British Announcer Darren Fletcher On The Call: 'All Extremely Humbling'

Checking in with the broadcaster who went viral for a great London Series call.

Matthew Childs/Reuters via USA TODAY

Darren Fletcher was an unlikely candidate to provide one of the baseball calls of the year given that his main gig is covering soccer and boxing for TNT Sports in the United Kingdom. But his annual appearance behind the microphone for the London Series put him in position to author a gem last Sunday as the New York Mets turned a game-ending 2-3 double play to thwart a Philadelphia Phillies rally. The call, which has been everywhere on social media, goes extremely hard and is wrapped in joy.

🎙 Darren Fletcher (British TV pbp) #Mets #Phillies #MLB pic.twitter.com/ZsSDAKoS7Z

— Announcer Schedules (@announcerskeds) June 9, 2024

Sports Illustrated caught up with the man behind the viral call to talk about what have been a whirlwind few days, set off by a swing and a dribbler by Nick Castellanos.

SI: What have these past few days been like and why do you think that call has resonated so much with American audiences?

Fletcher: It's been very humbling actually because I wouldn't expect people to react to the call in the way that they have. It's taken me by surprise and it feels really special that people feel that way about it. Obviously we want to make the calls as good as we can make them but in a situation like that you can't really prepare for it, it just happens. There's an element of luck that what you want to say, you actually say it. It could quite easily have gone wrong. I've been totally blown away by it. There was an article written about it in the New York Post. Mike Piazza reached out to me today to send a nice message. Rich Eisen commented on it. I mean, these are people that I watch on television from the U.K. and now they're commenting on something I said around a baseball game, which just seems mad really. It's crazy.

SI: My theory on it is that it's not just the accent but that you bring a different sensibility to the game than we get over here for 162 games a year. So when you hear someone rising to that level of emotion it hits you in a different way. Like, it's a reminder that you can always discover new things about a sport you love, especially when you're seeing it through fresher eyes or someone with a new perspective.

Fletcher: Well, the mad thing is that I only comment on baseball twice a year. When the game comes to London I do the two games for TNT Sports and that's it. For me, because I love the sport, I really enjoy doing it. I cover football and boxing over here and I've done quite a few Super Bowls. Every thing that I do, I really like and enjoy and try to get right into it. That's probably where the emotion of the call came from because, to me, it was such a special moment. A really good baseball game in London with a really good crowd and I know it means a lot to Major League Baseball to try to grow the game overseas. As a play-by-play person you can't help but get sucked into that and it's such a special feeling to be part of it in some small way. It does really matter to me whenever I do a call any game. It really matters and I'm glad that that came across on Sunday.

SI: The unique setting and having over 50,000 fans in the seats probably helped. Your call felt appropriately big given the added importance these standalone games take on and how they feel different than, say, an early June game at the end of homestand.

Fletcher: I'd love to do a game in the U.S. Doing it over here is a different challenge. I'd quite like to do that. They may not like it if they hear all of it. They may like the clip but they may not like all of it. They might, though. I suppose as a curiosity I'd like to know. Whether over the course of a game people say you know, he's not very good but he made a really good call or if people say he's actually okay without the mad call at the end.

SI: How have your colleagues who don't follow baseball at all received this viral moment? Have they been giving you the business?

Fletcher: [Laughs] There's been a lot messages and a lot of people over here have been really nice about because I think they know what it means to me. But I think all of us are a little bit in disbelief. Nobody expected it, especially me. It's all a little bit strange and I'm struggling to comprehend it. I've worked on the Champions League and the Premier League, I've just landed in Germany to work on the European Championships for Fox so we'll actually be broadcasting in the U.S. for the next three weeks. So I get the opportunity to do big moments — I commentated when Fury fought Usyk — but for something like this to resonate like this like it has, it's almost like a dream come true. You just want that moment where whatever you do people go I really enjoyed that because that's what we do it for. You want people to like what you do and to feel like you've made that moment better in some shape or form. But it's so rare to get the kind of response that came about from Sunday.

My wife and all my friends in England joke that in a previous life I must have lived in the U.S. because I'm obsessed with U.S. sport, when we holiday we go to the U.S., so for me to get the praise in the U.S. for doing it means more than probably England in a mad way. It's almost like frontier that you're never going to conquer. But for this really small window, as Andy Warhol said, my 10 minutes of fame has come about from a baseball call in London.

SI: What's the beginning of this story? Calling two games a year is such a unique gig. Can you tell us how you even found yourself in this situation?

Fletcher: We're the rightsholders in the U.K., we show a lot of live games from Spring Training through the World Series. But we use the U.S. coverage, the U.S. feed goes out through the television. So when the London Games came about back in 2019 with the Yankees and the Red Sox my bosses at work basically said you're a big fan of American sport, would you like to commentate the baseball? I said I've never done it before but, of course, I'll give it a go. It came about through my love of the sport and someone in the office thought I'd probably enjoy doing it, which I did immensely. To be honest, one thing that's surprised me a little bit over here is that as an English guy doing an American sport I would probably get more kickback than I would in the U.S. where people might be fascinated by the accent. But here we would find an American voice more palatable than an English voice doing the game so the fact that we get pretty good feedback based on the show that the team does is a testament to the team broadcasting the event. It's been a really strange 48 hours. I keep using the word but yeah, it's all extremely humbling.

The only drawback now is that I won't get to commentate on baseball now for two years because the London Series is taking a year off then it comes back. So I probaby won't call another baseball game until 2026, which I'm devastated about because I enjoy it so much.

SI: Well, you never know.