On Feb. 27, 1979, Jim Ellis made his first radio broadcast of a Mississippi State baseball game, a play-by-play account of the Bulldogs’ season-opening 5-0 win over Mississippi College. A crowd of 928 spectators turned out for opening day at Dudy Noble Field, and Ellis delivered his description of the game from a makeshift open-air booth behind home plate.
Ellis’ last broadcast from Dudy Noble Field came on May 18, 2024. The game drew a crowd of 11,551 and Ellis provided his account of the game from the Jim Ellis Broadcast Booth in the state-of-the-art Jim Ellis Broadcast Suite, located in a stadium often referred to as the Carnegie Hall of College Baseball after a $68 million renovation in 2019.
A humble man with a humble start to his career, Ellis announced his retirement Wednesday after 46 years at the mic – broadcasting 55% of MSU games ever played – as the “Voice of the Diamond Dogs.”
Ellis, 77, said his decision to retire was based on a couple of factors.
“First, I’m not a young man anymore and, to be honest with you, I think I have done about everything I could have possibly wanted to do as a broadcaster,” he said. “The other thing is how much has changed in the last few years. What I enjoyed most was the relationships with players and coaches and the people in the industry. Things just aren’t the same anymore with all the stuff going on in college athletics. It’s broken down the things that made the job so enjoyable to do, with all the player movement and how it affects the coach’s ability to coach.”
A transformational era
Ellis’ time at the mic bore witness to the transformation of college baseball.
When he started his broadcasting career, baseball was little more than an afterthought. Assistant football coaches often ran baseball programs, playing before crowds of dozens in stadiums not much better than those at high schools.
Ellis said his working environment then could best be described as primitive, even dangerous at times.
“At Dudy Noble, I was set up at ground level, behind a chicken-wire fence behind home plate,” Ellis said. “There is a photo of me doing a broadcast when it was raining with somebody standing over me with an umbrella. It was awful everywhere. At Auburn, they put me on the top row of the metal bleachers. A thunderstorm came through there one time when I was doing a game, and I just had to shut down the broadcast and go to the dugout.”
The year before Ellis began his career, David Kellum, an 18-year-old freshman at Ole Miss, began providing the radio play-by-play of Rebels baseball mainly because no one else wanted to do it. Kellum has similar recollections of those early days and how MSU baseball proved to be a catalyst of the game’s growth.
“When Jim and I started, we were doing a lot of games from card tables set up behind home plate,” said Kellum, who will begin his 47th season as the Ole Miss baseball broadcaster in February. “Then (Ron) Polk arrived at State. They made a commitment to baseball that proved to be the spark for everybody else, too. The feeling was, ‘We’ve got to keep up with the Bulldogs.’ The talent got better. The facilities got better. The games began to draw big crowds and get incredible attention.”
Today, college baseball draws millions of fans each season to modern, well-equipped ballparks where every game is broadcast on radio and television.
Jim and Jack
In addition to baseball, Ellis also announced MSU football and basketball beside legendary broadcaster Jack Cristil. He served as Cristil’s sidekick on those football broadcasts for 22 years and basketball for 28 years, taking over for his mentor when Cristil retired in 2011. Ellis provided play-by-play for all three sports until 2017, when he left the football and basketball broadcast to focus on baseball.
“The big thing I learned from Jack, and something I still think is important, was that it’s all about the game,” Ellis said. “He was a no-frills announcer. He told me from the start to be true to the game, tell them the score, where the ball is, the time on the clock. He said you didn’t need all the theatrics. I think Jack would be appalled by how that has changed. He would hate the hype.”
Ellis said Cristil’s influence helped shape his approach to broadcasting the game.
“I never tried to copy Jack,” he said. “But we did share a philosophy. I try to describe the game as clearly as possible and not get too hyped up about things that happen that really aren’t all that unusual in the game.”
Icing on the cake
In Ellis’ first year announcing, the Bulldogs made it to the College World Series for the second time in the program’s history. Since then, MSU has made 10 more trips to the CWS, culminating with an elusive national championship in 2021, the university’s first and only team national title in any sport.
In the game that secured the title, the Bulldogs had piled up a big lead en route to a 9-0 win over Vanderbilt. With no suspense about the outcome, Ellis had plenty of time to reflect on the journey, not only of the 2021 team, but of the long history of MSU baseball he had witnessed leading up to the moment.
“I didn’t really think about what I was going to say when the last out was made,” Ellis said.
Back in Mississippi, Kellum was watching the game.
“I told my wife, ‘State is fixing to win this thing and I want to listen to Jim,’” Kellum said. “So I turned on the radio and listened to his call. He did a great job.”
When the final out was recorded, Ellis told his audience: “We win, and by ‘we’ I mean all of the people in maroon and white everywhere.”
Ellis said the call provided context for a win not only for that team, but for all the teams and fans that came before.
“I thought about a fan base that had been so loyal for so many years and all the times they thought we might win it and didn’t,” he said. “It was a great way to cap it all off.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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