‘Voice of the Yankees’ Paul Olden returns to Spokane to celebrate nearly 50 years in broadcasting

Unless you were listening to radio broadcasts of the Spokane Indians in the early 1980s, you might not recognize Paul Olden by name. But you would probably recognize his voice.

Olden, 70, is the public address announcer for the New York Yankees – the only “Voice of the Yankees” since they moved into present-day Yankee Stadium in 2009. But the veteran broadcaster spent a few significant, formative years calling Indians games in Spokane.

Olden will be back in town this week to visit, reminisce and attend a ballgame at Avista Stadium for the first time since his last broadcast in 1983.

“I’ve been back to Spokane, but not to a game,” he said last week. “I’m excited to get back, see my old pals. … It’s gonna be like a reunion.”

Then on Thursday, Olden will join Spokesman-Review editor Rob Curley and Black Lens interim editor April Eberhardt at Gonzaga University for “The Power of Baseball,” sharing stories about his journey to the Big Apple and his role as the in-stadium announcer for the Super Bowl. The event will benefit Spokane’s Community Journalism Fund.

It will be a celebration of Olden’s career, which started in Los Angeles before hitting Spokane and several other cities before he settled in New York.

“I was very fortunate that in the early ‘90s, the New York Jets decided the best guy to hire to do their play-by-play was a Southern California guy,” he joked. “I was one of the rare ‘intruders’ that broke up the string of New York guys doing play-by-play for New York teams.”

Olden was born in Chicago, but grew up in L.A. and worked as a sports announcer for KLAC, so he was well-versed in the Los Angeles Dodgers even before he took over play-by-play for the Spokane Indians, who were a longtime Triple-A affiliate of the Dodgers.

“That’s, of course, how I first became familiar with the town of Spokane,” Olden said. “They produced so many of the players I grew up rooting for in L.A. I knew all about Spokane – at least its baseball connection.”

After attending Los Angeles City College, Olden followed the broadcasting path of some of his idols – who then gbecame mentors and, eventually, peers – into a career in radio.

“It was quite a thrill to do that,” he said, “especially since my favorite sportscasters – Dick Enberg and Vin Scully – Enberg was so versatile, doing all the sports. The radio station I ended up working for, KMPC, it was like the forerunner of the ‘sports station.’ They carried UCLA football and basketball, they carried the Rams, the Angels. Dick Enberg worked and broadcast on that station, and I followed in his footsteps and broadcast the same teams on the same station I listened to growing up.”

Olden grew up in something of a heyday for sports radio, with several stations developing and broadcasting a nightly wrap-up show of the day’s events in the sports world. It was a time before ESPN when your local sports radio host – whether it was straight news reporting, an analyst or a call-in host – was something of a local celebrity.

And in a market the size of L.A., there were plenty to choose from.

“You really got a full complement of sports news and interviews. You could really follow your teams that way. Of course, now there’s ESPN and 24-hour national sports shows on the internet. Back then you just had those local guys every night.”

To move up in the business often means moving on, though. And after cutting his teeth in the industry in L.A., he started pursuing other opportunities. That led him to the Pacific Northwest.

A broadcasting buddy let Olden know Spokane and Portland were both looking for radio announcers, so Olden sent in resumes for both. But he mixed up the addresses, sending the Spokane application – addressed to then-Indians general manager Larry Koentopp – to Portland and vice-versa.

“Larry told me he was intrigued as to how somebody would make that kind of mistake, and he opened the envelope anyway,” Olden said. “He hired me over the phone.”

Spokane was a learning experience for Olden in a lot of ways.

“It was the first time I was away from home,” he said. “I was 26, and the family didn’t travel very often as a kid. So I didn’t really miss anything because I hadn’t done it. I didn’t know if I was missing stuff. It was an important period of growth, those years I spent in Spokane.”

When the Triple-A team moved to Las Vegas after the 1982 season, Olden went with it. That led to gigs in Cleveland and back to Southern California for a spell, all the while performing the public address announcing at 13 consecutive Super Bowls. He took the job broadcasting the Jets, along with doing Yankees games for WPIX, then covered the Tampa Bay Rays for six seasons.

When “new” Yankee Stadium opened in 2009, Olden was hired as a temporary replacement for Bob Sheppard, who had been the P.A. announcer at Yankee Stadium since 1951. An illness never allowed Sheppard return to the booth, and he officially retired later than year and Olden was named his permanent replacement.

Sheppard died the next year at age 99 . Olden said it was an honor, but “humbling,” to replace someone affectionately known as “the voice of God” at Yankee Stadium.

“I got to know Bob Sheppard as a friend, which helped in the transition,” Olden said. “It made it easier that the torch was passed to someone he knew and liked, so that helped me quite a bit.”

After nearly 50 years in the business, Olden has seen just about everything. The information he had to wait for as a kid until those end-of-the-day sports broadcasts on the radio now comes to him in the palm of his hand.

“Now you get all the sports highlights instantly on your phone,” he said. “The latest Aaron Judge home run is put up within seconds of when he hit it. That’s the plus of living in today’s instantaneous world.”