Katie Nolan: Karl Ravech’s loyalty to ESPN is ‘being exploited’

Katie Nolan didn’t get two weeks’ notice when FS1 canceled Crowd Goes Wild in 2014.

As she would come to find out, networks saw little upside in handing a newly terminated employee a live microphone and a captive audience to settle scores on the way out the door. That’s why, even with the sheer callousness of Ryan Clark’s dismissal, in which he found out about his own ouster during a commercial break on NFL Live, the network never actually broke from the principle Nolan once had to learn the hard way herself.

The network had planned to tell Clark privately the next day, but once OutKick’s Bobby Burack gave ESPN an hour’s notice before publishing the news, ESPN scrambled to pull Clark off the air itself rather than risk him learning his own fate from someone else’s story.

So even if the way the network handled Clark’s exit was “f*cking weird,” according to Nolan, it wasn’t “customary” either, but it makes sense. Leaving Clark on the air after he already knew he’d been fired would’ve handed him an open mic and nothing left to lose. What doesn’t make sense is that ESPN would allow the exact scenario it avoided with Clark to play out with Ravech instead.

“It’s really weird to lay somebody off and then give him a microphone and put them out there,” Nolan said.

ESPN laid off Ravech last month after 33 years at the network, a run dating back to May 1993 that included stints as a SportsCenter anchor, longtime Baseball Tonight host, and, most recently, Sunday Night Baseball play-by-play voice before NBC took over that package this season, with Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder noting at the time that Ravech had called a Dodgers-Phillies game the night before his own layoff became public. Despite that, Ravech was back in ESPN’s booth calling a Braves-Nationals broadcast within a week, having accepted the network’s offer to work additional summer dates, including an Aug. 12 Yankees-Mariners game and Little League World Series coverage, a tournament he’s called for 20 years, with an ESPN spokesperson confirming the added assignments directly to AA.

The supposedly laid off Karl Ravech is in the booth calling Braves-Nationals for ESPN tonight 🤨 pic.twitter.com/HieiM61kgE

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) July 30, 2026

ESPN still needs someone in the chair for marquee summer inventory; Ravech is still, by every account, one of the more reliable and well-liked voices in the building, and neither side seems eager to make the parting any messier than it has to be. Ravech, for his part, hasn’t said much of anything to the news of his dismissal, but Nolan doesn’t see that as a point in the Worldwide Leader’s favor.

“And I kind of want to just encourage you, Karl Ravech, if you’re listening: speak your truth, big dog,” said Nolan. “You know, say what you got to say. If they don’t want to hear it, well, that’s their fault. That’s not your employer anymore, so you don’t have to do right by them.”

“I’d like to see him out here during the Little League World Series just talking sh*t about his employer,” she added. “If you didn’t want that, ESPN, you should have paid somebody else to do it. You know, you should have kept Karl Ravech on and not laid him off.”

Nolan compared the setup to a labor practice she remembered from roughly seven years ago, when companies would hire people part-time specifically to avoid paying for health insurance, then let them go once they crossed the hours threshold that would’ve required covering them, before quietly bringing the same people back once enough time had passed.

“It just felt like they were skirting the obligations of having employees,” Nolan said. “This kind of feels like that to me. ESPN doesn’t deserve to get Karl Ravech for a discount, or for free. He worked there for a really long time, and his loyalty to that company — this to me feels like that being exploited.”

Ravech has spent 33 years being the steady professional in the booth, not the guy airing grievances between innings. That’s not likely to change at the Little League World Series, as much as Nolan, who has been on the wrong end of a network axe, would like for it to.

“This isn’t free,” she continued. “We don’t work for free. Okay? Hey, Karl Ravech is not just, like, the automatic quarterback for any baseball event that you need him for.