CLEARWATER, Fla – Chris Wheeler wants to correct the record. He’s happy that Larry Bowa recently recorded a hole-in-one. It’s just in 30 years of the Phillies holding a golf outing in Spring Training, no one — be it a player, team employee or otherwise — had ever made a hole-in-one. Until Bowa.
It’s all in good fun, though. For as incredible as Bowa’s longevity in the Phillies organization is, Wheeler isn’t far behind. Like Bowa, Wheeler is 78. And also like Bowa, Wheeler is as sharp as a tack still, and remains one of the most prominent faces during Phillies Spring Training every year
“Well, my first Spring Training was ’72. So that gives you an idea of how many times I’ve been down here, and I love it,” Wheeler said in an extended conversation with Phillies Nation. “I live down here six months of the year now, and six months in Pennsylvania. Just to be around baseball, I love the game still. I do the PA, which I’ve been doing forever. And it keeps me involved. I gotta pay attention and watch, so I can watch players and everything. Hey, it’s baseball — Major League Baseball. So I’m just happy to be here.”
Wheeler is still the public address announcer for Grapefruit League games played at BayCare Ballpark. And if you didn’t know that, you must not have watched a Phillies Spring Training game in some time. Because at least once a game, his former NBC Sports Philadelphia — well, Comcast SportsNet in those days — broadcasting teammate Tom McCarthy makes sure to point out Wheeler, who he now affectionally refers to as “Mr. Spring Training.”
It isn’t something Wheeler dreads. In fact, he kind of enjoys it.
“You know, it’s nice. The people at home like it,” Wheeler said. “I just always have to ask the guys behind me, because I don’t have a monitor. I said, ‘Let me know if they’re doing that will you? So I’m not doing anything in here that would be inappropriate that they would have a really good time with.’ So sure, I love being part of their schtick, no problem.”
2024 will mark the 10th season that Wheeler isn’t in the TV broadcast booth. Prior to that, he had been a fixture on Phillies games for 37 years, working as both a play-by-play announcer and color commentator. He worked most frequently with Hall of Famer Harry Kalas, the only person who spent more time in the Phillies broadcast booth than him.
Old habits die hard, and some don’t die at all. Wheeler says when he’s watching Phillies games, he continues to have the mindset of a broadcaster trying to analyze what’s going on in real-time and find the right pocket to explain it to viewers. Even the viewers who might have thought they were above his insight.
“I still do it,” Wheeler acknowledged. “I mean, I can’t help it, I love the game. I do it when I’m sitting up here. I see when something is right or wrong, or a guy has a strength — what I always did all those years.
“I thought I was very fortunate to be around the people I’ve been around and learned so much from them, and I can impart some of that,” Wheeler continued. “You know some people said, ‘Well, they know all that stuff.’ Well, they don’t. But you know, you get used to that after a while and I enjoy it.”
While Wheeler did retire from the Phillies organization after the 2017 season and continues to have a strong relationship with the franchise he’s so closely associated with, he didn’t get to end his broadcast career on his own terms. He and Gary “Sarge” Matthews were let go after the 2013 season, with Matt Stairs and Jamie Moyer eventually picked as their replacements.
By now, Wheeler is very comfortable not dealing with the rigors of broadcasting 162 games a season, which, while it has its benefits, is a very taxing lifestyle. But he acknowledged that he initially struggled when the baseball world went on without him.
“The thing was, the first year, I gotta admit, when they left here [without me], it hurt,” Wheeler revealed. “It had been a long time. I hadn’t missed a roadtrip in 37 years. And when they left and went home without me, I thought, ‘How can they play that season without me? How can they go to Texas?‘
“But you know, it went away. Especially after the second year, I was a lot better,” Wheeler said. “Right now, when they leave, I’ll go out there and smell the exhaust from the busses.”
The reality is that when you’re a broadcaster for a team, you have to watch every second of every game. Sure, that might mean you’re a witness to legendary moments like Mike Schmidt’s 500th home run in 1987, or Roy Halladay’s perfect game in 2010. It also means you can’t turn the game off or even zone out when the Phillies give up 10 runs in the first inning and clearly don’t have a path to being competitive on a given day.
Now, Wheeler can use decades of baseball knowledge to decide that if the Phillies are down 7-0 in the fourth inning, it’s OK to go do something else. And while he watches most games, he doesn’t have to watch every game if there’s something he would rather be doing on a given day.
Make no mistake, though, this is still someone who lives and breathes baseball, even if it’s not quite to the same extent that it was from 1977-2013. And even as someone who was present when the Phillies won both of their World Series titles, he’s been blown away by the crowds at Citizens Bank Park during October in each of the last two seasons.
“But I still love it,” Wheeler noted. “I’ve been to some of the playoff and World Series games the last couple years. The Phillies are still great, they take great care of me.
“That atmosphere is,” Wheeler said before pausing. “We had great atmospheres in other years at the Vet in ’80 and Citizens Bank Park in ’08 and all that. I’ve never heard anything like the last two. It’s almost like people have decided, ‘We are a part of this, and we’re enjoying the heck out of it. And we’re gonna do what we can to help this team win.'”
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David Hewitt
March 14, 2024 at 10:16 am
Love ya, Wheels.
Ted Thompson
March 25, 2024 at 2:21 pm
The Phils have struggled somewhat to fill his role. Finally settled in with Kruk, Ben Davis and now, Ruben Amaro, Jr. – part-timers all.