San Diego Magazine / April 2004 / Mark Grant

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Mark Grant

The Padres are slogging toward a 98-loss record. Last year’s sorry team is on a 2003 East Coast swing. Cox Channel 4’s TV cameras pick up a young girl in the Shea Stadium crowd. Her oversized Mets jersey is askance. Her too-big glove is on the wrong hand. She’s crying. From the visiting broadcast booth, Padres color analyst Mark Grant sees the reason for the tears: She failed to catch a foul ball.

A father of three, Grant grabs a baseball and tells announcing partner Matt Vasgersian he’s going to run down and deliver a baseball. He does —to the delight of the kid, as well as the San Diego viewing audience.

An outgoing and engaging sports personality, Grant is a 16-year veteran of professional baseball. The right-handed pitcher was drafted out of high school by the San Francisco Giants, and played for the Padres from 1987 to 1990. His fastball topped out at 98 miles per hour. As a teenage hurler, Grant says he had no idea where his pitches would wind up. “I was 25 before I think I really learned how to pitch,” he says. “That’s when I learned to take something off the ball and work locations.”

You could say the same of his broadcasting career. In 1996—the year after a shoulder injury put a cap on his playing days—he did color commentary for a dozen Padres games. “I don’t ever want to go back and look at those tapes,” he says. But Grant, a playful kid-at-heart who feels lucky to get to hang around ballparks and talk about baseball, says he’s learned the tricks of the trade.

“I can get a little giddy sometimes,” he says. “But I know when to pull it in—to say ‘Enough’s enough.’ I know our product is out there on the field, not in our booth. I just want to be like the buddy you’d talk baseball with at a bar, or on your couch.”

His jocularity can be heard in the booth and seen on Channel 4 promotions. To wit: Last year he and Vasgersian did a water-ballet routine at SeaWorld; this year, he can be seen getting a bedtime story read to him by Padres manager Bruce Bochy.

Grant just signed a three-year contract extension with Cox, and finds that fact a bit ironic: “In my whole playing career, I never had a multi-year deal.”