Harold Reynolds was not yet two episodes of Baseball Tonight into his TV career when Chris Berman told him the first one had been unwatchable. Thirty seconds before their second broadcast together went live, Berman gave him the one piece of advice Reynolds, one of MLB Network\u2019s original hires, still points to more than 30 years later.<\/p>\n
Karl Ravech gets separate credit, in Reynolds\u2019 telling, for teaching him the mechanics of television early on, the \u201cins and outs,\u201d and when to shut up and let a broadcast partner talk. But the thing that actually shaped how Reynolds carries himself on camera came from Berman, and only Berman.<\/p>\n
Reynolds\u2019 first broadcast had gone poorly, in his own telling, as he shared during a recent appearance on All The Smoke Baseball, because he\u2019d followed every technical note he\u2019d been handed about enunciation and delivery to the letter. He followed the notes and came out sounding like a robot reading cue cards.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThat show yesterday, you did terrible,\u201d Berman told him. \u201cTerrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Berman then turned toward the camera, pointed straight at \u201cthe tube,\u201d and handed Reynolds a completely different way of thinking about what would become his second career, all in a single sentence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s me, you, and the boys in the bar,\u201d Berman said, according to Reynolds. \u201cThat\u2019s it. Don\u2019t worry about all that other crap they\u2019re telling you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, without any transition, Berman spun straight into the broadcast, launching into a highlight call \u2014 \u201cNo, Mo, say it isn\u2019t so\u201d \u2014 while Reynolds sat next to him, certain his new colleague was about to trip over the next play. Berman never did. He got through the highlight just fine, moved on as if nothing happened, and that was the whole point. Reynolds said the lesson stuck, and it\u2019s shaped how he\u2019s approached television for close to three decades since.<\/p>\n
\u201cBe yourself was his message,\u201d Reynolds said. \u201cDo not do anything else. Be who you are, and it will take care of itself. And that\u2019s, anybody ask me, what do you do on TV? How do you do all this stuff? Be yourself. It\u2019s authentic. It\u2019s real. People will love it. And if you try to be somebody else, it shows. That camera did not lie.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harold Reynolds was not yet two episodes of Baseball Tonight into his TV career when Chris Berman told…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2290],"tags":[94328,5,49717,14547,23750,1451],"class_list":["post-762198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-baseball","tag-all-the-smoke","tag-baseball","tag-baseball-tonight","tag-chris-berman","tag-harold-reynolds","tag-mlb-network"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116988059651878899","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}