After last season concluded, Lou Merloni began having discussions with NESN about appearing in the broadcast booth as an analyst alongside play-by-play man Dave O’Brien.
Beloved longtime color analyst Dennis Eckersley had just retired and NESN was looking to add new voices to its mix. There was some difficulty in figuring out how Merloni’s schedule might work alongside his daytime afternoon sports talk radio show on WEEI, but in December, WEEI informed Merloni they were moving in a different direction, reorganizing shows and not renewing his contract.
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Good timing.
“I’ve always wanted to be in the TV booth, I just didn’t know when the right time was, so sometimes things work out for a reason,” he said.
After 15 years on sports talk radio for WEEI, Merloni, who turns 52 next week, is now entering a new chapter in his career, one that’s taken him from the playing field to the radio studio and now into the broadcast booth.
It won’t be brand new for Merloni by any means. He’s worked a varying number of Red Sox games for the WEEI radio broadcast for the last nine years and will continue to do so this year. He’s also been a part of NESN’s pregame and postgame shows, but this season will be his first as a regular analyst in the TV booth for NESN’s broadcast. The plan, for now, is for Merloni to do about 50 to 60 games on radio and about 40 on TV for a total of about 90 to 100 games across the season on the two mediums. He won’t be on the first series against Baltimore, but Merloni is scheduled to do the radio broadcast for the next following series against Pittsburgh, Detroit and Tampa Bay followed by his first NESN games for the series against the Angels and the Twins.
“It’s what I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “I’ve done games before and that was my happy place. I liked doing sports talk, but after a while, it was 15 years, it started grinding on you more than I wanted it to.”
It’s the next step in a burgeoning media career for the Framingham native, who played nine seasons in the majors from 1998 to 2006, including six years with the Red Sox.
Merloni with the Red Sox in 2001. (Getty Images)And while NESN has brought several former Red Sox players to the booth in recent years, including holdovers Kevin Youkilis and Kevin Millar as well as fellow new arrival Will Middlebrooks this year, Merloni’s local ties — like those of the late Jerry Remy — allow him to bring another element to the booth.
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“For me, this is something I’ve always cared about, not just this organization because I played here, but being a fan and growing up in the city of Boston,” he said. “Sometimes that emotion when things don’t go right comes out as a fan, and balancing that with the analyst and now being around these guys and getting to know these guys and being fair. There are expectations to play at a certain level so that’s part of it. These guys are all better than I was, I know that, but at the same point, your job is to analyze what should have happened if something didn’t go right.”
Merloni didn’t have aspirations to enter the media world when he was a player. It wasn’t until his final season in 2006 when he got engaged that he started to think about a post-playing career. He’d contemplated coaching, but realized he’d likely start out in the minors and the grind of that lifestyle on a new marriage was not something he wanted to pursue.
In 2008, two years after retiring, he joined WEEI’s “The Big Show” as a frequent co-host and three years later was paired on a midday show with Mike Mutnansky for his first full-time role at the station. He later joined Glenn Ordway and Christian Fauria on middays until their show was moved to the afternoon drive. When Ordway retired in 2021, Merloni and Fauria hosted the show until Meghan Ottolini joined early last year.
Merloni credited Ordway with helping him shape his media career and learning the ins and outs of the business, not just in talk radio but in calling and analyzing games as well.
“He just knew the industry so well that he probably helped me out the most with my media career,” Merloni said of Ordway. “It’s just live and learn. I’ve said some things that made me feel uncomfortable and you’re like ‘Oh god, now I have to deal with this and that.’ But you sort of figure it out, like why do I feel uncomfortable? Is it because what I said I don’t believe in? Or just because somebody doesn’t like what I said? Is it the truth? So you start dealing with those kinds of emotions.”
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In the midst of his talk radio shows, he had started working on the Red Sox radio broadcast as well, including being in the radio booth for the 2013 and 2018 World Series. But the early years, understandably, were the hardest, not just in learning the business, but in transitioning to the media realm from the field.
“I still knew a lot of the guys on the team, which makes it hard,” he said. “I was like, if I want to do this, I have to realize it’s my job. I have to be able to criticize and not make it personal and deal with that. As my friends left the clubhouse, I kept the same attitude of ‘be critical without being personal,’ and just explain the game. But it did make it a lot easier when guys you knew, former teammates of yours, were not involved anymore.”
The career shift out of talk radio came at the right time for Merloni, who was feeling the weight of the echo chamber of negativity that often encompasses the job.
“You wake up every day and search for that negative topic and it wears on you and turns you extremely negative,” he said. “It’s not manufactured, it’s just, that’s your job. If you just talk about nothing but how great the Bruins are, nobody would ever call in. So it’s ‘Why isn’t (David) Pastrnak signed yet?’ So those are things that get people interacting with sports radio and those are the discussions you have. But you also want to keep it somewhat positive and balanced, it’s just different. There’s always that search for that sort of angle. And that grinds on you, it really does. It turns you into something you’re not, maybe.”
So in that vein, Merloni is eager to dig deeper into his first love: baseball. The game is vastly different from the one he played 20 years ago, but he’s enjoyed delving into advanced stats to help tell the story that might not always be visible in the box scores. Though he did quip that if some of the stats used nowadays were around when he played, he might have never even made it to the majors to begin with.
Balancing the differences between the narrative elements of radio and the more visual elements of television will be an adjustment, but the new rules this season on the field will add a different element too.
“Now I have to learn this whole section of new rules, pitch clock, shift, everything else,” he said. “Old school rules haven’t changed, but now it’s like learning the game all over again, which is actually fun. It’s advancing your database and knowledge of the game and taking it to another level with today’s game.”
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Merloni won’t be working the first Red Sox series against Baltimore, but then is scheduled to work the next five straight series either on radio or TV, followed by about a week off, then another stretch of games.
“It’s my first year doing it this way so it’s such a lifestyle change that I think it’s a good number to start,” he said. “I actually like it because going from one to the other is just enough different that you feel like it’s a different challenge so it’s nice.”
(Top photo of Merloni, far left, with fellow radio hosts Christian Fauria and Glenn Ordway, far right, and former state treasurer Deborah Goldberg: Matt West / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images)
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