For Zach Goodman, the apple didn’t fall far from the broadcast booth.
When Zach was about eight years old, he’d dress up in a shirt and tie and sit in front of the TV with a scorebook, watching his dad, Drew Goodman, call Rockies games. Zach would listen intently to the telecast and even mute the audio for a few innings at a time as he did his own play-by-play.
“Like a lot of kids, I wanted to be a professional baseball player until just a couple years ago,” Zach Goodman said. “But I was realistic, and I always had this other plan. I’ve always loved calling games, even if back then I was just a little kid watching the TV from the floor of my parents’ bedroom, just talking to myself.”
Zach began his professional broadcasting career last month with the Amarillo Sod Poodles, Arizona’s Double-A affiliate. With that, the 24-year-old is now going down the same career path as his dad, who’s in his 23rd year calling Rockies games as the organization’s longest-tenured play-by-play voice.
The younger Goodman landed the job in Amarillo after a standout playing career as a catcher at Arapahoe and then Division III Webster University, where he was a four-year starter and finished as a team captain this spring. Zach broadcast games in high school and college, mostly football, basketball and volleyball at the latter, to set the stage for his minor-league debut.
“He’s getting his reps right now, and each day he’s growing and getting better,” Drew Goodman said. “I just want him to enjoy the process, which he is, and I have a great deal of pride in what he’s doing. It’s really cool he’s decided he wants to pursue what his dad’s done.”
The father in the booth
To understand Zach’s passion for crafting a call, one must understand his father’s journey to becoming a fixture at 20th and Blake — and in his three sons’ lives as well.
Drew, 61, attended Ithaca College, where he briefly played baseball before graduating and moving to Colorado in 1986. His first job was as a sports anchor at Aspen’s KSPN-TV. He relocated to Denver a couple of years later, with his first big gig coming as an announcer for ACC football games in 1992 alongside analyst Jack Corrigan, the longtime Rockies radio voice.
By 1993, he was doing NFL games on NBC, and then he started a 10-year run as the Nuggets’ TV play-by-play man in ’94. The 13-time NSMA Colorado Broadcaster of the Year called both Nuggets and Rockies games for three seasons from 2002-04, before moving solely to baseball in 2005.
But those accolades and his diverse resume are of secondary importance to Goodman’s primary vocation: fatherhood.
“When they get ready to throw dirt on me, I am not going to be lamenting the game I missed at Dodger Stadium or Wrigley Field or Coors Field, for that matter,” Drew Goodman said. “My legacy is my boys. I’ve always felt that way. People always ask, ‘How many games have you done?’ I honestly have no idea.
“I’m privileged to do what I do, I love doing what I do, and I want to do it for a long time after already doing it for a long time. But at the end of the day, my whole life is about my three boys.”
Zach is Drew’s middle son. Jacob is 26 and Gabe is 21. Baseball is their common thread.
While Zach’s getting his career started on the mic, Jacob works for WIN Reality, a virtual hitting company founded by ex-Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd. And Gabe, still a student at Colorado Christian University, is a JV coach at Lutheran High School and manages a USA Prime club team.
Along the upbringing of all three, Drew’s presence was a constant, even with his demanding travel duties with the Rockies. Drew coached all of them, including serving as an assistant for the younger two at Arapahoe, where he still helps out. He incorporated them into Rockies road trips. There’s “a park or a spot of grass that I can point to in every city, just about, and go, ‘Yup, we had a catch there. Or we took groundballs over there.’”
And Drew’s made it a point to prioritize his sons over his job whenever possible, sometimes missing Rockies games to see them play, something he did 11 times earlier this season in order to watch Zach’s final hurrah at Webster.
“I remember I had a tournament one time and he flew home in the morning, watched my games, then flew back in the afternoon and called the game that night,” Jacob Goodman said. “I think we all learned a lot about dedication and priorities and work ethic from him.”
The three Goodman sons were practically raised in the batting cage in the family’s barn in Greenwood Village. It was there that Drew ensured his sons were left-handed hitters, converting each of the natural righties at about 18 months old with their baseball futures in mind.
“We’d walk out to the barn in snowboots in the wintertime and have to beat the ice off the barn door with a bat to get it open,” Zach recalled. “Those are memories I’ll never forget, all the batting practice sessions in there, and how the game brought us so close together over the years.”
In a way, Drew’s zest for fatherhood can be traced to his upbringing and his relationship with his own father, the late Arthur Goodman. That relationship, also underscored by a mutual love of sports, grew close after Drew’s mom, Marian, was killed in a car crash during Drew’s freshman year of high school.
Drew was in the passenger seat during the head-on collision, his life saved by a seatbelt. Marian, who was driving, was killed instantly. With Drew’s older sister in college at the time, the rest of his high school days were just him and his dad. While Arthur was a regular at Drew’s football and baseball games, Drew witnessed the toll that Marian’s death took on Arthur.
So Drew became an emotional support for his father just as much as his father, an actor-turned-lawyer who Drew says gave him the “performance gene,” was for him.
“Obviously I was traumatized by my mom’s death, but I didn’t want to show a lot of emotion to my dad, and not in a tough-guy way,” Goodman said. “It was because I would see every night at dinner him being visibly upset, so I didn’t want to compound it with him having to see his son upset, too, even though I was. There’s not a day that’s gone by in my life that I don’t think about my mom.”
Gabe Goodman believes that life-changing event at 14 shaped Drew’s parenting style decades later.
“Losing his mom young definitely created him into a very caring father,” Gabe said. “He loves us more than anything, and because he learned how precious moments are, he wanted to take advantage of every moment he could. And he’s done that continuously over the years.”
A mentor on the mic
As Zach built his broadcasting reel throughout his time at Webster, Drew was there at every turn.
Just like their postgame chats about Zach’s baseball games became standard, so too did Drew’s long-distance advice on how his son was doing on the mic. Drew listened to almost every game, considering most of Zach’s broadcasts came in the MLB offseason, and they had a standing call at hoops halftimes to discuss the son’s performance.
“He doesn’t want to hurt my feelings so he’s always like, ‘Hey don’t take this the wrong way, but …,’” Zach said. “I’ve told him over and over, ‘Dad, I’m not going to take it the wrong way. Please tell me what I can get better at.’ And he does.”
Drew stresses that “ultimately I want him to be himself in this craft,” and Zach wants the same. But the latter admits that all those years of listening to his dad on Rockies broadcasts have a tendency to creep into his own calls, especially in his first month on the job in Amarillo.
“We have a similar style,” Zach said. “I’ve listened to a couple of my highlights, not that I have many yet, but I’ll catch myself saying, ‘Swung on and missed.’ Then I’ll watch the Rockies game and I’ll hear my dad say the exact same thing, in the exact same inflection. And I’ll be like, ‘Oh.’ There’s some stuff that I use that definitely sneaks in there subconsciously.”
While Zach learns via trial by fire in Amarillo, he’s paired up with another voice who comes from a family with a much deeper broadcasting legacy than his own. Stefan Caray is the Sod Poodles’ other announcer, and the two split play-by-play and color duties.
Stefan is the great-grandson of Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Caray, the grandson of longtime Braves voice Skip Caray, and the son of Cardinals play-by-play man Chip Caray. Stefan’s identical twin brother, Chris Caray, is in his first year as the Athletics’ announcer, while their uncle Josh Caray does play-by-play for the Angels’ Double-A affiliate.
With those family ties in mind, Stefan says he and Zach are leaning on each other as each attempts to develop his own voice and identity in the game.
“The word ‘nepotism’ is thrown around a lot in regards to me and Chris and Zach, and it was tough initially for me,” Stefan said. “Zach and I have been able to have real conversations about how to go about this, how to best make your own way.
“I’m sure there’s going to be a little bit of pushback (as he moves up the ranks) and I want to be there for him on how to best handle that. He’s very proud of what his dad has accomplished in Colorado, but he does not hang on the last name at all. He wants to make his own name, much like myself and my brother.”
If there is one aspect of his dad’s career that Zach is attempting to replicate, it’s Drew’s versatility. While Zach hopes to be in the Sod Poodles’ booth again in 2025 to continue to hone his craft calling baseball, in the time between this year and next, he wants to open doors for broadcasting other sports, too.
“I would love to be calling college football games on ESPN, or in the NFL, or doing college basketball, the NBA, the NHL or NCAA hockey,” Zach said. “I feel like I’m set up well to do a lot of different sports going forward.”
His ultimate goal, however, is make it to the bigs as a team’s play-by-play announcer. Stefan believes his counterpart’s vision is more than attainable.
“He wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think he had the potential to be a big-league announcer,” Stefan said. “Once he gets more experience, he’s not going to be long for the majors.”
