Call him a workaholic.
With just 12 days off during a 152-day stretch, Andover's Alex Vispoli decided to drive four hours to Syracuse, N.Y., for another day of work.
That's all in the life of an up-and-coming baseball play-by-play announcer.
"At game No. 109, I've still got that same fervor and enthusiasm that I did for game No. 1, which is encouraging for me because it tells me I'm in the right line of work," he said.
The 24-year-old broadcaster is not only the lone radio voice of the Winston-Salem Dash, a Single A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox in North Carolina, but he also works as the Dash's media relations director.
"At this level of the game you have to do both because the organization isn't big enough where it can hire someone to be a full-time broadcaster and (another to be) full-time media relations," he said.
Vispoli's pregame tasks include preparing daily game notes for the media, finding story lines to present to the media, and setting up player interviews.
He then calls every inning of every game, anchors a postgame show, writes a game recap, sends out the recap to all the media outlets, and posts the recap online before finally heading home around midnight.
"Sometimes on the road that write-up gets a little bit crunched," he said. "I have to make sure I finish it, send it out, and post it online before the bus (to the hotel) leaves without me. That adds another level of stress."
This is Vispoli's first job as a team's No. 1 announcer. He was the No. 2 announcer for the three other professional baseball teams that he worked for before accepting his job at Winston-Salem in February.
He said he will have his own No. 2 guy next year, but for now he is alone in the booth — and that can be difficult.
"It's sometimes a challenge to find enough to talk about," he said. "Some of these guys, you don't really know much about them."
Vispoli's love of sports started early.
"When he was in elementary school he would play his imaginary Wiffle ball games in the backyard and do the lineups in his head while he was playing," his mother, Ann Vispoli, said.
Vispoli also hardly ever just sat down to watch an NBA game as a kid. Instead, he often was hard at work keeping statistics on every player.
"He'd put together these books for the different NBA teams," his dad, Selectman Alex J. Vispoli, said. "And he'd put his own stat sheets together and he'd follow the season."
Vispoli played soccer, baseball and basketball while growing up.
"I wasn't really good at playing sports," he said. "I realized that by the time I was in middle school."
Vispoli failed to have any hits during the baseball season he moved from Little League to the big diamond, so he turned his attention to another area of sports. Once he arrived at Phillips Academy, he first began writing for the student newspaper, then had a sports talk show on its radio station.
"I wanted to listen to him but we were too far out of (the radio station's) range," his dad said. "So I used to take my car and park in one of the school lots (to listen)."
Vispoli's father and mother are still listening to their son — a lot. Vispoli's broadcasts can be heard online.
"Just about any night that we're home we'll put the Internet on so we can hear him," Ann Vispoli said. "One night I was sitting with my daughter and it was about 10:30 and I said, 'We should have Alexander on,' I thought, 'Oh, today he had a doubleheader so it might still be on.' The first game was over but the second game went 20 innings and went on past midnight. I think it went on until about 12:30. My daughter and I, we were both tired, but we felt guilty to go before the game ended. That was a long day."
