening Day.'”
In the news business you get to be an adrenaline junkie, Capps says. Does he miss it? No, because the adrenaline now comes about five minutes before each Round Rock game. Capps makes the ritual pregame call to his wife, Dee (who has a public relations firm in New York City) from the Dell Diamond press box. He dons his headset in the broadcast booth and readies for another game between the Express and the Travelers.
“Game number 96. I can’t believe it,” Capps says. Minutes later he makes an excited call of Express second baseman Keith Ginter doubling home the first run of the game. His press-box chair holds his laptop computer. He spends the entire game on his feet, sometimes rocking side to side.
At CNN, the heavy travel schedule and heavy news stories began getting to Capps.
“I was a bit fried,” Capps says. “I had gotten to the point where I had done just about all I could do as a news correspondent.”
So he took time off from CNN and wrote his book. To promote The Scout: Looking for the Best in Baseball, Capps sat in on a California Angels spring training game broadcast in Arizona in 1996.
“‘I’m just a tad over 40 years old,'” Capps remembers telling Angels’ broadcaster Bob Starr. “‘Am I too old to get started in this business?’ And [Starr] says, ‘You’re a puppy.'”
And that’s about all it took.
“I got this phone call from him that afternoon,” says Dee Capps. “And mind you, he had taken time out from CNN, and he wasn’t sure whether he was going back to the news business or what.”
“‘Honey,'” says Dee, imitating an excited male voice. “‘I’ve had an epiphany. I’m not a newsman. I’m a baseball man.’ Aren’t you a little old for that? ‘No, no, no. Not as a player. As a broadcaster. I want to be Red Barber.'”
With Capps’ broadcast connections, it took him two phone calls to land a job with the independent Texas-Louisiana League’s Tyler Wildcatters.
“He blew off his international news career to go to some backwater place so he could, as he said, ‘Learn the craft,'” Dee says. “I really thought that was a pretty bold move.”
The international newsman spent a year in Tyler, a year in Nashville, a year in Sioux Falls, and a year in Atlantic City. This season he got the Round Rock job. This year it may be the best minor-league position in baseball.
The new Dell Diamond is one of the top minor-league venues in the country. And Round Rock is breaking minor-league attendance records by drawing about 9,500 fans a night. As of early August, the Express had the best overall win-loss record in the Texas League.
But Capps would be happy anywhere.
“I know every day when I wake up the absolute worst thing that’s going to happen to me is I’m going to the ballpark, and that is fantastic,” Capps says. “It’s a tremendous thing to be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘Let’s roll.'”
The new profession has come with sacrifices. Capps says he makes about two-thirds less money now than he did with CNN. But he likes his Jeep just fine and doesn’t miss his Infiniti J30. And his new career is “25 million times the reward.”
“I’m not money-hungry, never have been,” Capps says. “I knew the money issue would work itself out.”
Later in the first inning of the Travelers game Capps mishandles the call of a play. Express first baseman Charley Carter drives a pitch deep into right center field. The Arkansas right fielder makes a running, over-the-shoulder catch in front of a light-colored billboard on the outfield fence. For an instant, Capps thinks the ball has gone off the wall for an extra-base hit. He quickly apologizes. It happens to all broadcasters. But does it serve as a reminder of the difference between the minors and the majors?
“I’ve heard Red Barber, Mel Allen, Vin Scully, and Ernie Harwell,” says 74-year-old Express usher Hy Lapides, ticking off a list of baseball broadcasting immortals. “In my view, Mike is right up there with the best.”
Comparing anybody to the likes of Barber and Scully is dangerous. But Capps is more than capable and seems to have gotten better even over the course of this season. And he covets a major league job.
“I like a challenge,” says Capps, who points out that he’s completed three 50-mile runs and 21 marathons.
Getting a major league job offers all the challenge anyone could want.
Only two broadcasters from the Texas League have gone on to major league positions in the span of Roy Acuff’s 13-year broadcast career with the San Antonio Missions.
“I can’t think of anything more difficult to obtain than a big-league baseball gig,” Acuff says.
Bill Strong, vice president of broadcasting and sales for the Texas Rangers, estimates that major league teams get more than 50 audition tapes when they have play-by-play openings. (And with 30 major league teams, there are a limited number of jobs.) But Strong’s may be an underestimate. Dallas Morning News sports media reporter Barry Horn believes the number is much higher.
“Every time a major league opening happens, everybody working in the minor leagues sends a résumé, I guarantee it,” Horn says. “So go count the minor-league clubs.”
You’ll count about 200. But don’t count on long odds discouraging Capps.
It’s now past 10pm, and Capps has signed off after a 10-4 Express win. He packs up his tape recorder, scoresheets, and laptop, and heads for the press-box door.
“Well, that’s it,” he says. “Piece of cake.”
Only compared to 51 days in Waco. 
This article appears in September 1 • 2000.