This Phillies Fan Did an Inning of Play-by-Play and Absolutely Crushed It!!!

The Phillies handed a half-inning of radio play-by-play to a guy who won it in a charity auction, which usually produces a charming disaster. This time it produced Louis Kolb, and Kolb absolutely crushed it.

"Thank you, Scott. It's a thrill to be here. It's a lifelong dream to be in the Phillies broadcast booth," he opened. "So, here we go. Painter with the first pitch to Ortiz. It's in there for strike one called."

Then he closed it out clean. "Swung on and missed. They got him. Andrew Painter picks up the strikeout and that'll do it for the Nationals. No runs here in the top of the third. We go to the bottom half. Phillies lead it 2 to 1."

Rich's reaction on hearing it was immediate. "Holy crap." Chris went further: it was just as good as the regular guys.

So the show tried a guess at what a man with pipes like that does for a living. Firefighter? Police officer? Neither. According to the article that made the rounds, Kolb is a substitute teacher, which was where the story was going to end until line four lit up and Kolb himself was on the phone from Medford Lakes, New Jersey.

That is when the mystery resolved itself. Kolb is a substitute teacher in the latter years, as he put it, but he came clean on the rest.

"I actually was in radio, so I guess I should confess to that," Kolb said. "Back in the '80s and the early '90s, in fact, I did do some reporting including on WFAN's Mets Extra show. So, I'm not a novice, but I hadn't done the play-by-play."

He does record games at the local high school, Shawnee, and drops a little play-by-play onto the highlights. That inning in the booth was his first at the real thing.

Which makes what happened next the fun part. Rich called it the Roy Hobbs move. A guy who has been away comes back and crushes it.

"You want to call a good game. You get one chance, you get one inning, you sit down in the booth, and you just hope you don't screw it up," Kolb said. "I thought it went pretty well, but the reaction afterwards, I mean, Rich, for four days I've been all over the country, media hits here and everywhere, all of these stories written. You definitely didn't expect that."

He also copped to the announcer's private prayer, which Rich called before he could. Please, not a six-pitch inning. Kolb needed the pitch count racked up, and he was hoping for a home run he never got, since Philadelphia went three up and three down. The consolation came later, when a couple of his ESPN hits over the weekend asked him to recreate a home run call, and he got to do a Schwarber and a Bryce Harper.

Then Rich's 15-year-old, fresh out of camp and fluent in all things baseball, supplied the follow-up question: is Harper really going to the outfield?

Kolb had that one loaded. Harper is in the outfield, part of an infield shuffle that was already in flux, with Stott sliding over to third and Alec Bohm taking over at first.

Rich offered him a standing gig as the show's Phillies reporter. Kolb was in.