During a break between innings of a late-season loss to the lowly Washington Nationals, Phillies radio broadcaster Larry "L.A." Andersen pinches open a sunflower seed and attaches it to his face. Then he does it again. Methodically, using the same pinpoint control that characterized his 25 seasons as a pitcher, Andersen fastens the seeds to his cheeks, nose, ears and eyelids.
"You look ridiculous," says Andersen's on-air partner, play-by-play announcer Scott Franzke.
Andersen takes a few seconds to ponder Franzke's observation. Then he says, "You talking about my shirt?"
Franzke concedes that of all the sunflower seeds dangling from Andersen's face, he is "particularly impressed" by the single seed clinging to the tip of his partner's nose.
"That," Andersen says proudly, "was the hardest one."
They segue back to the game with the grace of Rollins tossing to Utley to start a doubleplay. Since the duo began their baseball-on-wry broadcasts, Franzke and Andersen have worked as smoothly together as Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn once did. Like their predecessors, they seem destined to become the voices on the soundtrack of springs and summers (and Red Octobers) for the post-Harry/Whitey generation of Phillies fans. And considering that the two are following in the footsteps of Philadelphia radio gods, this wholehearted embrace by diehards is breathtaking.
"People will come up to us in a restaurant and tells us that Scott and Larry will be their children's Harry and Whitey," Franzke's wife, Lori, says. "And that's the sweetest thing to hear because Harry was such a big part of our lives. Scott and I will always treasure the time we spent with him. We miss him."
Together, Franzke and Andersen pair geek knowledge and unabashed love and respect for the game with their unabashed love and respect for mercilessly busting on each other.
"I figure I can get along with just about any dork," says Andersen, looking directly at Franzke. "I'm the screw-up. He's the straight guy. I once tried doing play-by-play, but I stopped for the benefit of our listeners."
Franzke remembers the job description when he was hired.
"They said to me, 'You're going to work with this guy who we think is funny but stinks on the air,' " Franzke deadpans.
Andersen replies: "Scott can adjust to anything except for maybe when he hands me a card to read and, a minute after he hands it to me, I forget to read it. You know how when you're little and you leave butterbeans on your plate and you get that look? I get that look."
Andersen considers his role in their on-air partnership. "I think where I help Scott out the most is with my memory," he says.
"It's what we call a steel trap," Franzke says.
"We're friends outside of the ballpark, too," Andersen says. "We'll have lunch together, play golf together, especially when we're on the road."
"A lot of that," Franzke says, "has to do with very limited choices."
Franzke and Andersen have been busting each other's chops since they started doing the middle innings together in 2006, then became the regular broadcast team in 2007. "I don't think either of us have thin skin," Franzke says.
Andersen says the key to their appeal is that they allow themselves to be vulnerable. "It lets people in. When the fans tell us, 'I feel like I'm sitting out on the patio with you and Scott, talking about the game,' that's the biggest compliment they could give us."
Andersen's fiancee, Kristi Marnie, says fans feel the same bond when they meet Andersen on the street, which they do often since he moved to South Philly a few years ago.
"He's very comfortable talking to fans because he's a fan himself," Marnie says. "People are feeling what he's feeling. He won't even watch the World Series."
In the offseason, Marnie says, Andersen spends his days redoing his garage, hanging drapes, cooking "a great roast pork," hanging out with her stepfather at the Quaker City String Band clubhouse, fighting with her stepfather over her mom's homemade potato salad, savoring the hoagies at Cosmi's Deli, watching Eagles and Flyers games, and talking baseball with the neighbors. You'd never guess he's a native of Oregon the state, not Oregon Avenue.
"I'm born and raised in South Philly," Marnie says, "and Larry's like a real South Philadelphian to me."
Andersen's friendship with Franzke doesn't end with the Phillies season.They play golf with their fellow Phillies broadcasters. And recently, Franzke asked Marnie, a hairstylist at Salon Europa on 2nd Street near South, to give his young son, Gus, his first haircut. When Andersen and Marnie get hitched next Nov. 9, the Franzkes will dance at their wedding.
That their friendship is genuine is another reason why Lori Franzke thinks fans have taken to the pair so quickly.
"Sometimes, I wish they didn't like each other so much," she says. "I'm, like,'Scott, didn't you see Larry enough during all those months of the season?' "
Chris Wheeler, who has worked for 35 years as a Phillies broadcaster, says you can't fake the odd-couple friendship of Franzke and Andersen.
"There are people in this business who have insufferable egos and hog everything," Wheeler says. "So the guy who's working with them has to be like a potted plant. The star is like, 'Oh, did he say something?' There's no rapport. There's tension. And listeners can hear it. These two genuinely like each other. You can't fake that. It's like Harry playing straight man for Whitey. I think Franzke figured out fast that the best way to work with Larry is to be the straight man and let Larry be Larry."
And Andersen, Wheeler said, knows "there's a fine line between schtick that gets in the way of the play-by-play, and fun that complements the game. Larry has to let Franzke describe the game because radio listeners can't see it."
One of the pure joys of listening to a Franzke/Andersen broadcast is the duo's game-inside-the-game reporting of details that fans might otherwise miss. In the fourth inning of a soggy September game against the Braves here, Phillies rookie pitcher Vance Worley smokes a line drive to third, where 39-year-old Chipper Jones snares it for the third out. As the Braves trot off the field, Andersen notices that pitcher Tim Hudson is taking his time on his way to the dugout.
"You see Hudson looking, looking," Andersen tells Franzke. "Finally, Worley caught his eye. Hudson tipped his cap."
It's an Easter egg for listeners - an unsentimental, sparingly drawn image of a great older pitcher graciously acknowledging the skills of his rookie opponent.
Three innings later, Franzke tells Andersen that quirky Braves outfielder Jose Constanza shuffles both feet at the plate and sometimes changes his stance in the middle of an at-bat. "The biggest oddity is when he licks the bat," Franzke says. "Did you ever see him lick the bat, Larry?"
"I try not to," Andersen says.
Growing up in Dallas, Franzke didn't
really get into baseball until high school, when he and his friends would hang out at a youth-league field until after midnight, when the organized games were over and their pickup game could begin.
"It was the only field where the light switch had no lock box," Franzke says. "While we waited, we listened to Texas Rangers games on the radio. The Rangers were terrible, but Mark Holtz, who did the play-by-play, and Eric Nadel, who did the color commentary, just had this friendship and this way of making you a part of it. When I hear fans here talk about Harry and Whitey, I imagine it was something like I had with Mark and Eric, listening to them on the radio, waiting for our turn to play. And that's when I fell in love with baseball."
After 3 years calling games for the Class A Kane County (Ill.) Cougars and a couple with the Texas Rangers, Franzke found himself in Philadelphia, paired with Andersen. The rest is Phillies broadcasting history. Or as Franzke says, "That's when my life began to fall apart."
Andersen came to broadcasting after a long, successful major league career as a reliever. He coached for a couple of years in the Phillies' farm system, and was once offered the pitching-coach job by then-Phils manager Larry Bowa. He declined the offer, telling Bowa, "I'm not sure I want to come down and coach for you and get fired when you do 3 years from now."
Andersen became a Phillies broadcaster in 1997 because, "in a perfect world, I'd like to coach in rookie ball and sign a [$25 million-a-year] contract like Ryan Howard signed, but that's not happening," he says. So instead of fuming at umpires from a dugout, he does it from the booth. "My disdain for umpires is pretty well-known," Andersen admits, which is as obvious as the enormous Phillies 2008 World Series Championship ring on his right hand.
"Having been a pitcher," Franzke explains, "especially a pitcher with one pitch, Larry has to know where the strike zone is. So when he sits here and sees pitches coming to the same spot but not being called the same way, he has been known to get upset."
During a late-season game in Houston, the home-plate ump's strike zone was so erratic that even usually neutral Franzke told Andersen, "Neither the pitcher, the catcher, the batter, nor the broadcaster knows what a strike is." Then Franzke noticed that on his monitor, the Phils' TV broadcasters were discussing who the three best major league umpires were. "Are they goading you, Larry?" Franzke asked, then asked Andersen who the three best major league umpires were.
Franzke kept suggesting names. Andersen kept saying, "No."
Finally, Franzke said, "Mike DiMuro?"
"No," Andersen said, then admitted DiMuro had called one good game.
Franzke asked Andersen if he remembered that DiMuro was the home-plate umpire for Roy Halladay's perfect game.
"Yes," Andersen said. But that's as much as he would give DiMuro. One good game.
Andersen brings the same intensity to the broadcasters' behind-the-scenes food feuds. During yet another rain delay before a September game with the Braves, TV broadcaster Gary "Sarge" Matthews walks into the radio booth to announce that he had just eaten an entire tub of Lori Franzke's homemade banana pudding. He wants to thank her. But Matthews is not looking at Franzke as he says this. He's looking at Andersen, who glares back at him.
Franzke asks Andersen if he got any of Lori's banana pudding. "No," Andersen says, eyeing Matthews, "because it was all gone."
After Matthews leaves, Andersen says, "Sarge ate mine."
There's a back story to the pudding war, of course. "No matter where we are," Andersen says, "Sarge brings a lot of food to the ballpark, just out of the goodness of his heart. And out of the goodness of my heart, I eat as much as I can, whether it's mine or somebody else's. A while back, Sarge brought peach cobbler to the ballpark. I ate mine. I ate his. So this time, he ate my banana pudding, which kind of left an angry taste in my mouth."
Attempting to be a peacemaker, Franzke says his wife made three tubs of banana pudding, so two of them must still be in the fridge. "Sarge didn't tell me about them," Andersen says. "He knew and he didn't tell me." Retribution hangs heavy in the air.
Which brings us back to another food product: the sunflower seeds. Andersen was pitching for the Portland Beavers, then a Phillies Triple A affiliate, in 1983, when he saw teammate Tony Ghelfi applying sunflower seeds to his face in the bullpen.
"I just started doing the sunflower seeds because they helped me relax in the bullpen," Andersen says. "That's where I come up with my shallow thoughts. If I sat there and just focused on the game, I'd be a basket case, and I was already close enough to that.
"Tony just put the seeds on his cheeks. I also used my earlobes, my nose. I've done up to 87 seeds. Maybe I'm obsessive."
"It sounds ridiculous that anyone would even take the time to discover the sunflower trick," Franzke says. "Not only discover it, but perfect it. I mean, some of us have laundry to do."