Braves fans who listened to games on the radio noticed a trend: They heard Jim Powell less and less over the past few years. He had nearly disappeared from the air.
He once was a mainstay in the booth. In 2023, he estimated he worked 12 games.
“I made the best of it,” Powell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution over the phone about the past few years. “It wasn’t my decision to cut back my games. That was beyond my control, and I’ve gotten a lot better in my older age at not worrying about things that I can’t control. I obviously would’ve preferred to do each and every game. We’ve made the best of it.
“I’ve gotten to do a lot of things in the summertime that I couldn’t do for 30 years because I was always doing a Major League Baseball game every single day, so my wife and I took advantage of that and did a lot of things that we’d never been able to do together in the summer. That’s about all we could do. Until they call me and ask me to make my own schedule, there’s really not much else I can do.”
On Thursday, Powell posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he no longer is with the Braves Radio Network. It was not his decision. Powell began seeing a reduction in games from 2020 onward, but toward the end of last season, he knew his time with the Braves was over.
In his X post, he wrote this: “I won’t speculate about why this happened: it’s professional sports, and we all serve the pleasure of our employer.”
Asked for their reasoning in moving on from Powell, the Braves declined to comment.
Now Powell – a Roswell native who attended Roswell High and the University of Georgia – is left with the memories of a dream job. There are plenty. His tone was that of gratitude, not spite.
“I’m a pretty unfailingly positive person,” Powell said. “I have belief in God, a higher power, that things will work out, things happen for a reason. The alternative is to be unhealthy because you sit around and are upset because things you can’t control are not going your way. It really wasn’t that hard.
“I’ve got an awesome wife, Emmy, and three wonderful daughters, and I’ve got so many friends here in the Atlanta area, and the state of Georgia, and really, by extension all across the Southeast, from all those years of doing the games on the largest radio network that there is. I know it probably seems like I’m being disingenuous by saying it really wasn’t that hard, but it really wasn’t that hard. Probably harder on my family than it was me.”
Powell remembers certain moments, like Jason Heyward homering in his first career at-bat, but hasn’t sat down and reflected on his entire career.
After all, the 59-year-old hopes it isn’t over.
“I would love to do baseball broadcasting,” Powell said when asked what’s next. “I honestly feel like – and I’ve told this to the Braves in the past – I feel like I was born to do baseball, based on my skill set and my interests and my lifelong affection for baseball. I’m hopeful that I will be able to continue my career. Baseball jobs are few and far between, and they are very difficult to get, and there’s a lot of competition. And the baseball broadcasting world has changed, it’s been evolving the last few years into using more broadcasters and just trying other things.
“To me, the most beautiful thing about baseball is baseball on the radio. There’s nothing more simple and less complicated than a fan getting in the car, or getting home and turning on the radio and sitting on the porch, and listening to two guys that they’ve listen to for a long time talk through a baseball game, tell stories, give information, have a good time, keep it light hearted. It’s just a simple formula. The fans just want to hear their guys, and they want to hear them every day, and they want to hear the baseball game. That, to me, is the essence of what the job is, and I’m hopeful that I can recreate that somewhere else.”
The 2023 season marked Powell’s 30th as a major-league broadcaster and 15th with the Braves radio booth. In 2020, he was inducted into the Georgia Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He spent much of his time in with the Braves alongside Hall of Famer Don Sutton.
Before coming home to call games, Powell worked for the Brewers. He was on the radio with Bob Uecker, who taught him, among many other things, the importance of treating each day’s game as its own. Powell tried not to dwell on the past or look ahead to the future. He knew fans were listening to hear exactly what happened that specific day.
After the Braves began phasing out Powell, Ben Ingram became the main radio play-by-play broadcaster alongside Joe Simpson. This left Powell on the outside.
It was a sad end to a tenure that began with Powell’s homecoming to call Braves games. Powell, his family and his friends were overjoyed when the Braves hired him in 2009.
“Everybody just loved it, just thought it was the greatest thing ever – including me,” he said.
Now, this chapter is over.
Even if Powell is grateful for it, he’ll miss the people he met along the way.
“I have so many friends over there that I’ve gotten to know over the years,” he said. “I’d make trips way out of my way to getting to the press box to make sure I saw some of my buddies. Everybody was so nice. A lot of them, I’m sure, are surprised and disappointed. But I’m going to miss coming into the ballpark and seeing friend after friend after friend as I walk through the doors and onto the concourse and up the stairs and all of that, and all of that and get to see all my friends.
“I’m not going to be able to see them every day. That’s probably the one thing that makes me sad.”
