New Hall of Famer Joe Castiglione’s first teammate in the Boston Red Sox radio booth started his own big-league sportscasting career in 1952.
The last ones? Who knows how far and long they will go?
This much is certain: Castiglione will call his last series this weekend after 42 seasons in Boston and 45 in Major League Baseball overall. The Connecticut native got his start with stints in Cleveland and Milwaukee, then returned to New England in 1983 and logged 16 play-by-play partners over his Fenway Park tenure.
As the careers of those who are still active go by, a new form of six degrees of separation will surely unfold. Even now, the announcers in question have combined to broadcast 17 other MLB teams and all of the Boston/New England market’s major-league men’s franchises plus a smattering of other sports teams in other locales.
This chronological rundown lays out the full web of Castiglione’s connections in the position that defined his career.
Ken Coleman
Like Castiglione, Coleman was born in New England and previously worked for the American League’s Cleveland franchise. Through two stretches (with a detour to Cincinnati in between) on his home region’s sports scene, he logged 20 of his 34 MLB seasons with the Sox.
Those tenures included two World Series appearances — the 1967 Impossible Dream run and the less fondly remembered 1986 Fall Classic. Castiglione was at the latter for his fourth season with Boston’s radio network. A generation later, on another historic occasion, he evoked 1967 by channeling Coleman’s previous colleague, Ned Martin, and describing “pandemonium on the field.”
Bob Starr
Before Castiglione with the Red Sox, Starr warmed another seat for another revered Greater Boston announcer. From 1966 to 1970, he handled play-by-play duties for the Patriots alongside color analyst Gil Santos, who filled Starr’s spot in 1971 and ultimately served 36 nonconsecutive seasons in that capacity.
Coleman’s retirement brought Starr — who also worked in St. Louis and Southern California — back to Massachusetts ahead of the 1990 season. He stuck with the Sox for three years before returning to a more familiar place with the California Angels while Castiglione was poised to begin his second decade in the Hub.
Jerry Trupiano
With Starr’s permanent exit for the opposite coast, Castiglione rose to the No. 1 slot in the BoSox booth to start his 11th season there. To supplement him, the network tapped Trupiano, who, for nearly two decades, had called all manner of major-league sports in Houston and logged additional baseball experience with the Montreal Expos.
At 14 years, this tag team was Castiglione’s longest arrangement, covering precisely one-third of his Boston tenure. Trupiano was dropped after the 2006 season but stayed long enough to stand next to Castiglione and hear the hallowed call: “Swing and a ground ball. Stabbed by Foulke. He has it. He underhands to first — and the Boston Red Sox are the world champions!”
New Englanders have since heard plenty more from Trupiano. He has cohosted a talk show on 98.5 The Sports Hub and taught broadcasting at Dean College in the Boston suburb of Franklin.
Glenn Geffner
After a stint with the San Diego Padres broadcast team, then four serving the Sox in various TV and radio capacities outside of the big-league booth, Geffner got his break in time for the 2007 championship season.
That would be a bada-bing, bada-bolt deal, as Geffner pounced on an offer by the Marlins after one season under Castiglione’s wing. He relayed real-time baseball news to Southern Florida fans for 14 years before shuffling to Florida Atlantic University, where he imparts his expertise as a sports broadcasting professor.
Dave O’Brien
The Massachusetts native came home after an aggregate two decades with the National League outposts in Atlanta, Miami, and New York, joining Geffner as a rotating replacement for Trupiano. He would juggle his duties alongside Castiglione with national assignments for ESPN, and the two BoSox broadcasters swapped rankings in 2011.
After nine seasons, including two World Series campaigns (2007 and 2013), by Castiglione’s side, O’Brien shuffled to Fenway’s TV booth in 2015-16 after the New England Sports Network controversially canned Don Orsillo (who once took college classes and interned with Castiglione). As of this year, his run on the Red Sox cable channel matches the length of his radio tenure.
Jon Rish
After Geffner left, Rish represented some homegrown talent when he moved from the Sox radio network studio to the booth for portions of six seasons starting in 2008. That arrangement abruptly ended in April 2013 when he left the business over a contract dispute with the flagship station WEEI.
Dale Arnold
Already known locally for his prior radio work through the Patriots and a talk show plus 12 years of announcing the Bruins on NESN, Arnold completed the rotation with Rish and O’Brien from 2008 to 2012.
Sean Grande
The radio voice of the Celtics since 2001, Grande has described five runs to the NBA Finals, including two triumphs. In between, he dabbled in Hub hardball broadcasts to variously fill in for Castiglione, O’Brien, and Rish in 2013.
His affiliation with the Sox and WEEI ended in 2013 when the C’s transferred their broadcasting rights to the rival Sports Hub. But kinship between casters and a common passion for the local teams transcends any crosstown airwave rivalry.
Case in point: Grande published the most substantive statement among all of Castiglione’s current or former teammates after the Sept. 15 announcement. Through his Twitter/X account, he commented, in part, “It was a true privilege to spend much of that (World Series) season alongside Joe in the Sox booth.”
Alluding to his more constant association with the Hub’s reigning (and record 18-time) NBA championship team, Grande added, “To be the voice of a franchise, particularly a heritage one, is a sacred trust. I mean, believe me, this is one of the few things on which I can speak with authority.
“Joe lived up to that trust, for over four decades, and did it with honor. Making championship moments a lot of people never thought they’d live to see, or hear, forever.”
Tim Neverett
With O’Brien’s move to NESN, Castiglione was the primary half of the Red Sox radio voice tandem again in 2016. By that point, Rish and Grande had also dispersed, and Neverett filled the void with a regional pride stemming from his native New Hampshire and a resume topped with four years of baseball broadcasting in Colorado and seven in Pittsburgh.
He stuck as the sole secondary broadcaster for three seasons, culminating in Boston’s 2018 World Series triumph over the Dodgers, who acquired his rights for TV and radio that offseason.
Chris Berman
After Neverett — the Sox radio network’s first steady secondary announcer since Trupiano — left for Hollywood, 2019 saw an unprecedented rotation of seven Castiglione colleagues, including brief returns for Arnold and O’Brien.
With Berman, Castiglione occasionally worked alongside a fellow Nutmeg Stater and an ESPN personality who by then had been in Bristol for four decades.
Tom Caron
The Mainer joined the Red Sox-owned NESN in 1995 and has served the station in a diverse range of on-air capacities. By 2019, his association with the Sox as their TV studio host was sufficient to include him in WEEI’s dazzling rotation of Castiglione sidekicks.
Long since returned strictly to the screen, Caron said of Castiglione on Twitter/X on Sept. 15: “No one loves his job, or the team he covers, more. He’ll be missed on air, but I have no doubt we’ll see plenty of Joe around Fenway.”
Mario Impemba
If only for 60 games in 2019, the Sox lent Impemba a landing spot when his hometown Detroit Tigers released him after 17 years of TV service. Between that and a preceding seven-year run with the Angels, he thus rounded out a quarter-century of MLB play-by-play work.
Josh Lewin
Another one-year wonder in Castiglione’s coterie, Lewin also attained a 25th season calling big-league ball through the BoSox in 2019 on top of terms with the Orioles, Cubs, Tigers, Rangers, and Mets.
Sean McDonough
For two full decades (three seasons as studio host, 17 as play-by-play announcer) McDonough called his hometown Sox on their terrestrial channel before NESN became the club’s sole TV abode in 2006. That move left the regionally and nationally renowned voice without a Fenway microphone until the 2019 carousel campaign.
Whenever McDonough joined Castiglione that season, New Englanders heard a combined 76 years of mainstream sportscasting experience. McDonough is the only part-timer since 2019 to have stuck in the same capacity.
Will Flemming
Another homegrown specimen, Flemming singlehandedly replaced six other men to rotate with McDonough after previously announcing the Red Sox’s Triple-A team in Pawtucket (now based in Worcester). After declaring this September his swan song, Castiglione championed the now five-year veteran Flemming as his prospective successor (per the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn).
Tyler Murray
Murray’s first season in the majors saw him riding the same Worcester-Boston shuttle as many diamond prospects. But the 34-year-old won’t be a candidate to replace Castiglione or hold the No. 2 slot full-time, as the NBA’s New York Knicks enlisted him to their TV booth three days before Castiglione announced his retirement.
