A big leaguer, for the rest of his life

There’s no sense burying the lead for very long here, because it opens an awesome story.

Shawn Murnin — a 35-year-old Forest City grad who works as the radio play-by-play voice of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, the Double-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals — got to live out every broadcaster’s dream last weekend. The Royals called him up to fill in on the radio broadcast for last weekend’s series against the Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park.

He worked four innings alongside legendary Royals radio commentator Steve Stewart on April 26 and 27, and his work and story proved so heartwarming to Kansas City fans, they brought him back Sunday to work the fifth inning for that game, too.

“I don’t want to say I had imposter syndrome,” Murnin said, recalling the experience from the Arvest Ballpark radio booth before the Naturals hosted Wichita on Wednesday. “But I was definitely sitting there thinking, ‘Who the hell am I?’ There were just a lot of things going on in my head.

“I did my best to try and take it all in, but at the same time, I was trying to manage a lot of emotions.”

I’ve known Murnin’s backstory for more than a decade, and even as I write it, I’m having a difficult time grasping what this man went through to get where he got.

I met Shawn in the press box at PNC Field in 2011, back when it was my second home and the people in it my second family. Don’t remember what his official title was, but judging by the type of work he did and the person who seemed most in charge of guiding him, it might as well have been “assistant to the intern.”

The intern, a boisterous, confident college student named Josh Horton, was writing program features and tending to the needs of then-Yankees broadcaster Mike Vander Woude and his visiting counterparts for a year or so. In many ways at the beginning, Shawn was his opposite. Quiet. Introverted. Trying to absorb.

It took a few weeks for him to settle in, to be more than just a hulking 6-foot-5 guy taking it all in from the second row, and catch his wry, deadpan humor. To hear his story about how, only about a year or so before he wound up in that press box, he dropped out of college. How he got by working a series of odd jobs, full time. One was as a caretaker at a funeral home in Forest City. Another, toweling off Rav 4s at a car wash.

Murnin only went back to school, at Lackawanna College, at the urging of friends. He became a Dean’s List student with the help of professors Andy Kurilla and Amelia Angeli, who he said “wouldn’t let me fail.”

When he interviewed Murnin before the 2011 season, Vander Woude had a full gamut of interns lined up. But a few minutes worth of talking convinced him he had to add Murnin to the list. He couldn’t pass up someone begging to work for free, doing the thankless behind the scenes work for a year until the team went on the road while PNC Field was renovated in 2012.

Murnin took a job producing Vander Woude’s broadcasts before he and his wife Samantha, a physical therapist, moved to Minnesota for a fresh start in 2014, fully cognizant of the reality that his days with the Yankees were three years past.

But in Minnesota, the hometown team was the Mankato Moodogs, a member of the Northwoods League, a collegiate summer circuit. And the guy who got the job behind the mic for the Moondogs the year Murnin moved there happened to be Horton, his fellow 2011 Yankees intern.

When Horton left after the season, he recommended Murnin for the job. He interviewed by recording an inning he called from a video game he played at the time, and got the gig. Turns out, he was pretty good. His deep, rich voice always seemed ideal for radio, and nobody was outworking him when it came to research on opposing teams and knowledge of the league.

The tape he built there landed him a job in Peoria, Illinois. Then places like Hagerstown, Maryland, and Bowling Green, Kentucky. In 2023, he landed the job with Northwest Arkansas, two steps from the bigs and higher up in baseball than he ever dared dream he’d get.

He and Samantha just bought a home for their 3-year-old son Elias and the child they’re expecting in a matter of weeks. Fresh off the fill-in opportunity he first heard about last month that he was equally pining for his whole life and dreading in the days it drew closer.

How was he supposed to call an at-bat, after all, when Bobby Witt Jr., the Royals shortstop and one of the game’s brightest stars, is going out of his way to say hello every day? When Alec Marsh, a right-hander who appeared in 11 games for Murnin’s Northwest Arkansas team in 2023, sees him, springs from his chair, delivers a hug and tells him he made it, that he’s a big leaguer now, too.

“The thought, ‘Act like you’ve been there before’ never crossed my mind,” Murnin said. “I wasn’t prepared to process all of this. This is the dream. This is what anybody who has enjoyed baseball for even a moment of their life says they’re going to do. And every single person I come in contact with is saying exactly that: ‘You’re a big leaguer. Even when you go back down to Northwest Arkansas, you’re a big leaguer for the rest of your life.’

“It just seems so outlandish that someone, specifically me, could sit down and say that, and continue to say that. ... It’s like, ‘Holy (crap), this happened. That’s now part of who you are. You’ve done this.’”

It is hard to stay centered after an experience like that. Take it from a guy who found himself in the middle of the Yankees clubhouse after Game 6 of the 2009 World Series, dodging champagne sprays while fully recognizing the reality that getting drenched in that environment was all he ever dreamed of doing as a kid.

But for Shawn Murnin, the flight left Detroit, and the first thing he did upon his return to Springdale was help the grounds crew pull the tarp off the diamond. He wants to get back to the bigs again, of course. But the thing about minor league baseball is, it’s always there. Few leave forever, and frankly given the road he took to get that job, it’s just as much the dream for Murnin as being in Detroit.

“It know how special it is,” he smiled from that tiny booth in the small stadium, “to be here.”

DONNIE COLLINS is a sports columnist for The Times-Tribune. Contact him at dcollins@scrantontimes.com and follow him @DonnieCollinsTT on X.