Joe Davis more than rose to the occasion in the biggest moment of his tenure so far as the voice of the World Series for Fox, when he paid homage to two Los Angeles Dodgers while calling a Game 1 walkoff grand slam by Freddie Freeman.
With the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the 10th, the hobbled Freeman stepped to the plate. As he crushed the ball over the right field wall, Davis harkened back to Kirk Gibson’s own 1988 Game 1 walkoff homer and the “she’s gone” call by the late Vin Scully.
“Gibby, meet Freddie,” Davis bellowed as the Dodger Stadium crowd roared.
While Davis admitted to self-critiquing the call “more than is healthy” in the aftermath of the historic call, in an appearance on FS1’s First Things First ahead of Game 5, he acknowledged he’s always prepping himself for those huge moments.
“You don’t want to script it, because I think then it’s going to sound scripted,” Davis said. “But anybody who who tells you ‘It just comes to me,’ they’re either brilliant or they’re lying. For me, I can’t just properly do my job and capture these moments, just having it come to me in that moment.”
Joe Davis: “Anyone who tells you, ‘it just comes to me,’ they’re either brilliant or they’re lying.”
The voice of the World Series joined ‘First Things First’ today and broke down his iconic Game 1 call: pic.twitter.com/JYJ9fCKbz2
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 30, 2024
Davis continued:
“So I’m always thinking about the context of if this moment were to happen. You lean forward into a situation where the Dodgers were down a run … and you say, ‘what would it mean if they did have a comeback?’ It’s gotta be more than just, ‘home run Freddie Freeman, Dodgers win.’ That’s not quite doing my job.
“So I’m thinking about the fact that it’s Game 1, like it was in ’88 when Gibson hit his home run. As Freddie Freeman comes up, the next layer to that is that this is an injured player, the same way that Gibson was. And then for me, it was the flight of the ball that we’ve all seen a million times on that highlight of Vin Scully calling Kirk Gibson’s home run, and that sparked for me the nod to Vin. So it’s just a lot of different layers to kind of wrapping your mind around the context, and then hoping that it comes out right.”
Earlier this week, MLB trademarked Davis’ instantly iconic call.
Davis’ history with the team and replacing Scully as the Dodgers’ top announcer on local television made him uniquely equipped to understand the magnitude of that moment. But even from that vantage point, few in the history of broadcasting could deliver the call Davis did.
