Cross & Crescent

At the young age of 16, Josh Lewin (Northwestern 1990) began his broadcasting career doing play-by-play for his hometown New York Rochester Red Wings, then Baltimore’s class Triple-A baseball farm club in the International League.

After deciding to attend Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to study journalism, Lewin continued to spend many of his weekends traveling to Red Wings’ games and doing play-by-play.

“I was lucky,” he says. “They kept a spot warm for me on their broadcast crew, so anytime I was able to meet the team on the road, I was able to get some on-air experience.”

Lewin structured his class schedule at Northwestern so he had to attend classes only on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings.

“I would get in my rickety old car and drive from Chicago to wherever the Rochester team was playing,” he says. “I would hope to get there on Wednesday night or Thursday and then spend three days, if not four, doing my precious couple of innings of play-by-play. That’s really what I enjoyed and what was important to me.”

He then would drive back to Northwestern, sometimes driving 11 hours or more, so he would be back on campus late Sunday night in order to attend classes on Monday morning.

Squeeze Play

Today, Lewin is the TV voice for the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, where he just completed his sixth season as the play-by-play announcer.

Prior to coming to Texas, Lewin called Detroit Tigers games on Fox Sports Net Detroit from 1998 to 2001.

In addition to his Rangers duties, Lewin also is one of the voices for Fox-TV’s coverage of Major League Baseball, occasionally subbing for lead play-by-play announcer Joe Buck when Buck is doing a National Football League broadcast or another assignment.

To add a another challenge to his already hectic schedule, Lewin became the radio play-by-play voice of the NFL San Diego Chargers in July 2005.

“I was ready for a new wrinkle,” he says. “As much as I love baseball, trying to learn the NFL was a cool challenge. It’s definitely something I needed to jump into with both feet.”

Lewin says that learning about the NFL was like going back to school. He took a crash course where they fed him a lot of knowledge in a short period of time and found it to be very invigorating.

When Lewin began his job announcing the Chargers, he knew he had to win over the fans so he wrote an open letter to them to show his passion for announcing sports.

“All right, I know I’m up against it on a handful of fronts,” Lewin wrote at the time. “I’m known first and foremost as a ‘baseball guy,’ I’m not a native San Diegan and I never played a down of varsity football, not even in high school. God gave me a choice of strapping athleticism and decent pipes and, for some reason, I took the pipes.”

Lewin says he is very fortunate to have three very understanding employers who do not want to stand in the way of anything he wants to accomplish. But sometimes, tight schedules create interesting challenges.

Occasionally, there is an “imperfect storm” that hits in August and September when Fox baseball, Chargers football, and Rangers baseball all overlap, which can make for some interesting travel.

During one particularly crazy day this past August, Lewin provided TV play-by-play for a Fox Sports’ Saturday baseball game — a home game for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

When the game was over, he then traveled 90 miles down to Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, California, to provide radio play-by-play coverage for the San Diego Chargers’ NFL preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks.

Despite an occasionally tight schedule, Lewin says, “I’m doing exactly what I’ve wanted to do since I was five — be at a sporting event with a headset on my head.”

Finding Time to Write

Before he became the radio voice of the San Diego Chargers, Lewin spent the off seasons writing two books about baseball, You Never Forget Your First and Getting in the Game.

“Those two books were pretty much born out of boredom,” he says. “Figured I’ve got some time to kill and might as well pretend that my journalism degree did me some bit of good.”

Published in October 2003, Getting in the Game is about professional baseball’s winter meetings that had never before been captured from the inside.

In You Never Forget Your First, published in August 2005, Lewin interviewed about 100 current and former baseball players about their first day in the majors, creating mini-biographies, highlighting the personalities hidden behind the on-field accomplishments.

Although Lewin jokingly admits that his books did not knock the Da Vinci Code off the bestseller list, he had fun writing them.

With his current schedule, he says it will be a while before he is “bored” enough to write another book.

Early Career Priorities

Lewin spent so many weekends at Northwestern traveling to do play-by-play for minor league baseball, he unfortunately did not have a lot of time to commit to the Fraternity.

“There’s no way I could commit to being rush chairman or treasurer when I was traveling and away from the campus so much,” he says.

“My interest was getting out and getting my career started,” he says. “My priorities were getting my resume ready so I could try to do this broadcasting for a living.”

Lewin also says that he almost did not join Lambda Chi for he was somewhat anti-Greek when he came to Northwestern.

Not surprisingly, when he met the men from Lambda Chi, they were different than the other fraternities.

“The guys at Lambda Chi didn’t seem like a typical fraternity, Abercrombie and Fitch-wearing (guys),” he says. “They were very real, very cool. Nothing against Abercrombie and Fitch.”

Lewin says he was just more interested in a stress-free environment where he could hang out and watch ball games with good friends. “They were very like-minded guys. We had fun times, great experiences.”

Of course baseball was always a big part of what the chapter was doing. They would often take the “L” train from Evanston to Wrigley Field, sit in the bleachers, watch the Chicago Cubs play, and heckle Cubs outfielder Andre Dawson.

Ironically, the night that Lewin finally decided to accept his bid to become a Lambda Chi, also revolved around baseball.

It was the night of the infamous Game 6 of the 1986 World Series between the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox when Bill Buckner missed the ground ball and the Mets went on to win the series.

Luckily, the brothers who were yelling at the TV that night stopped long enough to welcome Lewin into the Fraternity.