But among other Goldpanners moments there still exists an audio clip of this one: Before his first road game, a guest — the governor of Alaska — showed up. Baarns had never heard who the governor was. Neither, at the time, had most of America. In Alaska, however, Sarah Palin was wildly popular.

“Now, Sarah,” Baarns began, channeling a little bit of Jimmy Simmons’s wit, “you charged fellow Republicans with a lack of ethics. What is this, putting personal ethics and responsibility in front of party politics? Seems like a dangerous trend.”

“Well, imagine that!” Palin said. “Just trying to clean up government.”

As the season wore on, he gained confidence, especially at away games. The longest required a 14-hour trip across the Alaskan wilderness. He slept in a cramped trailer on stadium grounds. He learned to identify elk tracks. And that angry moose could kill.

After night games in the home of the Midnight Sun, there was enough daylight for fans to spot him walking to his trailer and pull him aside to tell him how much they loved listening to him. “I suddenly felt like I was this 6-foot-5-inch kid coming out of high school with the blazing arm,” he says. “Suddenly it was like: ‘Oh this is what it is like to be a prospect. This is what it’s like.’ ”

Making It ... in Visalia, Calif.

When Baarns returned to Occidental to finish college, he sent 70 minor league teams demo CDs of his Goldpanners broadcasts. Just before graduation he got a call from Tom Seidler, an owner of the Visalia Rawhide, a long-struggling team in the Class A California League. Seidler is the grandson of Walter O’Malley, the legendary owner of the Dodgers. O’Malley’s team hired Scully in 1950.

Seidler was a fan of Baarns’s delivery. Like Scully’s, less was always more; a game was not a game, but a story.

Seidler hired Baarns in 2008.

During his first season, Baarns teamed with another broadcaster. But then he was on his own. His broadcast booth at Rawhide Ballpark was an open-air concrete bunker in the stands behind home plate. He swatted away moths, spiders and June bugs. It wasn’t much better on the road, where the radio lines were sometimes so bad that he was forced to call games over his cellphone.