No play, no pay: How the Rockies TV broadcast crew is getting by without games

Fresh off an 11-hour shift at King Soopers last week, back-ended with some sweet overtime, Marc Stout walked home before the sun set in Thornton and took off his work gear. In the grocery store, behind his name tag and mask, Rockies fans might not recognize the longtime veteran Denver broadcaster, but there’s a hint it’s him. If you look close, Stout’s safety gloves are batting gloves.

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“I don’t know what will happen with this baseball season,” Stout said, “but the supermarket ain’t going away.”

When a customer calls in an order for curbside pickup, Stout runs their groceries to the parking lot. They pop the trunk and sometimes leave coupons in a plastic bag. Some of them say hi, eager to talk to another human outside their own walls, and sometimes they recognize Stout’s voice behind his mask.

He has been a regular studio host and sideline reporter during Rockies broadcasts on AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, the regional sports network that airs 150 Rockies games every regular season plus six more during spring training. Stout was scheduled to work about 50 Rockies broadcasts this season. That was the plan for a normal season. This season long ago became abnormal.

During baseball’s great pause, Stout lost his jobs. But the grocery store was hiring.

“I put a ballcap on and my Kings apron and walk to the store and clock in,” he said. “I’m digging it. It’s a wide slice of life.”

Stout was supposed to help fill in for Taylor McGregor this season after she left ATTRM earlier this year to join the Cubs’ Marquee Sports Network in Chicago as a sideline reporter. Stout’s first second job, as a night DJ at 103.5-FM, disappeared in March, when iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications, a multibillion-dollar media conglomerate) furloughed a large portion of their workers, Stout included.

He was lucky, in a way. Stout was scheduled as a part-time reporter on Rockies broadcasts this year. His coworkers at ATTRM, though, are in a separate, difficult situation.

Nearly everyone involved in a Rockies television broadcast, on-air and behind the camera, are technically freelance workers, even though they work full time or more for eight months. It is an unusual situation among regional sports networks in Major League Baseball. And now, without games, they have no workplace health insurance or benefits. Many of them, some of whom confirmed their situations to The Athletic, haven’t seen a paycheck since last October and are scrambling to get by. Stout lives alone. Most of his coworkers have families.

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Some ATTRM workers have filed for Small Business Administration loans to survive the COVID-19 shutdown. The network paid each of them for 10 games to start the season, through the middle of April. Stout was paid for nine games because months ago he had asked for a day off to play in an “old guys” rec league game. It was an arrangement that Stout called generous. “Everything has been on the up and up,” Stout said. “ATT’s been cool to me.”

In Houston, ATTSN Southwest, ATTRM’s sister network, also paid 38 workers through mid-April after reaching an agreement with the union that represents them, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. In Pittsburgh, the ATTSN outlet paid about 50 workers through the first two weeks of the season. A similar arrangement was reached in Seattle with the AT&T sister network that airs Mariners games.

But like many play-by-play announcers and color analysts around the league, those teams have on-air broadcasters either employed directly by the teams or on a full-time basis with the network. In Philadelphia, Phillies games air on an NBC Sports regional network, with a mostly full-time crew. They have continued broadcasting replays and new content, either on TV or through social channels.

Among Fox Sports Networks, a chain that holds regional rights with 15 teams, the freelancers that help cover game day broadcasts were offered only a $2,500 loan advance from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conglomerate that now owns FSN.

On ATTRM, the nightly time slot normally filled by live Rockies games has been replaced by hand-picked replays of old games, mostly from the past three seasons. Most of them have Drew Goodman calling playing-by-play and Jeff Huson, Ryan Spilborghs and Cory Sullivan, among others, working as analysts. A highlight from 2009 aired on Monday night, a Rockies game won when Spilborghs, then an outfielder, hit a walk-off grand slam in the 14th inning to beat the Giants. Stout worked that game from the sidelines. Only Jenny Cavnar is a full-time employee of ATTRM. All of the hosting duties on TV, Twitter and Instagram have become her responsibility.

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In early April, ATTRM broadcast a game in Cleveland from 2017 that saw the Rockies win with late heroics, a game Stout remembers working from the sidelines. “My manager, Jeremy, he’s 26, he was telling me about a Rockies-Indians replay he saw,” said Stout. “I said, ‘It was an afternoon game, right? Yeah, Charlie Blackmon hit a homer in the ninth in that game.’”

Emojis and humor aside…I’ve been through lotsa’ losing seasons and it makes the winning even winninger.
Exhibit A: pic.twitter.com/J20HA384tw

— Marc Stout (@MILEHIMARC) November 20, 2017

Stout moved to Denver from Buffalo in 1995 for a job as morning sports reporter at KOA, but only after Larry Zimmer, the station’s sports director, took Stout to a Rockies game to convince him to stay. It was the first game at Coors Field, when Dante Bichette hit a three-run homer in the 14th inning to beat the Mets. Stout was hooked.

Since then, he has covered the Rockies, Broncos and Rapids, among other media jobs. Now 57, he works with teenagers much younger and seniors much older at a supermarket in Thornton. The grocery store is almost constantly busy, Stout said, with familiar faces from the neighborhood milling about even without buying, desperate to be around other people, as if a pandemic hadn’t swept around the world.

“I love baseball and I look forward to the game coming back,” Stout said, “but for now, I’m a King Soopers employee and it’s great. The days are flying by.

“I’m from Jersey, and my Irish Catholic mom, I’m sure she’s looking down and approves,” he said. “I hope she knows I’m working hard.”

(Photo of Marc Stout from 2014: Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)

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