ROUND ROCK, Texas — There's one man whose voice is synonymous with the Round Rock Express.
Mike Capps is the director of broadcasting for the program. His is the voice you hear when you listen to the games on the radio.
But while it may sound like a dream job, it's not an easy one.
"I wake up, if we played a night game. I wake up [at] about 6:30, 7, and I go through last night's game on my score sheets and I take notes. I get on the internet for about an hour, hour and a half, and see what everybody else in our league did. I do about five hours of this kind of work. Then I do about two hours of work out, and out to the park we go," Capps said.
"You already work seven hours before you get to work?" KVUE's Rob Evans asked.
"Yeah. Oh, yeah. But, look: it's not work," Capps said.
Work is how he described his job as a television reporter for CNN, more than two decades ago. That was work that nearly cost him his life in Iraq during Desert Storm, when his convoy was ambushed by two truckloads of Iraqi Republican guards.
"They have their AKs bayoneted, and they surround us. And I'm looking up to heaven and I'm saying, 'Couldn't you just pick me off in a firefight? Why do we have to do this to the throat on the last day?'" Capps recalled. "God as my witness, two big A-10 warthogs, the anti-tank airplanes, come over the mountain where we were and buzz these guys. And they left and we left. Got to Ankara and flew home from there."
He came home, quit his job and followed his instinct.
"I keep hearing this voice, 'You can do this, you can do this,'" Capps said.
At the age of 45, he reinvented himself as a baseball announcer.
"I fell in love and it just, it went from Tyler to Triple-A Nashville the next year. The year after that, I'm doing a major league fill-in for ESPN Radio," Capps said.
In those 22 years, he's seen some of the best come through Central Texas.
"We've had Andy Pettitte, we've had Roger Clements," Capps said.
His favorite memory was in 2000 when he got to call a Texas League championship.
"It was just one of those things that your Walter Mitty dream turned into a Steven Spielberg moment, you know what I mean?" Capps said.
His dream continues, and the long hours aren't taking a toll.
"[I'm] 71, going on 35," Capps said.
There's a lot more baseball to call and a lot more road ahead. And Capps isn't slowing down anytime soon.
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