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The radio broadcasters reminded listeners of the final score, invited them to tune in again the next day, and signed off. The Dodgers had lost Saturday, so the sounds of “California Stars” wafted through Dodger Stadium.
“Well,” Charley Steiner said to his colleagues in the broadcast booth, “they’re still playing this song.”
The little things can be the ones we remember the most. On Saturday, for the first time in three years, Steiner called all nine innings of a Dodgers game.
In 2024, he beat cancer into remission. The first sign was back pain. He later suffered three back fractures, and to this day the pain is still there.
“It’s gone from intolerable to tolerable,” Steiner said.
He left Dodger Stadium in a wheelchair Saturday. He can walk, but the trek from the broadcast booth to the parking lot is too much, at least for now.
Dodgers starter Justin Wrobleski gives up two home runs and Brewers ace Jacob Misiorowski holds the Dodgers’ big hitters at bay in Milwaukee’s 4-1 victory.
Yet he was in the booth, and on the air for nine innings, so Saturday was a very good day indeed.
Steiner returned for opening day in 2025, but he wore down and left midway through the game. He has called a few games this season, for a few innings each time, building up his workload as if he were a pitcher in spring training.
On Thursday, after Steiner called six innings, he said he would like to try seven the next time. Duane McDonald, the Dodgers’ radio producer, encouraged him to try the full nine.
And so Steiner did, his voice sounding raspy and rusty in the early innings but getting stronger with each successive inning.
He called the statistics put up by Milwaukee Brewers prodigy Jacob Misiorowski “Koufaxian numbers.” He translated an infield single with an exit velocity of 37 mph into everyday language: “That’s driving in the school zone.”
And, on an afternoon Dodgers starter Justin Wrobleski gave up two home runs — that’s 11 homers surrendered in his last 19⅔ innings — Steiner did not miss a beat when reading an advertisement: “Toyota dealers: they make it easy. Wrobleski makes it hard.”
