When Fred Manfra was growing up on Kane Street in East Baltimore, he often drove his friends crazy by constantly describing the action of baseball games. Even when he was at bat, the determined youngster called out balls and strikes, emulating the sonorous tones of legendary Baltimore sports broadcaster Chuck Thompson.
It’s little wonder that Manfra calls his current gig as one of the Baltimore Orioles’ radio and television announcers his “ dream job.”
“Growing up, I wanted to take over the catcher’s job from Gus Triandos or broadcast for the Orioles,” said Manfra , perched in the press box above the field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards while players from his home team fired balls to one another before a recent game.
“I’m broadcasting for my favorite team, the team I grew up living and dying with,” he said. “ It’s a lot of fun. It beats working.”
The 58- year- old play-by-play man said the School Sisters of Notre Dame helped hone the skills he needed as sports announcer. Manfra attended Our Lady of Fatima School and was a member of its first graduating class before attending Patterson High School.
“The nuns made you speak properly,” remembered Manfra, a parishioner of St. Mark, Fallston. “You couldn’t get away with using slang.”
Manfra recalled how the School Sisters, wearing their traditional black and white habits, frequently assigned students the dreaded task of diagramming sentences. It was an assignment he ridiculed at the time, but now credits for helping him become a more fluid user of the language.
The nuns weren’t all work and no play, according to Manfra. They promised students that if they behaved, they could take out their radios and listen to the World Series which was broadcast during the afternoons in the 1950s.
“They lived up to their word,” Manfra said with a laugh. “Hey, they were the sisters. They couldn’t tell a lie!”
An altar boy at Our Lady of Fatima who played soccer for the CYO league (along with baseball, football and basketball in other leagues), Manfra said he never developed East Baltimore’s distinctive nasally accent because his father was from New York and his mother was born in Biloxi, Miss. His father was from an Italian family and his mother had Polish and German ancestry, he said.
With a deep, rich voice that he describes as a gift from God and a hardworking approach to broadcasting, Manfra was able to land several premier positions. He has announced college football and basketball for the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan, USFL and Arena football, Detroit Tigers baseball and New York Knicks basketball. Manfra also announced the NBA finals and NBA all- star games and the Olympics in Sarajevo, Los Angeles, Calgary, Seoul, Albertville, Barcelona and Lillehammer. Since 1982, he has broadcast horse racing’s Triple Crown – the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes.
Manfra arrived at WBAL radio in Baltimore in 1993 after doing weekend sports regularly since 1981 on more than 500 stations for the ABC Radio Information Network. One of the most intimidating moments of his life was when he first broadcast an Orioles game with his boyhood hero, Chuck Thompson.
“My knees were so weak and my mouth — in my business we had a term called cotton mouth where you get very dry,” he said. “ I could barely get a word out.”
To prepare for a game, Manfra said he’s up by 7 a. m. He spends more than two hours reading 10 newspapers on the Internet and visiting all the major baseball sites and sites related to the team the Orioles will be playing. The mustachioed broadcaster then takes some time to analyze statistics and heads out to the ballpark at least three hours before the start of the game. He visits the clubhouse to talk with the players, some of his greatest sources.
“On radio, the biggest challenge is being able to describe what’s going on and hopefully make it interesting,” Manfra said. “On T. V., it’s not talking too much because people see exactly what’s happening.”
Some of Manfra ’s highlights in Baltimore have included calling Cal Ripken Jr.’ s 3,000th hit and Eddie Murray’s 500th homerun.
“I’ve never been to the World Series with the Orioles,” he said. “Boy, what a dream it would be to do a World Series and have the Orioles win like they did in ’ 83. That would be just fabulous.”
Copyright © 2005 Catholic Review Media
