There are times, hard as it might be for some of our loved ones to believe, that being a pack rat has its benefits. (Trust me. I speak from experience.)
Ross Porter ran into that a while back. He had kept 217 recorded videos with sports figures, dating to his days as the nightly sports anchor at KNBC-TV and encompassing his 28 years as a member of the Dodgers’ broadcast team.
A few years ago – “I think it was 2021,” he said in a Zoom session this week – he received a call from a gentleman named Mike Kunert, who was compiling an “I Remember Radio” series on YouTube and interviewing some of those who had worked in that medium. Kunert was based in Oregon but had lived in Southern California for most of his life and followed Dodgers broadcasts.
“For one hour, he interviewed me,” Porter recalled. “And at the end of the interview, I said, ‘It’s interesting that you would call today, because last night I decided to throw out all of my old interviews, because we’ve changed homes and we really don’t have room for it here.’”
Kunert’s response? As Porter recalled it, he screamed.
“He said, ‘You go (to) that garbage can and pull all those tapes out and you send them to me, and I’ll start you a website,’” Porter said.
The result of that conversation? Porter, now 87, is still providing content. The “Ross Porter Sports” outpost on YouTube features some of those many recorded interviews. He has a Facebook page with nearly 7,000 followers. And the first batch of those interview transcripts is now between covers with “The Ross Porter Chronicles, Volume I: The Dodger Years,” (Halcyon Street Press, 2025), with former Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley writing the foreword followed by 22 of those interviews, plus a transcript of the session Porter did with Kunert for the “I Remember Radio” website.
This volume starts with Porter’s interview with Vin Scully before he passed away in August 2022, and how can you get off to a better start than that?
“I thought it was the best interview I’ve ever done,” Porter said. “He told me things that had not been known before.”
Including the time 70 years ago that Scully, then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 29-year-old announcer, was part of a a group with pitcher Ralph Branca and his wife that visited the Vatican and saw Pope Pius XII. Scully noted that the Holy Father had exchanged pleasantries with Branca and his wife, and said:
“Then he moved to me, and now this is going to be the moment that I’m going to tell my mom all about. My hands are a little moist and my legs are trembling a little bit. And he looks at me and he said, ‘Are you with them?’ And I went like that – nods – and he moved right on. I left there and I thought, just how humbling can that be to have him say, ‘Are you with them?’”
I wondered what the current pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, might say in that situation. Porter said he’d had a close friend who was honeymooning in Italy, “and they got a chance to go in and at least be in the same area as the Pope when he was walking through the crowd. And as he approached my friend, who was in the third row back, my friend yelled, ‘Covina, California! Covina, California!’ And he (said), ‘California, that’s great,’ and shook hands with him. And my friend said, ‘I almost said ‘White Sox! White Sox! White Sox!’”
Other highlights of the book included a conversation with the late Roz Wyman, the city councilwoman who was instrumental in the move of the team from Brooklyn to L.A.; segments with the four members of the longest-running infield in baseball history, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey; and interviews with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Don Sutton, Shawn Green, Dusty Baker, Mike Scioscia, Fred Claire, Jerry Reuss, Orel Hershiser, Jaime Jarrín and Tom Lasorda.
And there was a reminiscence of Porter’s solo broadcast experience in a 22-inning marathon in Montreal on Aug. 23, 1989. It was the final game of a four-city trip; Scully had gone home since none of the games were to be televised, and Drysdale had to hustle home when his wife Ann went into labor.
“Somebody said to me later, what would happen if you got hoarse or got sick,” Porter said this week. “I said Lin (his wife, who had made the trip) would have made her major-league announcing debut.”
And no, he didn’t have a sore throat or was hoarse following that game, won by the Dodgers 1-0 on Rick Dempsey’s home run off former Baltimore teammate Dennis Martinez.
But the Dodgers were marathon men that year, because in early June they’d played a 22-inning game on a Saturday night in Houston, a 5-4 loss. Scully worked a 10-inning game for NBC that afternoon in St. Louis and then jetted to Houston to do TV. Later in June, they had a 17-inning loss to the Padres at home.
“We all laughed about it; Drysdale had the night off” in Montreal, Porter said, “We had five games that were 13 innings or longer. And Drysdale missed four of the five.”
There will be another volume coming along soon, he said, featuring interviews with Johnny Bench, a fellow Oklahoman, as well as Tom Brokaw, Eric Karros, Willie Mays, Rafer Johnson and Ann Meyers Drysdale. And there might be another book or two after that. Porter has an hour-and-a-half interview with the late Jerry West in the archives, “and I will have to reduce that for the book,” he said.
(He noted that for books ordered through the rossportersports.com website, 50% of the profits will be donated to Stillpoint Family Resources, a charity run by his son Ross Jr. that helps special needs families.)
There’s this as well:
“I didn’t know what a QR code was when I got started,” Porter said. “I didn’t realize what you could do with it.”
A lot, as it turns out. Eleven of the chapters have a QR code at the end which brings up additional material on a phone or tablet. One particularly interesting link is to a home movie of a 16-year-old Mike Piazza hitting in his backyard batting cage while Ted Williams – yes, the Hall of Famer Ted Williams – watched and commented, along with Dodgers scout Ed Liberatore.
“This kid hits the ball harder than I ever did at 15, 16,” Williams said. Obviously he suspected something others didn’t, since Piazza went from 62nd-round draft pick to his own Hall of Fame plaque.
But the exposure to such moments is a reminder: Sometimes holding onto things pays off.
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