Fox’s Joe Davis Is Ready to Play Ball

Davis, 37, is hitting his stride at Fox, now in his 11th year with the company, and third as its lead MLB announcer. Earlier this year he secured his first Emmy win for Sports Personality/Play-By-Play, he now has multiple iconic calls under his belt (“Gibby! Meet Freddie!,” “Harper, the swing of his life!” and he even secured his own bobblehead, as the Dodgers, where he works throughout the regular season, honored their most prolific TV personality.

Ahead of the World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays, Davis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about what goes into a call, the state of MLB, and more.

You’re now a couple years into being the lead baseball announcer for Fox, I know you won your first Emmy Award for play by play sports personality earlier this year. It feels like you’re kind of settling in a little bit. Can you reflect a little bit on what the journey has been like since you joined Fox and took over the top spot there? I know it’s been a whirlwind couple years, but I’m sure it’s been a rewarding one for you.

Yeah, it’s always been my dream to do this. From the moment that I found out that I was going to call the World Series it was like, wow. You know people say living the dream, and it kind of becomes cliche, but for me, this really is what I wanted to do. I grew up watching Joe Buck, wanting to call the World Series. When I came to Fox, I guess it would have been 2014, Joe was obviously there and you’re like, yeah, I’m at the company that has the World Series and the Super Bowl, but you don’t figure Joe’s ever really going to go anywhere, or that he’s ever going to choose to not do the World Series anymore. So when that happened, it was a massive surprise, and when they chose me as the person to take over for him, it was a dream come true, a huge responsibility being the guy to follow Joe, and it’s something that I do look at as a responsibility, and I love it, and it is something that I get so much fulfillment out of. But it’s an awesome responsibility to to be the person who tries to capture these moments.

I think that your job is actually a really complicated one, because you’re helping the viewers understand what’s happening. And for a national broadcast, like may not be as familiar with the teams, they may not be as familiar with the players, it’s kind of a different set of skills than the local broadcasters, which I know you also do for the Dodgers. So how do you prep for that? How do you make sure that you’re ready so that you can help the national audience understand what’s happening? Even if they may not be quite as familiar with everyone on the field?

Yeah, you’re right. It is a shift, especially when you get teams like we have in the Championship Series right now, Blue Jays and Mariners, who definitely are on that end of the spectrum of new to the national conversation. And you do have to pull back and give kind of the headlines on the guys, as opposed to the really nitty gritty details you may get on the local broadcast. When I do a Dodger game, I may tell you what Will Smith did on his off day. Totally different conversation than we’re having about Alejandro Kirk where we are telling you the real headline backstory of where he came from and what he means to the team. So it’s definitely a shift in how you frame things, what angle you take on talking about these guys. But for me, this time of year, it’s the most fulfilling thing, just this headlong plunge into learning everything that you can possibly learn. Because, yeah, you’re introducing these people to a national audience, but also the most important fans in these cases are the fans of the Mariners and the fans of the Blue Jays that know these teams like it’s their job, so we have to come in and we follow them throughout the year, but really in a short time, learn them enough to be able to teach those super fans something about their team. And I just love that challenge of going as deep as I possibly can and really getting immersed in each team that I cover, and doing my best to draw those stories out.

How do you balance that? Because, especially towards the end of the season, you’ve got your responsibilities with the Dodgers, your responsibilities with Fox for baseball, and then also your your NFL responsibilities for Fox as well. It seems like that’s kind of a stacked schedule, and I have to imagine, a lot of prep goes into each of those places.

It does. September is the craziest, because I’m — like you said — doing all three of those. October at least I’m focusing just on baseball, and that’s where I get that headlong plunge right into the two teams that I’m covering, it helps doing the Dodgers year round, where I’m always paying attention, at least sort of, to each team. In a lot of cases, I’ll see each team. So the Blue Jays, the Dodgers played in early August, and I had the background from having done that, but once you get into September, I do my best to plan out my weeks really carefully, to really be intentional about how I’m going to use my time. I have a hard time blending from one thing to the other, so I try to block off time ruthlessly where it’s going to be a few hours of NFL prep, and then I know that I have to be done. And then I shift to Dodger prep for the afternoon, get to the stadium and do the game, and then the next morning, maybe I’m getting early in an hour of baseball prep, so just really trying to be diligent about putting those guardrails in to make sure one thing doesn’t lead into the other prep, and that I am carving out enough time for each and that takes some intentionality, looking ahead at the week and the month that you have coming.

I wanted to ask also about how you are able to adapt and react. You’ve had calls like “Gibby, meet Freddie!” You can do all the prep in the world, but at the end of the day, there’s no script for baseball. There’s no script for football. You have to be reacting to what’s happening. So how do you learn to teach yourself to call, to look into that archive of baseball history and know when to pluck things out to emphasize a call, or make something really pop with the audience that just really resonates or connects with them?

I think that’s the thrill of the job, is that it’s live entertainment, and you don’t have time to sit there and think about it. You’ve got to be ready when the moment hits you, and hope that the right thing comes out. I think one thing that has been such a blessing for me has been doing Dodger games for the last decade. They’re so good, they win so many games, they have multiple big moments each week. And how do you get good at calling the big moments without calling the big moments? In order to call the big moments, you just have got to be lucky enough to be sitting in the chair when they happen in front of you.

So being the Dodger announcer during the regular season has given me a bunch of practice at those moments. And that’s the that’s the big test, right? When the big plays happen and it’s your job to capture them, are you ready for it? Because I think that yeah, you can call the play and you can nail the call and do a fundamental job, but to really do it justice, there’s some more context there that needs to be brought into the moment. So I prep as hard as I can, and then when I get into those moments, instead of just reacting — I’m not planning, because, like you said, you can’t do that, you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen — but you can see, going into the ninth inning, there could be a rally coming here. What would this mean if this happened? I start to try to lean forward and wrap my mind around what the bigger context would be if the moment happened. And with all that work, you hope that when the moment does happen, you’re ready to say what should be said.

One fun thing: I saw that you you had a bobblehead at a Dodgers game this season. As someone who’s got young kids, I feel like if I ever got a bobblehead, that would be like the highlight for them, more important than anything I would ever do professionally, so I’m very curious what that was like for you.

It was really special. The most special part about it was my two oldest kids got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. And it just so happened that the night before Clayton Kershaw announced that it would be his last game as a Dodger, that he was retiring at the end of the year. So it became his last start at Dodgers Stadium, and it became a whole lot more special than just my bobblehead night. The kids will be able to say they got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Kershaw’s last game in Dodger Stadium. Amazing, but it was a special night. Part of that was Apple TV had the game, so I got to be with my family during the game, and up in the suite, we had a big group of friends and family, and got to enjoy it all. But it was really cool. And yeah, I guess it probably gave me a little more street cred with the kids too. A few people asked me to sign their bobbleheads, and so the kids asked, would I sign theirs? So I did. I put something like, “when my head moves, clean your room.” So they got their own special edition sitting on their shelves.