Answering The Call

Josh Sborz kicked and delivered the 2-2 pitch to Ketel Marte, and in one fell swoop, Chase Field went into pandemonium. The Sborz breaking ball caught the strike zone, punching out Marte and delivering the Texas Rangers the 2023 World Series and their first world title in franchise history.

The broadcasters who make the calls throughout October baseball go down in lore, their voices becoming iconic sound bites that are remembered forever. Matt Hicks, a Maryland alumnus who honed his craft on campus radio, is one of the select few people who can say that they have been in the booth for a World Series call.

Hicks and legendary Rangers radio play-by-play voice Eric Nadel had the honor of bringing the Rangers faithful home that fateful night in Phoenix. He knew what the moment meant to Nadel, who had been with the organization since 1979, and allowed him to call the final moments of Game 5 against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“I really never gave it a thought as to what I was going to say, but to be in that moment to share it with him, and for me to have a part of the call I just didn’t want to step on Eric’s call,” Hicks said. “I let a few seconds go by, then I could add my two cents. So on a lot of the replays you do hear my part of the call on there, and in that moment, I allowed myself to think back on my career. All of the people that have helped to get me to this point in my career and I’ve had the opportunity to either text with them or talk with them. It’s been a humbling experience for sure.”

Hicks’ journey to sitting in the radio booth for a World Series champion, much less a Major League Baseball team, had humble roots dating back to his childhood in the mid-1970s. As a kid growing up in the Prince George’s County town of Bladensburg, his first memory came from Super Bowl VI between the Dallas Cowboys and the Miami Dolphins, when he and one of his friends tried their hand at play-by-play over the recorded game.

“We had one of those old-fashioned tape recorders and we got the rosters of the two teams out of the Washington Post that day,” Hicks said. “We did the entire Super Bowl VI play-by-play. I did two quarters and my friend did two quarters. I actually still have those tapes if you can believe that. So I knew that early on it was something that I wanted to do.”

He stayed active in sports, competing in football, baseball and basketball growing up. But once Hicks enrolled at the University of Maryland, he got right to work on his dreams of becoming a sportscaster. In the spring of 1979, Hicks’ second semester in College Park, he joined WMUC and started working baseball contests alongside Matt Noble, who is still with the university as a public address announcer for the football, baseball and men’s basketball team.

“Matt picked me to be his partner for Maryland baseball, so during the 1979 season, Matt and I did Maryland baseball play-by-play and I was raw and quite frankly terrible,” Hicks said. “But Matt gave me the freedom to learn on my own and sort of work some things out and then eventually I got to do pretty much all of the sports for varying lengths of time.”

Hicks tried his hand at any sport he could under the Maryland Athletics banner, working football, women’s basketball and lacrosse alongside baseball as he worked to improve his abilities and put together a tape that could land him a job in the National Hockey League. But he didn’t have much luck finding a position leading up to graduation until he had a chance encounter at a gas station along Route 1.

Pumping gas at the same time as him was Dick Dull, Maryland’s athletic director from 1981-86. The two chatted and Dull invited Hicks to stop by his office with some of his radio material, which led to the athletic director sending his tape out to everyone in the University of Maryland Radio Network. He received an offer for his first full-time radio job for WCEM Radio in Cambridge, Maryland through Dull’s assistance.

“They needed a morning news anchor at the time, so you know I replied and ended up having an interview,” Hicks said. “I got the job and my first day in professional radio was the Fourth of July back in 1983. I graduated from Maryland in May of 1983. So, there is no question about the fact that working at WMUC and my connections with the athletic department got me my first job in radio.”

At WCEM, Hicks did just about everything one could do in local radio. In addition to being the morning news anchor, Hicks would go into the community to report, help with local sports coverage at high school sports events and Little League baseball games and do spot work as a DJ. But the dream of sports remained strong for Hicks as he continued his career.

Hicks got back to calling college events for the WSVA station in Harrisonburg, Virginia, helping to call games for James Madison. But it wasn’t until 1989, six years after his college graduation, that he found a full-time sports job. Hicks worked with the Frederick Keys, the Advanced-A level affiliate for the Baltimore Orioles, in the summer while doing events for Mount St. Mary’s just half an hour away.

The position with the Keys led to almost 25 seasons worth of work in the minor leagues of the MLB. He called Double-A ball for the El Paso Diablos, an affiliate in the Milwaukee Brewers organization, before being hired on by the Houston Astros’ Double-A squad, the Corpus Christi Hooks, to be the team’s first play-by-play announcer.

Through his position in Corpus Christi, Hicks made another important connection that changed his trajectory. He worked with Ryan Sanders Baseball, a sports and entertainment operator ownership group, which is headed by MLB’s all-time strikeout king, Nolan Ryan. During Hicks’ time in south Texas, he got close to Ryan’s two sons, Reed and Rhys, who helped their father with Ryan Sanders operations, and the relationship between Hicks and the Ryan family helped him to get to the big leagues.

“When I got hired by the Rangers in 2012, one of the reasons I got hired in the middle of the 2012 season was not only because of working for Ryan Sanders Baseball, but also at the time, Nolan Ryan was the president of the business side of the Baseball Operations department with the Texas Rangers,” Hicks said. “So when a need came for them to have a fill-in broadcaster in the middle of the 2012 season, Nolan talked to his son Reed and he said ‘Hey, why don’t we get Matt up there and see what he can do?’”

Hicks was with the team on a temporary basis in 2012 and worked hard to stay on. After just five games, Rangers management asked him if he could stay on for the rest of the campaign, and after the 2012 season, Texas made him a full-time offer to be its radio announcer.

Leading into the 2023 season, Hicks had worked 11 seasons to varying levels of success from the Rangers. He witnessed Texas make the playoffs as a wild-card team in his first season and win a pair of AL West division titles in 2015 and 2016, but had never seen the team he worked for make it past the ALDS in over a decade.

That was until 2023, when everything came together for the Rangers after missing the postseason party for six consecutive seasons. Their journey to the postseason mirrored that of Hicks’ journey to making the majors as a broadcaster, with many people stepping up and making the most of the opportunity available to them.

“I think when you talk about one of the strengths of our club in 2023, obviously it was the pitching that we acquired in the offseason and during the season,” Hicks said. “But it was also the ability to fill in for all of those injured players. In order to do that you have to have quality throughout and you have to have quality depth and we had that.”

The Rangers entered the playoffs as a wild-card team after finishing second in the AL West. Without having home-field advantage throughout the AL bracket, Texas won three series over the Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles and Houston Astros to make their first World Series since 2011. In the World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Rangers took a 3-1 series lead, and Hicks was confident the Rangers could close out the season that night.

“We were up three games to one and I kind of felt for sure when I woke up that day that we were going to win the World Series that night,” Hicks said.

At first, it looked like the Diamondbacks had the fight to push the series to a sixth game with ace Zac Gallen tossing six no-hit innings. But after a Mitch Garver RBI single to break the scoreless tie in the seventh inning and a four-run ninth inning, the Rangers sat just three outs away from winning their first Commissioner’s Trophy.

Hicks deferred the ninth inning to his broadcast partner, Eric Nadel, wanting the voice of the Rangers for nearly five decades to have his moment of catharsis.

“I got interviewed by Levi Weaver of The Athletic because he was doing a feature on Eric in anticipation of the Rangers winning the World Series,” Hicks said. “I actually got choked up during that interview with Levi thinking about Eric and his long association with the club for 45 years and being so close but not being able to call a World Series championship. A lot of my emotion that day was directed at Eric and his moment in calling the World Series title, and I of course was sitting next to him when that happened. I wasn’t thinking about what I would have said, because had the game gone into extra innings and it had been my half inning, I would have turned it over to Eric to make the call because it would have been the right thing to do.”

As Hicks made it to the pinnacle of radio broadcasting, he reflected on how his experience of starting out at WMUC helped him reach lofty heights. For him, it served as the launching pad for his four decades of broadcasting 

“Had there not been a campus radio station at Maryland, I might have never gotten into the industry,” Hicks said. “The chance to do everything that I did at WMUC, the people that I met along the way and the contacts that I made were all instrumental in helping me get my start.”