Tigers broadcaster Craig Monroe brings the style and the substance

June 25, 2024

NEW YORK — “Whaddup, whaddup, whaddup,” Craig Monroe says one recent afternoon, bounding down the visiting dugout steps, giving fist bumps and greeting everyone in sight. Ray-Bans over his eyes. Bling from the 2006 Detroit Tigers on his hand. He’s a bundle of enthusiasm looking for somewhere to channel all the energy. He’s a chatterbox, darting from one conversation to the next, everywhere at once.

Monroe is an extrovert, which can create unfair perceptions. Maybe he’s too aloof, maybe more flash than substance. But watch Craig Monroe for long enough, and suddenly you will see him slow down. He’ll be talking with someone, and he’ll begin nodding and listening, locked in with total focus.

With his loud clothes and fast-talking, free-flowing style, Monroe has questioned whether he fits the mold for what a baseball analyst is supposed to be.

But there’s a whole story behind how Craig Monroe became who he is. He played nine seasons in the big leagues and hit 28 home runs for the 2006 Tigers. He is always watching, always learning, constantly absorbing information. After a few years of figuring it all out, Monroe has once again become very good at his job.

And the more he does it — working a variety of roles for both Bally Sports and the Detroit Tigers’ radio broadcast on 97.1 The Ticket — the more Monroe is bucking incorrect notions.

It’s Opening Day Baby!!! #tigers #detroit pic.twitter.com/20ItG29EDI

— Craig Monroe (@CMo_27) April 8, 2022

Listen to Monroe on a broadcast these days. He takes viewers and listeners inside the batter’s box in a way few can. Plenty of people can talk hitting. Few can translate the language like Monroe. Sunday in New York, he was detailing Miguel Cabrera’s eighth-inning at-bat, talking about how Miggy was spread out in a two-strike approach, how he was looking to slap the ball up the middle.

Moments later, Cabrera hit a single up the middle to tie the game.

“That’s one of the things I do well,” Monroe said. “I can dive in. I slow it down. I watch my own videos. I watch them hit. I watch them when they’re having success and what they’re doing, and then all of a sudden I can develop this program in my head of what it’s supposed to look like, and then I can break down the intricate parts of the swing.”

This weekend in New York, Monroe was sitting in the dugout, talking quickly, in a stream of consciousness. And then he slowed down for just a moment.

“I do think there’s an art to it,” he said. “I think it’s because I’m a sponge.”

To get to the heart of it all, you have to start with Marilyn Monroe.

That is Craig Monroe’s mother’s name. As a teenager, Marilyn was a terrific basketball player and a track star. She had an opportunity to play college sports on scholarship. Then she learned she was pregnant with a baby boy and everything changed. This is the genesis of why Monroe has always adored his mother. Times could be hard growing up in Texarkana, Texas, probably harder than Marilyn ever let on. She, too, got through those days with an upbeat personality.

“We’re a lot alike,” he said. “We wear our hearts on our sleeve.”

Marilyn also played softball, where she was a catcher with a hose for an arm. The way Monroe tells it, she was also an all-world shortstop, a rangy outfielder who crashed through fences, the Willie Mays of local softball leagues. Monroe recalls watching his mother in amazement when he was 5 years old. That admiration hasn’t faded a bit.

As a kid, Monroe was shooting a basketball at a hoop in the front yard. His grandmother, paralyzed from the waist down, spent a lot of time in bed. She was stationed in her wheelchair by the window, watching her young grandson try to make some ridiculous shot. After far too many tries, Monroe finally made one. He rushed into the house, probably yelling and pumping his arms. He jumped up in his grandmother’s lap. He told her: I’m gonna be better than Marilyn Monroe!

A few years later, Monroe walked into his grandmother’s room one night. There she was, reading the Bible as she so often did. This time, she looked at her grandson and told him she thought he would become a professional athlete one day.

“It’s crazy how it came to fruition,” Monroe said. “I’m just playing out the script.”

Sports opened up new doors for Monroe in the years that followed. He started playing on elite teams in the area and met new friends. He spent time with the Taylor family in the suburbs and got a glimpse at the sort of stability he had always longed for but never quite had. He started looking for male role models and found some in other family friends — guys like Buck Hunter and the Collins family. He started to admire men, Black men especially, who showed him what was possible.

“It was beautiful, to be able to learn and see how men are supposed to handle their family situations, fighting for them, keeping together, not what I experienced having a single mom,” Monroe said.

Monroe’s individual identity is actually more of a composite, something he constructed through years of watching other people do what they do.

“I take a lot of great traits from a lot of different people. Just facts,” he said.

His Uncle Wayne, for instance, was always dressed to the nines. He would weave through local thrift shops, finding items someone else didn’t want, combining them all into an impeccable fit.

Another uncle, Milton, always seemed to be wearing the latest styles, the freshest new shoes. So if you want to know why Monroe is always looking his best — and why he says he hunts for deals and shops at a handful of different stores — there’s not much left to guesswork.

“I admired those guys,” Monroe said. “They were real ones. Neat, polished, clean, respectful. I’d see my uncles dressed up every time they went somewhere. They walked out the house, they were right. Being a kid seeing that, that’s how you want to be.”

It all culminated in 2006 when Monroe was playing in Yankee Stadium. He brought his mother along for the trip, the Marilyn who had never been to New York. During a rainout, he took her to see a show on Broadway, and the next day, he hit a home run.

Monroe never thought he’d be on the other side of it.

“This is something that I didn’t even know that I wanted to do when I was playing,” Monroe said. “This was the dark side, to be honest, because you’re in the media.”

That changed shortly after his playing career, when people — Bally host John Keating, former Tigers broadcaster Rod Allen and more — kept calling him. They were starting a pre- and postgame show for Tigers games and needed a color analyst. Monroe, they thought, would fit the bill perfectly. As a player he had always been a great interview, able to talk about the intricacies of the game, answer the hard questions and be introspective and emotional, like when Keating interviewed him after the Tigers won the 2006 AL pennant.

Monroe, though, wasn’t sure. He worried the network decision-makers might want someone better educated, more polished, less, well, C-Mo. But Keating and Allen finally talked him into flying to Detroit and giving it a shot. Monroe went through something of a tryout and did well. Starting in 2012, he became part of the Tigers Live lineup.

But just like watching a player go through growing pains in the big leagues, it took a while for Monroe to really settle into this new job. Players turned broadcasters often face a difficult balance. In the clubhouse, you’re no longer one of the players but not exactly one of the other media members, either. On air, you know the game in and out but also know what it feels like to live under the microscope. How do you be honest about what you see without being overly critical? If anything, Monroe probably leaned toward being too forgiving.

“If you’re not with these guys every day, you don’t know what they do on a day-to-day basis, how hard they work,” Monroe said. “So it’s not fair to me to attack characters and all that. That’s not my job.”

As late as 2019, Monroe was still learning. He’s done a variety of roles in this new job. The postgame show, color commentary, even behind the mic in live postgame interviews. There were times Monroe might stumble through questions or generally seem a bit uncomfortable. Like the high-level athlete he was, he was always fixated on getting better.

“Now I’m getting this opportunity to grind, fight, claw, even when I wasn’t good at this,” Monroe said. “Now all of a sudden things are starting to happen. That’s just my mentality. I don’t quit. I love all challenges given to me.”

Last year, with radio analyst Jim Price no longer doing most road games, Monroe filled in on 13 broadcasts. After the first game, he basically asked venerated announcer Dan Dickerson for a full evaluation. Dickerson kind of laughed. These things take time. But Dickerson told Monroe what he tells everyone: Let him call the pitch, then jump in with your insight. The audience has to know how the count got from 0-1 to 3-1.

By later in the year, Monroe would jump in with a punchy but profound point between pitches. He’d look at Dickerson and pump his fists like a boxer.

“I think there is that perception out there, big personality, flashy clothes, but I think that obscures what he brings,” Dickerson said. “Every time I do a game with him I realize how much he brings, and he just wants to get better and better.”

Being authentic was never too hard behind the scenes. But for a man so unapologetically himself, a man who has learned so much from others, Monroe struggled with learning to harness his authenticity on air. That meant a few things: Not worrying about what someone on TV is supposed to sound like, just letting go, bringing his energy and intellect to the broadcast without trying to be Walter Cronkite.

“I can’t try to be like Matt Shepard,” Monroe said. “I can’t try to be like Dan Dickerson. I’ve got to be C-Mo. I didn’t go to grad school. I didn’t go to broadcasting school. If that’s what they wanted from me, then they would have got somebody else. But they want my authenticity, they want my heart, they want my honesty.”

As for the baseball part of it, Monroe found an easy solution when it came to analyzing what happens on the field. He’s always been a geek for hitting, the details of the swing, the cat-and-mouse game pitchers and hitters constantly play. As a player, he loved going down to the cage with Pudge Rodriguez or Alex Rodriguez or Magglio Ordonez and watching them hit, picking their brains.

More and more, he started to bring that out on air — talking about what he has noticed in player’s swings, how a play unfolds, what a pitcher might try to do in this or that situation.

Just this past weekend, he was talking about the struggles Javier Báez has had against sliders and gave insight that can only come from a former player. Monroe wondered if Báez needed to lock his eyes in on the pitcher’s release point rather than worrying about where the ball will end up, something that might allow him to better detect spin out of the hand. He’s giving honest critiques without making it personal.

“These fans of Detroit, they know the game of baseball,” Monroe said. “You can’t fool them. Be honest. … Being able to get comfortable with doing that has really elevated my career.”

This year, Monroe is all over the broadcasts more than ever — the pregame shows, doing TV with Matt Shepard and radio with Dan Dickerson. He’s been doing an even greater load of radio broadcasts on the road, and while so much of the C-Mo smile and style seems fit for TV, he’s embraced the freedom of radio and taken his commentary to the next level.

Dickerson says he’s amazed by Monroe’s preparation. Like a player, Monroe spends nights watching video of the next day’s starting pitcher. He wants to have a sitdown with Dickerson to learn more about how Dickerson prepares, what stats he leans on, how to gather more of his own information. All that leads to a fun and insightful broadcast, a free-flowing baseball conversation rather than a bland Q-and-A.

“I just think he’s doing a terrific job,” Dickerson said. “The more I’m with him the more you realize how much he knows about hitting, how much he sees.”

Sitting in the dugout at Yankee Stadium, Craig Monroe is answering questions about himself and his unabashed sense of self. He can’t help but laugh.

“You don’t have to read between the lines with me,” he said.

Is the energy actually authentic? Does he ever turn off? Are there ever days where Craig Monroe has to splash water on his face and down some coffee and tell himself, ‘OK, let’s go, you can do this?'”

“I don’t think I have bad days,” Monroe said. “And if I do, you won’t know. My energy, it can be impactful, and I want to impact people in a positive light.”

Plenty of people approach him and often tell him how cool it must be to be him. And if we’re being honest, it is pretty cool.

But there’s a large part of Monroe that has always wondered what it would be like to be somebody else. He’s curious about other people and their jobs. Writers, police officers, you name it. Monroe, who was drafted in the eighth round out of high school, wonders what it would be like to have a college degree, a different type of insight.

“I respect everybody’s profession and how great they are at their job even though they might not get paid like we got being in sports,” Monroe said. “I’ve always been like that. I tell people, ‘Honestly, I want to be like you.’ I wish I could have went to college and got a degree and been able to create a lifestyle. It’s just respecting everybody’s journey, and that’s what I do.”

As we finish talking, Monroe hops down off the dugout bench and makes eye contact with Bally Sports anchor Trevor Thompson. Monroe is still shrugging his shoulders, bouncing around, cackling.

Thompson looks over and shakes his head, pretending to be exhausted by C-Mo’s energy.

Monroe grins. Unfazed. Ready for whatever the day brings next.

“This is just me, man,” he said. “I’ve always been like this. It’s pretty wild.”

(Top photo courtesy of Craig Monroe)

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