Crack! rattled the sound waves through the stadium as a baseball soared with an urgency to nurse its wounds in a more solitary place: the outfield bleachers. It was the Rangers’ first home run in Globe Life Field, and as Joey Gallo approached first base on his historic home run trot, the soundtrack from “The Natural” played, just like it had when Rougned Odor’s seventh-inning grand slam last September 29 was the last home run to sail out of Globe Life Park across the street.
Advertisement
But while the song may be familiar, this year’s Rangers home runs are also accompanied by something new: pre-recorded cheers to help fill the aural void created by the absence of fans due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The hope is that the pre-recorded noise will help the games feel more like regular-season games — yes, for TV and radio audiences, but for the players on the field as well. Nothing about the 2020 baseball season is ideal, but if there’s one team that is more well-equipped for these circumstances than the rest, it might be the Rangers, thanks to their secret weapon: Grubes.
At least that’s how you probably know him. Or perhaps you’re more familiar with “Shoopy,” or @tweetgrubes. His real name is Michael Gruber, and if none of those monikers sound familiar, allow me to welcome you to the DFW sports media market. Sure, there are figures around here who have more (and more ardent) supporters — names like Galloway, Hansen, Rhyner and so on. But as far as approval rating? There are only a few legends that rank higher than Grubes.
But it’s not because he has kept a low profile. In fact, the more you learn about Gruber, the more you’ll start to see him popping up like some kind of DFW sports Forrest Gump, adjacent to the biggest stories in the Metroplex. Intern and board op at one of the biggest local sports radio stations in the world, starting at age 16? Check. An MLB ballplayer has the nickname “Kitten Face;” how’d that happen? It was Grubes — the Twitter personality with the run-on shibboleths that conclude with the acronym “ATSOT” (“and they score on that!“). Life-sized bobbleheads at the local AA baseball team’s park? That’s the same Grubes? Yep. Who’s that manning the DJ booth at the Dallas Stars home games? Grubes again. Dirk Nowitzki starts a Twitter account in 2010? Bet you can guess the first media member he mentions… that’s right, it’s the guy whose parents sold Dirk their house. Jack White plays first base at a celebrity baseball game in Reverchon Park? Hang on, I think I know that baserunner…
Photo: Levi WeaverSo where did this beloved figure get started on his path?
Advertisement
“It all really started (because) I wanted to play fart drops for The Hardline,” Grubes admits.
The early years
“Grubes is just such a lovable fellow,” says Texas Radio Hall of Famer Norm Hitzges. It was Hitzges who first let Gruber in the door, all the way back in 2002, when Gruber was just a high school sophomore at Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas.
But that opinion wasn’t always as universal as it is now.
“Seventh grade sucked,” Gruber says. This was back in October of 2019, just after it became official that Gruber would be part of Chuck Morgan’s in-game entertainment team at the soon-to-open Globe Life Field. “For whatever reason, it wound up that all my good friends were in the other class — you know, it’s like A and B classes. And a few of the kids that were in my class had been held back. They were cool the year before and then …weren’t.”
Gruber says that the bullying was never overly physical, but included “…a lot of mental (abuse) and occasional pushing. I think because I was always the runt of the class, I never got hit too much, but the mental bullying was definitely there … I was like a golden retriever or something, still wanting to be everybody’s friend and hoping it would stop … I was trying to be there, trying to do my best, trying to learn, but when you’re using most of that brainpower to try to deflect how people are treating you, it’s tough.”
Gruber credits his parents, Mike and Diane, for guiding him through the difficult time. His mom allowed him to take days off when things got to be too much (“I missed a lot of days of school that year”), and when eighth grade arrived, they transferred him from St. Elizabeth to St. Monica Catholic school. It didn’t take long before the cloud lifted. By the time he reunited with some of his St. Elizabeth classmates at Jesuit for his freshman year of high school, he was coming into his own.
Advertisement
In addition to some peace of mind, his time at Jesuit also provided Gruber with a couple of other things. The first was clarity: While playing on the JV baseball “B-team” as a sophomore, he began to realize that his big-league baseball dreams were unlikely to materialize. But his new social circle also provided him with something more useful — connections. His coaches were Jeff Staubach (son of Roger) and Danny Lowry, who was working in sales at sports radio station 1310 The Ticket. Grubes had listened to the station with his dad since he was a child and decided he wanted to work there. Lowry agreed to ask around. By June of 2002, the 16-year-old Gruber was interning for Hitzges.
“Back then, our intern program was not the official intern program it is today,” Hitzges explains. “Today, one must be in college, having had at least a year in college and you receive credits. Back then, it was, ‘Hey, my kid is interested in doing something like this; do you think he could come and be an intern?'”
It didn’t take long for Hitzges and others to recognize they had something special.
“You immediately knew he had a good mind,” says Hitzges. “And you immediately knew he had a good work ethic. Immediately. When you’re 16, what do you have to offer an employer, except, ‘I’ll work‘? And Grubes, it was immediate that he would work. And he would self-start. He’d throw ideas on the table because he listened to the station and liked the station. It wasn’t just a fit with me — he fit with everybody. Everybody liked Grubes at the station. I mean, everybody liked Grubes.”
By 19, Gruber was promoted to technical director, colloquially known as “board op.” His responsibilities included manning the soundboard, running the commercials and, where he could fit them in, playing “drops.” For those unfamiliar with the term, a “drop” is basically a sound effect. Sometimes it is, indeed, a fart noise, but it can often come in the form of previously-aired broadcast audio, taken out of context. One perfect example was years ago when Bob Sturm was interviewing Mia Hamm and Grubes — only a couple of months into the job at this point — played an out-of-context drop that flustered both the high-profile guest and the radio veteran:
https://www.theunticket.com/audio/drops//bob-mia.mp3“Boy, this is a really complicated story,” Sturm says with a laugh now. “So once upon a time, we were talking about Joe Namath and Suzy Kolber. And in telling that story, I had imagined Joe Namath was thinking in his head, ‘Can I stick my tongue down your throat?’ as he’s talking to Suzy Kolber. Well, of course, that made a funny drop. But as I took a breath with Mia Hamm, Grubes fired that drop off. So she can see — because I’m five feet from her — that my mouth is not moving. But (the line) is in my voice, and she has no idea what is going on, whereas I know exactly what’s going on, but I’m pretty embarrassed and frankly awful flustered.”
Confidence can be an extremely thin lane. Too much, and you can be seen as unteachable, arrogant, not knowing your role. Too little, and you’re a wallflower, too hesitant to do the things that the job requires. Somehow, Grubes has always managed to avoid careening into either ditch.
Advertisement
“You almost have to be an instigator,” Sturm says of the board-op role. “You almost have to be willing to annoy somebody who’s well up from you on the food chain. So I guess you have to have a lot of nerve, and he struck that balance wonderfully because you would never really be mad at him. But he would definitely kick you in the groin when you were not looking with a sound or with a drop of some sort. And it made the show very entertaining and much-improved when he was on the board.”
By 2007, at just 21 and in the fall semester of his senior year at SMU, Grubes was working for the drive-time show The Hardline, one of the biggest local sports radio shows in the nation.
“I was very reluctant to turn things over to somebody that young, that inexperienced and somebody I didn’t know that well,” says Mike Rhyner, founding member of The Hardline. “I was very protective of stuff back then, especially as it pertained to our show … (Accepting Grubes) happened fairly quickly because really all I wanted out of anybody in that position is: be into it, be in the moment like we are. Don’t just sit there, jerking off online or whatever one might do. Be there … pay attention to it like we do. It became very clear straight away: That was not going to be an issue for him. Not only was he going to pay attention, he wanted to be a part of the show. He took technical-director-as-part-of-the-show to a whole different level.”
Buy-in was never a question. Considering this to be the top of the mountain, Gruber dropped out of SMU to focus on the role. But revolutionary as Grubes might have been in the position, it simply wasn’t a position that was going to allow him to stick around long-term. Radio stations prioritize big-name hosts when it comes time to make budgetary decisions. Technical operators tend to be entry-level roles, no matter how good they are. After four years of unsuccessfully asking for a raise, Gruber — now 26 — decided to quit his job finish his degree at UNT.
“By then, I’d seen that happen with some of his predecessors,” Rhyner says. “Most of those guys who were there in that job, when it came time for them to leave, they didn’t want to, but they’d hit the ceiling … I knew there was gonna come a day when the string was gonna run out on him, too. It’s almost like that job is planned obsolescence, but that didn’t make it any easier for me to accept … He was special. He did the job like nobody else.”
“He has fallen up”
This time, with about 70 hours of credits already under his belt, Gruber decided to try his hand at a business degree. But it only took a semester and a half (and “probably an economics class or something”) to figure out he wasn’t thriving. He switched his major back to RTVF (Radio, TV, Film), which left him in an odd situation: He was taking classes to learn how to do a job in which he already had nearly ten years of experience. He already had the expertise… and more importantly, the job opportunities.
“I kind of had an offer from the full-time audio guy at Fox Sports Southwest, Ron Pell,” says Gruber. “We’d been communicating while I was at The Ticket my last couple years there, sending audio to each other back and forth … He would almost always end our communications with, ‘Hey, if you ever want to make some real money, come on over to Fox, and I’ll train you…'”
Advertisement
At the time, Gruber had wanted to stay at The Ticket. A semester and a half of soul-searching later, he needed the job. But while he pursued audio work at Fox Sports Southwest, some of his other connection-seeds were beginning to take root, as well. DJ Wiz, who was the Dallas Mavericks’ and Stars’ DJ, was planning on taking a step back, and the Stars needed an in-game DJ who knew how to think quickly — to read the room and play the right thing at the right time. The Ticket is the Stars’ flagship station, and unbeknownst to Gruber, Stars VP of production and entertainment Jason Walsh had been considering him for a job. But that wasn’t the last relationship that would help.
“I interviewed with Jason Danby, who until last February was the director of game presentation,” Gruber recalls. “And he didn’t really know who I was, (but) we had a mutual friend: His brother played in a band that opened for my Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band all the time back from 2007 through 2009. So when we realized that connection, that kind of helped break the ice a little bit. … No pun intended.”
(Oh, right, did we forget to mention that? Gruber also plays in a Red Hot Chili Peppers band, cleverly titled “Pepper Theft,” a play on the name of another Ticket-centric cover band, Mike Rhyner’s Tom Petty cover band “Petty Theft.”)
“When I got both those positions, I realized I’ll be making enough to live,” Gruber says. “College would kind of be superfluous. Getting an RTVF degree when I already had 10 years’ experience in the field and was about to get even more?”
Grubes approached the Stars gig the same way he had approached his roles at The Ticket: Take it extremely seriously while preparing so you can make the not-so-serious sound effortless. He put his thumbprint squarely on the whole production — out with the predictable playlists you could hear in any arena around the league; in with a fresh and ever-evolving playlist, including a healthy dose of recognizable tunes from video games or film scores to add drama to a tense moment. His switch to Pantera’s “Puck Off” (in which the local metal legends chant “Dal-las! Stars!) has become a signature for the Stars experience at the AAC. Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Grubes production without more drops plus a bit of mischief. The time he played only Nickelback songs for an entire period got some press.
Did you hear about the time Sports Illustrated did a profile on the Stars DJ? Yeah, same guy.
But there were more sports to cover.
Photo courtesy of Thaddeus MatulaAn 80-grade centaur
Baseball has always been Gruber’s first love, so it only made sense that Gruber would gravitate toward the sport eventually. In 2014, three years after stepping down as managing partner and chief executive officer of the Texas Rangers, Chuck Greenberg had just become the new owner of the AA Frisco RoughRiders and was looking to make the most of it. And so, at the Dirk Nowitzki Heroes Celebrity Baseball Game, Gruber and Greenberg struck up a conversation. Gruber knew who Greenberg was, due to his baseball fandom. What he didn’t know was that Greenberg had been a fan of his for a while and wanted to bring Gruber into the RoughRiders fold in a role to be determined.
Advertisement
“I got such a kick out of his whole persona and how he handled it,” Greenberg says. “He was so humble and bemused by his own notoriety … I thought he was a great guy with a really enjoyable, offbeat sense of humor. (He) clearly didn’t take himself seriously at all; neither do I, neither do the RoughRiders, and I thought, ‘Well, we could have a lot of fun just making it up as we go along.'”
Grubes, meanwhile, thought Greenberg was joking. When Greenberg told him he wanted to meet up in the upcoming offseason, Gruber was polite — but skeptical.
“I thought I was getting pranked by Ben & Skin,” says Gruber. “I knew that they were buddies with Chuck, and I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ Because it was just so out of the blue for me.”
By the next season, Grubes was the official “Ambassador of Fun” for the RoughRiders.
“I’d just go out there and they — and I — didn’t really know what to do with me, because I’m not a great on-camera performer,” Gruber says now. “So a lot of times I would just be going wherever the end game host was, and just kind of waving to the camera.”
Well, that’s not all he did. By the time Grubes finished the gig last year, there were also the bobbleheads, some of them even life-sized, others of them, uh… a centaur.
“We just had fun with all of it,” says Greenberg. “Every once in a while, maybe we swung and missed, but we always took the mighty cut. I mean, how could you ever have any regrets when we actually gave away a Grubes centaur? You know, there are some things that were just meant to be, and Grubes, the centaur, was one of them.”
One of the other duties: DJing for baseball games.
But in keeping with the theme, Frisco wasn’t the top of the mountain for Gruber. Like most of the performers in AA, he was being evaluated by the big-league club. Rangers VP of game presentation, production and promotions Chuck Morgan was considering splitting up his announcing and in-game entertainment duties, and he had his eye on Grubes.
Advertisement
“I made a decision toward the end of last year,” Morgan says. “Knowing the type of equipment we were going to have in the new ballpark, I got to thinking about the way we had done things for a long, long time. I was running the soundboard, I was playing the music, doing the PA … I thought it really wasn’t fair to the fans for me to continue to wear all of those hats.”
Gruber started working games during the 2019 season and was set to begin his full-time role when the Rangers played two pre-season games with the Cardinals in March before the regular season. Of course, those games never happened. Life was shut down for a while.
Baseball in the time of Coronavirus
As soon as sports were shut down, Morgan caught wind of the possibility of games being played with no fans. So he asked Gruber to pore over a bunch of old Rangers broadcasts on Fox Sports Southwest broadcasts and pull enough audio to be prepared for anything that might happen in, well, one of the most unpredictable sports on the planet.
“He’s got over 100 files of things that he can play at different times,” Morgan said in a media availability in late July. “Michael was also able to find the old hot dog vendor who used to say ‘HOTTTTT DOGGG,” and he’s dropped that in a couple of times during games. He’s also isolated Zonk playing the drum. So in addition to the regular noise you might hear during a ballgame, we do have some things that are exclusive to a Ranger game.”
Eventually, MLB sent an iPad to each big-league team for their in-stadium crowd noise. But Morgan says that the files Gruber pulled from old broadcasts were better, more unique and fit the feel of a Rangers game better than the generic sounds (though the MLB iPad will still get regular use).
The MLB-issued iPad. Photo courtesy of Michael GruberI know what everyone is wondering: Maybe not in the first homestand against the Rockies and Diamondbacks, but what about when the Astros come to town? Is Grubes, singlehandedly taking on the role of 40,000 Rangers fans at once, allowed to boo?
“Honestly, before all the pandemic stuff even happened, Chuck and I talked about, ‘What happens when the Astros come to town?'” Gruber says. “I was having fun the couple days before with fans requesting stuff; like, oh, maybe I’ll play ‘Bangin’ on a Trash Can’ from the cartoon Doug, (but) I kind of had a feeling that wasn’t going to be encouraged. When I talked to Chuck, we both agreed — obviously, we wouldn’t have any control over the real crowd if they boo, but we’re not going to encourage it.”
Advertisement
In short, Morgan wasn’t comfortable with an employee of an MLB team booing the other opponents. Still, Gruber is finding ways — just as he did at The Ticket and the RoughRiders, and as he will continue to do with the Stars once they make their return to the AAC — to infuse the whole production with a bit of his own personality. Sure, there’s pressure to get it right. But not only does Grubes have the experience of hitting a button to speak for someone else — just ask Bob Sturm — but his relationship with Rangers fans is similar to the relationship he quickly built during his time at The Ticket: He’s one of them.
“If I’m hitting a cheer, I’d be making that same cheer in that situation if I was in the crowd,” he shrugs. “So those are pretty accurate to how I’d be reacting if I were sitting in the stands; it’s not super daunting. Obviously I’m representing 40,000 fans but right now, my (live) audience is some ding-dong beat writers and the players on the field.”
The players, by the way, have noticed.
“Nothing’s going to feel normal. There’s cardboard cutouts in the stands, and no one is coming through the gates,” Lance Lynn begins.”But it’s better than silence. When I’m pitching, I don’t hear anything, but when you’re sitting in whatever assigned seating you have when you’re not playing, it’s like, ‘Okay, when’s he going to hit the button again?’ You gotta really understand the feel of the game to hit the crowd noise, so I’m anxious to see some of these guys push buttons on the road to see how in-tune to the game they are.”
“The crowd noise that they’ve been playing, it kind of tricks your mind a little bit when you’re on the field,” says Joey Gallo. “Because they’re playing it in the right situation when there’s a big moment. Even when I was hitting when it was 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, I felt pressure from the crowd with that noise.”
Informed that “they” were just one guy, Gallo seemed genuinely surprised.
“Is it only one guy doing the buttons?” the All-Star outfield asked, rhetorically. “That’s pretty impressive he’s doing that.”
Advertisement
Looking back over the nearly two decades, that’s a sentiment that could be applied pretty much anywhere along the path.
Photo courtesy of Eddie FlachTop photo courtesy of Eddie Flach
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kHJscWhkbnxzfJFpZmlwX2WBcMDHnmSlnZeau6V5zp9koKqll7K0eceormalmZi1orHLZp6rrZKav26uxJyYpp1dqbWmecWoqaudo6l6qMHMqWSonl2Zs7h50qmmq6yjZA%3D%3D