The voice of the Bees didn’t need the big leagues to live a baseball dream

There are still four hours until first pitch inside the cramped radio booth and Steve Klauke is already conjuring up another story.

After a lifetime as a play-by-play announcer, this is how Klauke’s mind works. Ask a question, get a story. Every conversation is filled with detours for colorful anecdotes.

So when the subject is posed about the best Triple-A players he’s seen that never made it in the bigs, he puts down the pen he is writing his stats with — a habit he started long before stats were readily available online — and begins with Brandon Wood.

“First one that comes to mind,” Klauke says. “He was the No. 1 prospect overall and he hit 77 home runs here. But when he got to the big leagues, the Angels messed with his swing and it never worked out.”

He rattles on about Dallas McPherson, another No. 1 prospect that never made it a full season in MLB.

“Those kinds of players, I hate to put labels on them, but they call them Quadruple-A players,” Klauke says. “They dominate this level, but it doesn’t work out for them for whatever reason.”

But what if there were not only Quadruple-A players, but also Quadruple-A announcers?

The conversation breaks. Klauke takes a sip from his large Starbucks iced tea as he looks out onto the empty seats at Smith’s Ballpark. It’s a backdrop so familiar to him that he compares it to a summer home.

He has been broadcasting Salt Lake Bees games, currently the Triple-A affiliate for the Los Angeles Angels, for 29 years. Over 3,000 times he has stepped to the mic hoping that he would prove himself to a major league team. But for nearly three decades he, like so many players, never got the full-time call-up.

He has flirted with it. He’s been a finalist for dozens of jobs, keeping all the rejection letters along the way. Legendary Utah basketball coach Rick Majerus vouched for him one time. So, too, did the late Larry H. Miller. But each team passed.

And now the 68-year-old is retiring, approaching this end graciously like any other Triple-A player who never quite got there. He’s grateful that he spent every summer at the ballpark doing something others would kill to do. But there is the tinge of the what-if.

“Obviously I would have liked some other things to go my way,” Klauke said. “But I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. It was a different and unusual path to get here.”

Beating Joe Buck

Klauke’s pathway started in 1991, in a battle with a 21-year-old Joe Buck to get the call for Utah Jazz pre-and post-game shows.

At the time, Klauke had been unemployed for 19 months after his radio station shuttered its doors.

Buck, who was the No. 2 play-by-play guy for the Triple-A Louisville Redbirds, had a bigger name than Klauke. His father was Jack Buck, the Hall of Fame voice of 17 Super Bowls and eight World Series.

But Klauke was the more experienced and it showed. He called over 900 men’s fast-pitch softball games from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Aurora, Ill. as he waited for bigger spots to open. He worked odd jobs, like charting weather for airports, to keep bringing in enough money. (He’d eventually get fired after he sent a plane directly into a storm. “Nobody got hurt,” Klauke said.)

Klauke never went to college, but he enrolled himself in Career Academy at night. Motel management was on the first floor. Broadcasting was on the third floor. He was there to chase a dream.

“When I was younger I sold Christmas cards to buy a tape recorder, went to Wrigley Field and found a spot nobody was in and called the games,” Klauke said. “I always wanted to do play-by-play. This was it.”

Klauke got the job, accepting it after taking an Amtrak train to Kalamazoo where he would call a Little League Softball World Series in another freelance gig.

Two years later parlayed the Jazz job into the Bees gig.

The Bees were relocating from Portland to Salt Lake City, opening up a rare Triple-A play-by-play job.

Klauke was in his late thirties then. That summer before the Bees came, Klauke campaigned wherever he could for the opening. He went to a golf charity event for muscular dystrophy to get paired with Randy Rogers, a local radio station director who would broadcast Bees games.

“I asked him if he could send me to Portland to broadcast some games so our [Salt Lake market] could get a feel of what was coming,” Klauke said.

Rogers obliged and Klauke called a series. One game on the road, Joe Buzas — who would become the general manager of the Buzz — listened to the broadcast outside the door and proclaimed that Klauke would be the voice of the team in Salt Lake.

The Triple-A life

Back at Smith’s Ballpark, Klauke has wrapped up writing his own stats and heading down to the field.

He always goes to batting practice. Some announcers don’t get to the park in time to see players take hacks. But Klauke arrives five hours before the first pitch to make sure he can get around the players.

It is partly out of habit of trying to work harder than anyone else to get a MLB job. But he also just loves the game.

As he steps out of the dugout, he is immediately greeted by Brett Phillips — an outfielder just sent down from the majors. He goes over to Jack Lopez, the team’s shortstop, and ribs him about getting on SportsCenter Top 10 the night before making the iconic “Da da da, da da da” sound. Lopez laughs.

Klauke relishes this part of the job: the raw moments between the grind of a Triple-A season that only baseball can offer.

Even for announcers, the Triple-A life is taxing. Klauke spends 190 nights on the road, racking up over 330,000 airline miles. At one point, Klauke was the team’s press relations representative, the travel coordinator and in charge of booking singers for the national anthem.

As he stands there watching others hit, he goes into the stories. One time in 1999, future Red Sox legend David Ortiz was playing for the Bees and was taking batting practice. He wasn’t hitting particularly well that day and he put his bat down and started walking around the cage.

“Everyone’s wondering, ‘What is he doing?’” Klauke says. “He looks at me, takes his hat off and puts it on my [bald] head. And he says, ‘Here, the glare is bothering me.’”

Another year in Des Moines, then-Bees manager Phil Roof let him take a few swings during BP. Klauke hit a few into the outfield and turned to the general manager of the Twins, who were still affiliated with the Bees at the time, and asked for a contract. He was told maybe he should coach instead.

Roof and Klauke would actually become quite close. Whenever Roof didn’t agree with his own coaches, he would call Klauke into the office and sound off ideas. He let him set the lineup one night and the Bees won. Another time he asked if a shortstop should start his last game before being sent down. Klauke said yes and the kid committed three errors.

“Last time he asked me for advice,” Klauke said. “... Everyone used to be really close in the early years when calling collect from the hotel room was the only way for people to communicate.”

Hotels were another thing. Players would spend time with each other just to get away from $39-a-night hotels. The Sandman Hotel in Calgary was so bad the staff would steal player’s belongings while they were away at games. MLB had to step in and demand different housing for visiting teams.

Klauke and players would go to restaurants for refuge. He has been to 225 establishments featured on on Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.” And when it wasn’t a restaurant, they would have group gatherings.

In Vancouver, they held a team party paid for by the fines they each got for playing pranks on one another. Klauke was fined twice, not for pranks but for violations of team code. He forgot to drive two players to the stadium one day because he couldn’t find them in the team lobby. Another time he called a pitch a “changeup curve” in the locker room and the pitcher fined him $10 because it didn’t exist.

“It was something of a kangaroo court,” Klauke says, noting others got fined for things like soaking their teammate’s bed with water as a prank. “If you argue it, it doubles.”

Trying for the majors

When Klauke was first coming up through the ranks in Salt Lake, he would fill in for the Utah basketball radio broadcasts. He called 29 games one year and worked closely with Majerus.

Majerus was outspoken and quirky. He famously lived out of a hotel for a decade while coaching the Utes and routinely brought in media members to talk late at night after games.

Years after Klauke stopped covering Utah games, a job came open to do play-by-play for the Milwaukee Brewers. Majerus knew the owners of the team and decided to call them for Klauke.

Major league jobs rarely come open, so every chance is valuable. Klauke interviewed and ultimately didn’t get it. But two weeks later Majerus sent Klauke a two page letter explaining the process.

“Basically there were seven finalists and two with major league experience. I didn’t have any,” Klauke said. “They hired one of the guys with MLB experience.”

Klauke figured if he got some experience he would eventually break through. Miller, the Jazz owner, was also in his corner. He just needed to round out the resume.

In 2004, he got a call from the Toronto Blue Jays to fill in for a couple of innings for two games. Later in 2016, he called six Angels games when their radio broadcaster had to go to a wedding.

“I thought it went really well,” Klauke said. “At that point I was still optimistic.”

During the Angels broadcasts, he called an Albert Pujols home run in the ninth inning at Camden Yards for the Angels to win the game.

But once he had his experience, he was too old. Clubs don’t typically hand the keys over to people in their 60s.

“Of course, I wanted to [move up],” Klauke said. “But a person I really trusted came to me a couple of years ago and said, ‘You are probably wasting your time.’ No regrets. A lot of people in this business would kill for the job I do have.”

Leaving a legacy

The game is about to start and Klauke is in cruise control. He has his note cards out for each player and catchphrases that bring levity to the broadcast.

When opposing outfielder Cole Tucker comes to the plate, he jokes about how he is engaged to actor Vanessa Hudgens.

“Entertainment tonight with Steve Klauke,” he says.

Everything, even down to his own scorebook that he personalized and has printed specially by AlphaGraphics, is the work of a lifetime behind the mic.

“Our first broadcast this year, [one person] came up to me and said I still have my fastball,” Klauke says. “It was nice. But it’s time.”

Klauke doesn’t show much erosion, but people around him remind him that time has passed. His wife needs more help around the house. His children are grown and gone. His son works for the Jazz now and his daughter has a local job. He was around as much as possible the last three decades, but even he admits he missed things along the way. His son stopped playing little league baseball after Klauke couldn’t go to games.

“We haven’t had a summer vacation since 1993,” Klauke says.

As for his legacy, he knows it is complicated. The stories of those announcers who break through the majors are always told. But for people like him, his legacy will have to live on through people and smaller things.

For example, he single-handedly kept the history of the team since it was brought to Salt Lake. He has every scorebook since 1994 in his office. When the team sent out an email earlier that the ballpark got its 14-millionth fan, he was the one who calculated that.

But it will also be in the people who have listened to him for all these years. Players, fans and coaches.

He was walking on the concourse one night and one father flagged him down. He said his son could do Klauke’s signature home run call, “It’s up there, it’s out there, it’s gone.”

“The poor kid was nervous as all get out and couldn’t get it,” Klauke laughed.

But it still struck him that he was the soundtrack to the kids’ life — just like the White Sox and Cubs announcers were to him when he went to Wrigley and spoke into a tape recorder that set him off on this journey.

Maybe that kid will do the same and make it to the majors.

Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified a former Salt Lake manager as Dino Ebel. The manager was actually Phil Roof. Also, Klauke beat out Joe Buck for the Utah Jazz pre- and post-game show, not the Bees play-by-play job.