The 33-year ESPN veteran was caught in the company’s latest round of layoffs but is still in the booth for the Little League World Series.
Read more These Democrats used to be Republicans — and hope that will help them win midterms
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Staring out across a baseball diamond one recent evening, Karl Ravech, the longtime ESPN studio host and play-by-play voice, turns introspective.
“I wonder when I’ll be back here,” he says. “It feels like home.”
The Little League World Series has that effect. More than 240 10- to 12-year-olds congregate here for the better part of two weeks in a town that triples in size with the youth-sports gem’s annual competition, which crowns a world Little League champion. Kids (and adults) trade themed pins, smuggle in cardboard boxes to slide down the Series’ tallest hill, basking in a childhood naivety Williamsport uniquely captures. As Ravech often says, “Everyone’s a winner.”
For many wandering the north-central Pennsylvania campus — which features two minor league-size stadiums and a complex of activities and shops — and millions more watching from home, Ravech has become synonymous with the late-August baseball festival. ESPN has broadcast the event every year since 1987, and this is his 20th year on the call. Before, between, after games, he walks through the crowd and spends well over an hour each day taking photos and chatting with “youngsters” who shout his name from a distance.
“This event, more than anything else, is my thing,” he says. “I love this place. And I think most people recognize me because of this.”
But ESPN laid off Ravech, 61, in July as part of a slash that cut a handful of notable personalities, including Ryan Clark and Cam Newton, along with more than 30 off-camera employees. It was the latest of several cuts the network has made over the last decade as it grapples with cord-cutting and other industry shake-ups that have sent cable subscribers fleeing, all while the company heaves over $50 million at its largest names, Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee. ESPN declined to comment for this story and wouldn’t make other employees available for interviews.
The timing of the layoffs meant no suitable replacement could fill Ravech’s lead role at the LLWS for 11 days of shows, most with roughly eight hours of programming. After some consideration and a conversation with his wife, Chris, he decided he would be willing to return for a final production. It has become a tour of tears, though he says he won’t let fans see him cry. “This isn’t about me,” he reasons.
Staying in the same hotel, eating at the same diners and coffee shops and running around the same neighborhoods every morning for decades, he has developed a rhythm. The 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. games arrive with such consistency that an ESPN aide knows to visit his booth at 5:33 p.m. to ask whether he wants dinner. (The answer, always, is “Can I see the menu?”)
“It’s hard to leave it behind,” he says. “It’s almost like I’m being eulogized. … I’m here because I love the Little League World Series, like so many other people here. I’ve spent so much time here, seen the Series grow. If I could, I’d call this for the rest of my life. But things change.”
He wants to keep announcing, possibly even for ESPN. After the championship Sunday, though, he doesn’t know what comes next. So every one of these moments is to cherish.
On this day, between the afternoon and night broadcasts, he and longtime statistician Michael Notaro trade tales, a habit they have carried since they started working together in Williamsport in 2014. They debate the swankiest North American city (Ravech favors a few Canadian options), make the case that the nearby Genetti Hotel is haunted and discuss local history.
“Williamsport had a minor league baseball team, you know that?” Ravech asks. “I remember, because I’m the one who broke that they were leaving.”
“Oh, really?” Notaro jabs.
“Yep. Back in the day, I was a bit of a reporter myself,” Ravech jokes. “The Williamsport mayor had a lot to say. I remember that.”
Soon, it’s back to business — “if you can call it that,” he jokes as he joins Todd Frazier and Jessica Mendoza on a pair of stools to frame the broadcast’s opening shot, which always occurs under a disco ball just out of frame. He looks back, admiring the field and setting sun. Suddenly, with a cue in his earpiece, he jolts to life, setting the stage for a highly anticipated meeting between the tournament’s West and Southeast representatives. He details their star hitters and the control of California’s starter, before joking about how Alabama’s Kinley Rasmus, a two-way star who will go on to set the record for the most hits by a girl at the tournament, might be Shohei Ohtani in disguise.
Then the broadcast cuts to kids playing on the venue’s back hill as it fades to break.
“In Williamsport,” he says, staring at the program feed, “summer never ends.”
GROWING UP IN NEEDHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, Ravech watched folks such as Mike Lynch on the nightly news discuss his Red Sox and Celtics. So when it came time to settle on a career, he thought “talking sports” seemed suitable.
At Ithaca College, he found himself surrounded by talent in the school’s small, competitive student newsroom. He and a pair of friends, Mike Mulcahy and Bob Maxon, pushed one another, he says, spending long nights examining scripts. He would come in for a 3 a.m. radio show with 30-some-odd listeners, chasing reps, as were thousands of other student journalists scratching into the field.
“That was the path,” he says. “You paid your dues, and you’d climb. It was all about how hard you worked, but there was going to be somewhere out there for you.”
He was right, soon landing at his hometown station, ABC’s Boston affiliate WCVB Channel 5, for a summer internship after his junior year, with Lynch taking him under his wing. He was brilliant on-air immediately. “I thought I was going to have to hide him,” Lynch says now. “He was going to take my job. You could just tell he had it. He was funny, super smart. He could be human, and, man, could he report.”
He spent three years in Binghamton, New York, as a sports anchor, and after growing frustrated when he wasn’t selected for a promotion, he started cold-calling other stations. On days off, he would drive to cities four or five hours away, telling producers he “happened” to be in town and would love to get coffee. The gas bills stacked, yet soon he was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Three years later, the real break came.
“I remember interviewing for ESPN, and something felt off,” he says. “Then I got the call that it wasn’t me.”
Days later?
“Turns out the other guy couldn’t leave his current job, and I was in,” Ravech says, smiling. “Often, in this business, that’s just how it happens.”
The work, he emphasizes, earned him “the dream,” which ESPN truly was for aspiring sportscasters. He slotted into the 2:30 a.m. “SportsCenter” before shifting to the East Coast evening slots. He began hosting “Baseball Tonight,” ESPN’s flagship MLB studio show, shortly thereafter. Aware of the need for versatility in the volatile TV industry, he angled into play-by-play duties as well.
Fans grew to recognize him across verticals. When ESPN held MLB rights, he was in the booth. A February college basketball Saturday found him in a gym somewhere in the Southeast. When Tiger Woods chased the Grand Slam in 2000, Ravech chased him down Pebble Beach with a mic.
But none of it compared to his 2006 assignment, when the network sent him to call the Little League World Series. After that first summer, he argued to return every year.
For fans and ESPN higher-ups, he struck a delicate balance. When he was on the call, the games felt like they meant the world, yet no 12-year-old athlete’s mistake was singled out. He was gentle and energetic.
Read more Military leaders warn Hegseth against extending Iran war operations
“And, man, was he a part of my childhood,” Declan Robbins, a 23-year-old fan, said while gathered in a crowd cheering as Ravech walked into the concourse after a broadcast this past week. “I grew up watching this, and he was always there. This is, like, weird to say: He narrates my memories.”
So this has been an emotional send-off, fans coming up to him and mementos being exchanged. Ravech says he doesn’t regret coming back. How could he? He doesn’t know whether this will ever be the same, a feeling he has spent this past week ravaging through for an answer that so many in his profession can’t find.
“I told him, maybe sometime a few years back,” Lynch recalls, “‘In this job, you never go out on top.’”
THE VIBE WASN’T GREAT, he admits.
Three years ago, Ravech watched as ESPN tore a slew of his comrades from their roles with little warning as part of one of its largest layoffs ever. Prominent, steady voices and reporters such as Suzy Kolber and Max Kellerman: sliced. “You see it,” he says, “but you never think it’ll be you.”
Which is why he broke down on an Amtrak platform in Philadelphia on a Tuesday morning last month. After he worked the night before, a reporter called asking for comment about him being laid off. Executives hadn’t told him yet. The next three hours, riding back to his home on the Connecticut shoreline, “were a lot.”
Ravech was making somewhere in the low to mid-seven figures, a person with knowledge of his agreement said, not a measly salary but nothing compared with ESPN’s heavy hitters. Elsewhere in the company, contracts are bloating to record levels. McAfee makes around $30 million per year, and he’s negotiating a contract that could push close to $60 million, the same person said on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss employees’ salaries. Last winter, Smith signed a five-year extension worth $100 million.
Ravech also worked more events than almost anyone else at ESPN. What he couldn’t pin down, then, was why there wasn’t at least a conversation about reducing his salary or changing his schedule.
“I would’ve been willing to talk,” he says. “But I never heard anything.”
He settled on the simple answer that his world was shifting around him. When he joined ESPN in 1993, the brand had little competition while still in its original wave of “sports nirvana.” Shows popped up at will, and reporters pitched targets as ambitious as their minds allowed.
Despite cable subscribers fleeing and streaming revenue projected to surpass $200 billion by 2030, ESPN profited by $2.9 billion in 2025. It remains steadier than many competing news organizations (even if, in some ways, stuck) because of cost-cutting and a direct-to-consumer push, and it holds the 2027 Super Bowl rights. But with tightening margins and social media driving more engagement than ever, the company’s priorities continue to shift.
Last summer, Bristol welcomed its first social media influencer, Katie Feeney. McAfee will expand his role to contribute to “Monday Night Countdown,” ESPN’s NFL pregame show, this fall. Smith has his own digital show, aptly named “The Stephen A. Smith Show,” and ESPN social media accounts haven’t gone a day in years without at least one clip of the boisterous New Yorker.
And if you aren’t drawing eyes for your personality, you need to be cheap. Play-by-play voices at ESPN have turned younger in recent years. Anchors and reporters are taking on more assignments at their same or trimmed rates.
“It just changed,” says Linda Cohn, who joined ESPN as an anchor a year before Ravech and who “mutually departed” this June. She began on the same set as Ravech, hosting “SportsCenter” alongside him, and went on to host the most segments of ESPN’s signature show of any employee in its history. “But we just reached a point where it was clear this wasn’t the same thing it once was,” she says. She recently started a YouTube show named after herself instead.
“I’m not sure there’s anything I’d do differently, or at least have known to,” Ravech says. “It was still my dream. … I wouldn’t have ever imagined any of this.”
Which is why, despite the ordeal, he finds himself in the wooden Lamade Stadium booth of which he knows every splinter. He isn’t retiring, and he looks forward to the next crew that will welcome him. It’s just a matter of where, and that doesn’t deeply concern him right now.
“I’m in Williamsport,” he says. “This is where I always want to be.”
THE MORNING BEFORE AN EARLY TOURNAMENT GAME, Ravech sips a cup of black coffee at a new cafe, nodding as locals stroll through the shop’s door.
He used to play pickleball in the mornings at a court about a mile from the Little League World Series complex. Here, he’s made friends, becoming a part of the community. If you need restaurant recommendations, he’s got them. He doesn’t run through these streets anymore because of a bad knee, but he’s always out and about.
“He’s a part of Williamsport,” says Chris Burke, who broadcasts games at the tournament with Ravech each year. “He shows up here, and it’s like he becomes one with the place. As a broadcaster, that’s your dream. And Karl’s the best at it.”
Recently, he has found another rhythm. In this line of work, it’s difficult to grasp how you’re publicly perceived. People might hate you — at least, that’s what your X feed suggests after every call. But this past week, he can’t escape the voices. He has had cards slipped under his door, gifts left in the press box.
“We’re going to miss you,” a woman says as she walks in the front door this morning.
In a 1993 interview with the Syracuse Post-Standard, days after ESPN hired him, he mused about the job that lay ahead. “I still have difficulty walking in the door and believing I work here,” he said.
His feelings never changed, he explains now. “I’m not sure anyone else will ever get the job I got. It has, truly, been a dre—”
“We love you, Karl,” a jersey-clad kid interrupts, followed by a small pack. “This won’t be the same without you,” their father adds, holding the door. “I watched this with my father, and you were the voice when we bonded.
“Thank you.”
Ravech nods and says he appreciates it.
But after the door shuts, he looks toward the street, then back across the river in the direction of the small-town stadium he never knew would define his life. He thinks about all those who have come and passed as he has been here. The morning stand-ups, late-night dugout jokes. Childhoods and dreams. He turns back, and a couple of wet dots rest on his cheeks for the remainder of a conversation that navigates through 33 years.
Then he glances at his phone. It’s 11 a.m., but he should head back to the complex, to the games, he says. With a brief wave to those hes met this morning, he’s off, once more, to Lamade. Call-time is at 1 p.m. The stadium is only a seven-minute drive away, and he knows Williamsport’s one-way streets better than any. He just doesn’t want to miss anything.
Read more An 80-year-old senator says he’s the voice of his state’s youth. Many believe him.
