Baliva was driven to be a broadcaster

PEORIA, Ill. -- Nathan Baliva remembers what life was like when he didn't have an audience.

Venturing out to baseball games near his hometown in Springfield, Ill., Baliva would find a seat far away from fans and make himself as comfortable as he could on the aluminum bleachers. He'd take the stat sheets that he had printed from the Internet and spread them out in front of him. Then, right before the first pitch, he'd turn his tape recorder on, and the broadcast would begin. Show time.

Only, no one was listening. At least not yet.

"There's some jobs you can't get because you don't have the experience, but you don't have the experience because you can't get a job," Baliva said. "So I went out and did it on my own."

Almost a decade later, Baliva's broadcasts aren't much different. As the lead radio personality for the Peoria Chiefs, he still keeps his stats handy, only now they're just a mouse click away. He still removes himself from the rest of the spectators, only now he's in the press box. And he still records his broadcasts. Only now, everyone's listening.

When Baliva was a student at Marquette University, he would find any excuse he could to practice his play-by-play. It didn't matter whether he was calling an independent league game or a Nintendo game, if he was sitting behind home plate or nestling beside a foul pole hundreds of feet away. Sometimes, if he was broadcasting a high school game and didn't know the players' names, he'd just make them up.

"If you're going to be a doctor, you can't really go in and practice cutting up on people," Baliva said. "But if you want to get into baseball, especially as a broadcaster, you can go anywhere and practice."

During the drive home from the simulated broadcasts, Baliva, 29, would play back his recordings to see where he needed improvement. Then he would use the tapes to seek advice from anyone who would listen.

He'd badger his professors at Marquette, where he earned his degree in broadcast and electronic communication. Later, when he was attending the University of Florida for graduate school, he'd ask his internship advisor at the local radio station to critique his work. Any way to get a leg up, he thought.

"I think it just depends on how much hard work you want to put into it on continuing to improve," Baliva said. "Broadcasting for three hours a day is a tough thing to do, and if you want to be the best, you've got to work at it."

Even when he was at Florida, Baliva continued to work at it, rambling on his personal radio whenever he could. He would attend Spring Training games in his spare time or make the hour and a half trek to Tampa Bay -- where he knew there wouldn't be many people -- to broadcast Devil Rays games from the upper deck.

A year before Baliva finished grad school, the Chiefs hired him as an intern in 2002. The team was so smitten by his work that they gave him a full-time position as the team's broadcast and media manager the following spring.

He's been the radio voice for the Chiefs for five years now. And people all over Peoria tune in to his broadcasts.

"That's why I spent all those nights alone in the bleachers," he said.

The rehearsal tapes helped Baliva get the job, but they didn't have much usefulness for his responsibilities behind the scenes. The "media" portion of his title puts him in charge of producing the media guides, running the team's website and handling requests from the press.

He's particularly busy when he has to set up press conferences on the nights that big-league players are in Peoria for rehab assignments. And, this being a Chicago Cubs affiliate, those nights seem to occur about as often as "Friends" reruns.

But despite his hectic schedule, Baliva still finds time to sneak off, catch a game where no one will recognize him and dust off that trusty tape recorder of his. Because he knows that if he wants to make it to the top, he's still got a lot of work to do.

"Even the guys in the Major Leagues are probably still trying to improve," Baliva said. "Unless they're the Hall of Fame guys -- the Bob Ueckers and the Vin Scullys that are up there -- the rest of us have plenty of work to do."

In the mean time, he's happy right where he is.

"I couldn't have asked for a better situation to start my career," Baliva said. "This is a starting-out job and, man, has it been a great one."