After an interview Tuesday night with former Met Bud Harrelson, SNY reporter Kevin Burkhardt was about to send it back to the booth when something shocking happened.
“Gary. Hefner,” were the two words Burkhardt spit out as a way to transition the play-by-play back to Gary Cohen, who finished the call (“deep to left”) of Mets rookie pitcher Jeremy Hefner hitting his first big-league home run in a win over the Phillies.
It’s an opportunity Burkhardt would not have had as recently as two years ago. But, as he improved as a roving reporter, SNY has increased his role.
“I think it went from being completely green, trying to figure it out to really trying to make it better,” said Burkhardt, who started at SNY in 2007.
“The thing that’s fun about it is that [producer Gregg Picker] is very open to trying new things. I would say an example of that would be a couple of years ago when I went from doing the little snippets to leaving my microphone open for entire innings where we’d have a four-way conversation. My producer has tried to push me and have me grow a little bit and he’s had some instances where he’s put me in the booth, not as an analyst or a play-by-play man but as a third party.”
It’s been a strange road for the New Jersey native, which started with him, as a teenager, calling games — and even producing postgame shows — while playing the Nintendo game “Baseball Stars.” Burkhardt struggled to find his way in the broadcasting business and after brief stints at smaller radio stations, he closed his eyes and picked out his next profession by pointing blindly in the Sunday classifieds.
“That’s how frustrated I was,” Burkhardt said, when explaining how he ended up as a car salesman. “I really didn’t look like I wanted to completely get out of it, but I wanted to jump-start myself. … I learned some good lessons about myself and I got lucky enough to get back in. It was a leap of faith, and I got lucky.”
Burkhardt has been mostly popular since starting on Mets broadcasts, but he has been critical of his own work going over from radio, where he was the Jets reporter on WFAN.
“The biggest thing that I’ve learned over the years is that it’s OK to take a breath on TV,” he said. “I used to be just talking, talking, talking and get every bit of information I have out there as fast as possible because that’s the way it is on the radio when you are doing updates. … I am still not great at it, but it took a long time to work its way through.”
Burkhardt said he spends his mornings reading to try to find information — often about opposing players — to add to the Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling booth.
“I am just trying to look at details the booth won’t give,” Burkhardt said. “Gary is phenomenal at what he does, Keith and Ronny are great as analysts and story-tellers, so I am just trying to find something that they won’t give.’’