Toward the end of September, some people in broadcasting reached out to C.J. Nitkowski with a heads up: The Braves lead analyst job, they said, might open up. Be on the lookout, they told him. And a while before this, Jeff Francoeur, who held the post, had told Nitkowski he probably would step back at some point because he wanted to spend more time with his young kids.
This is what happened. Francoeur decided it was time, which left an opening.
Bally Sports South and Bally Sports Southeast has hired Nitkowski, a former major-league pitcher, to be play-by-play broadcaster Brandon Gaudin’s main color analyst. Nitkowski, who has been in the Bally Sports family, formerly worked as the analyst on Texas Rangers broadcasts. He also called a select number of Rangers games as the play-by-play announcer for Bally Sports Southwest, in addition to working for MLB Network Radio on Sirius/XM.
Nitkowski, 50, expects to call around 110 games in 2024. Francoeur believes he’ll work about 30 contests, which would be a role similar to Tom Glavine, who called around 25 games in 2023.
This is the perfect opportunity for Nitkowski, who has lived in Alpharetta for 18 years and has spent so much of that time on the road because his broadcasting gigs always took him away from home.
“I will tell you that my wife and I, multiple times, have said, ‘This doesn’t feel real,’” Nitkowski told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the phone on Monday. “Quite honestly, it’s been a big surprise. Once (Francoeur) got locked in here a couple years ago, I was resigned to the fact that he’s so good that this would never open up. And so I never even dreamed on it, quite honestly. And so when he reached out to me and let me know kind of what was going on, I was like, ‘Oh, that would be great.’ But again, same thing: ‘Ah, it’s too good to be true. There’s no way it’s going to work out that well.’’
But it did.
Nitkowski is home – and here to stay. He is not leaving.
Nitkowski and his wife, Megan, have three kids: 24-year-old Matthew, 22-year-old Brooke and 15-year-old Luke. C.J. called himself a “hotel warrior.” As C.J. and Megan have raised their family, C.J. has spent almost 120 nights per year in a hotel when he worked Rangers games. He never felt it would make sense to get a six-month lease at some apartment in Texas.
“It was fine,” C.J. said of that lifestyle. “The first five or six years, I was like, ‘All right, this is what you do.’ It’s a great job and my family wanted to stay in Alpharetta, and so you just suck it up and do it. And so this past, I would say, year and a half, it started getting to me a little bit. If I have an off day, just sitting in a hotel in Texas for an off day, like, ‘Ah man, I could be home right now.’”
This will put it all into context: Nitkowski has been in baseball for 30 years – 19 as a player, 11 as a broadcaster – and the only time he ever lived at home during a season was for one month in 1998, in Houston. That September was lovely, but the Astros soon traded him in the offseason.
In 2023, two events hit Nitkowski hard: The deaths of Jim Poole (his former Tigers teammate) and Tim Wakefield (the former Red Sox pitcher).
“They were both 57 years old,” Nitkowski said. “I’m 50. And when they were 50, they were perfectly healthy. And that was kind of weighing on me, just in the back of my mind a little bit as I was going through all of this, and knowing I’m spending 120 nights on the road. That’s a full year every three years on the road. I really started thinking about it a lot this past year.”
So the Braves job, then, really is a golden ticket. Nitkowski can spend more time at home. A broadcaster’s schedule is still grueling and full of travel, but at least he’ll be able to wake up in his own bed.
And Nitkowski has so much experience to bring viewers. As a left-handed pitcher, he spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors. A first-round pick of the Reds in 1994, he debuted for Cincinnati in 1995. He played for eight teams, including the Braves in 2004. He posted a 5.37 ERA over 479 innings. He also played in Asia for four years.
Braves fans loved Francoeur, who is one of them. He’s a Parkview High alum. He’s relatable and funny. Before scaling back his workload, he’d served as the main analyst on Braves broadcasts for six seasons (and had been at the networks for seven seasons).
Nitkowski knows he’ll have to win over the fanbase. He has experience here: Nitkowski replaced Tom Grieve, the Rangers’ legendary analyst, on those broadcasts years ago.
What can Braves fans expect when Nitkowski calls games alongside Gaudin?
“I want it always to be conversational,” he said. “The best compliments I think I ever get is somebody saying they learned something from the broadcast, or ‘I didn’t know that’ or ‘That’s something I can take to work the next day and sound really smart’ – all while, at the same time, hopefully delivering that in a really entertaining way. To me, it’s the combination that we’re all going through: How do we best use data from the entertainment side to bring insight without beating people over the head with a lot of math? If I can’t explain it quickly, then it’s not worth bringing to a broadcast.
“But trying to do some of that, trying to have some fun. I’m very self-deprecating. I feel grateful to play as long as I did, but I also know I had an average, at best, career. I was a grinder to do it for 19 years, so I will make fun of my career probably all the time, quite honestly.”
Nitkowski’s self-deprecating humor will go well with Gaudin, who often makes fun of himself. In his first season calling Braves contests, Gaudin provided a soundtrack for so many historical moments.
Since Nitkowski stopped playing, he’s built a nice broadcasting career. He’s an analyst for MLB Network Radio on Sirius/XM, where he co-hosts Loud Outs. From 2014-19, he worked for FOX as an analyst on national broadcasts and served in a studio role for MLB WhipAround and pre-and-post-game programming for games in the regular season and postseason.
Nitkowski said he’ll continue his work on MLB Network Radio. The Braves, he assured, are his priority. With Texas, Nitkowski would do the radio show – which is 2 p.m.-5 p.m. – before heading to the park. But the Rangers play in Central Time and many of their games are in Pacific Time, which means Nitkowski will have to adjust to doing the show on Eastern Time.
“One of the things, to a fault, is I have a tendency to be a little bit of a workaholic,” Nitkowski said. “And when I was on the road so much, I was like, ‘Well, why not? If I’m going to be away from home for 120 nights, I have no problem working twice.’”
Now, he’s back home.
When it appeared Francoeur’s job would come open, Hall of Famer John Smoltz, the Braves legend, called Nitkowski. During part of their conversation, Smoltz said, “Man, this team’s gonna be good for a long time.”
“It’s incredible to see,” Nitkowski said. “What they have done with this roster and the cost control, and the way that they’ve done it with the contracts, everybody in baseball has got to be envious of what this Atlanta Braves roster looks like, and (they) still have the ability to add if needed. I’ll be honest with you: If the team was terrible, I would still wanna be here because this is about family. The extra bonus is the fact that this organization is in such great standing right now, that all it does is make it even more exciting.”
But what makes it even better is that C.J. and Megan never saw this coming.
“We’re still like, ‘Is this real?’” C.J. said. “It almost doesn’t feel real. We just feel so fortunate.”
