Carpenter Secure Again... For Now

After nearly a quarter century in the broadcasting business, Washington Nationals television play-by-play man Bob Carpenter doesn't get particularly nervous when he's on the air. Still, last Friday night, he was just a bit on edge up in the booth even as the Nats were ending a nine-game losing streak with a 5-2 victory over the Cincinnati Reds.

It was Aug. 1, the day he would learn whether the option year on his one-year contract with MASN would be renewed for the 2009 season.

While Carpenter technically is an employee of MASN, the decision ultimately would be made by the same baseball team that had treated him so shabbily a year ago. He was told late last season he'd be wise to start looking for other work because the club had its eye on several other broadcasters for a job he's held since the Nats came to town two years earlier.

Fortunately for Carpenter and the many fans who were outraged when they learned about a possible switch for the 2008 season, his potential replacements were not in the least bit interested. The club finally came to its senses and offered him a new one-year deal with an option for a second, and Carpenter decided to stay, even if the far better move would have been for the team to offer him a much longer deal.

In any case, shortly after last Friday night's victory over the Reds had been secured, Carpenter got the call from station executive Chris Glass that his option to continue as the first and only television play-by-play voice of the Nationals had been renewed for next season.

"Friday night was a very good night," Carpenter said in telephone interview Monday before leaving for the ballpark in Denver to call the team's fourth straight win, a 9-4 decision over the Colorado Rockies. "We broke a long losing streak, and I got some security."

Carpenter has been in the business long enough to know there are hardly any guarantees in his chosen profession. He said the longest contract he's ever had was four years at ESPN from 1997 to 2001, when he handled a variety of assignments for the worldwide leader.

But the relatively lengthy deal only came about because CBS made a run at him, at least giving him some bargaining power he's never really had in Washington, until many Nationals fans let MASN and the team know how unhappy they were last year when he nearly lost his job.

Why did it come down to that in the first place?

Carpenter prefers not to talk about it, but clearly there were so-called "chemistry issues" with Hall of Famer Don Sutton, the former pitcher who joined him as a color analyst in the booth in 2007. Sources back then and now have said Sutton was not entirely comfortable working with Carpenter last year and essentially told team management he thought Carpenter talked too much during the broadcasts.

You could have knocked Carpenter over with a dust-off pitch when he first heard about it from Nats management last year. But once he signed the new deal last fall, the two men spoke at length in several offseason telephone conversations about how to resolve their issues, and after making what he described as a "few adjustments, " Carpenter said there have been no problems this season.

"It's all water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned," he said. "This year we've had smooth sailing. The fact that they picked up the option for next season would indicate they were satisfied with what we've been doing.