Like many boys who grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, during the 1980s, Tim Neverett had visions of a Major League Baseball career. He may have originally pictured himself in uniform, but that vision soon changed to one of him in the broadcast booth.
“I remember when I was playing baseball at Emerson (College, a communications school in Boston) my coach telling us, ‘Not a single one of you is going to make it to the big leagues unless it’s as an announcer,’” Neverett recalled. “That always stuck with me. That’s how it began.”
As it turned out, the late Jim Bradley, Neverett’s coach at Emerson, was correct. Neverett reached the majors in 2008 as a television and radio broadcaster for the Pittsburgh Pirates and remained in that position until earlier this week, when he accepted a job to broadcast Boston Red Sox games with Joe Castiglione on WEEI. Neverett, a 1984 Nashua High School graduate, will replace Rye, N.H., resident Dave O’Brien, who will move from WEEI to NESN next season.
“It was a difficult decision to leave Pittsburgh,” Neverett said. “It was a great job, a great situation. The only thing that it’s not is home. I’m excited to be back home.”
Neverett, 49, said he has always tried to keep an eye open for any broadcasting jobs in Boston — he interviewed for the Boston Celtics radio job that went to Sean Grande in 1998 — but stumbled upon the Red Sox opening by accident.
“I was looking at a magazine that list jobs in minor league baseball,” Neverett explained. “I was looking for a job for my oldest son when I saw the Red Sox opening. You never see any Red Sox openings, so I called a friend and asked him if they had someone in mind or if the job was really open. He said, ‘Not only is it open, they want you to email your stuff.’ A couple days later they called me and said, ‘We’d like to bring you in for an interview.’
“I think they made the offer in mid-December. I know when the stories first came out in the (The Boston Globe) and (the Boston Herald) I hadn’t seen anything on paper yet, so they jumped the gun a bit, quite honestly. The Pirates wouldn’t have given me permission to talk to anybody else unless it was Boston because they knew Boston was home.”
Neverett’s first break in the broadcasting business came when he was 19. He was a summer intern at WSMN in Nashua, and helped out the broadcasters during Nashua Pirates games. At the time, the Pirates were a Double-A team in the Eastern League.
The station’s two broadcasters were both off on July 4, and Neverett called both games of a doubleheader as the only person in the booth.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is really cool,’” Neverett said. “Imagine if I could find a way to make a living doing this.”
Fenway Park is currently the only major league ballpark from which Neverett has not broadcast a game. He’ll be the fifth person to partner with Castiglione in the radio booth, joining Ken Coleman (1983-89), Bob Starr (1990-92), Jerry Trupiano (1993-2006) and O’Brien (2007-15).
“I wasn’t looking for another job,” Neverett said. “I had to make a hard decision because my situation in Pittsburgh was really great, but my goal was always to get back home.”
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