Where Are They Now? - Dan Watson and Scott Bacon

The Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League, a wood-bat baseball league for athletes at the college level, seems to be preparing more than just the players for a future in what the baseball crowd calls “the Bigs.” Now, two former broadcasters of the League, Dan Watson and Scott Bacon, hold jobs broadcasting for minor league teams and are on the way up in the baseball world.

“I have always believed that the Great Lakes League is a developmental league for all the people associated with it,” says commissioner, Dr. Kim Lance. “The goal of our league is to prepare people for the next level.”

And the League did just that. Dan Watson is currently broadcasting for the Daytona Cubs, a Class A farm club for the Chicago Cubs based in Daytona Beach, FL, and Scott Bacon is working with the Lynchburg Hillcats a Class A club out of Lynchburg, VA.

Scott Bacon, a former broadcaster for the Columbus All-Americans, compares his journey as a broadcaster to that of a player, except he uses a longer time scale. He has worked his way up becoming an assistant broadcaster. Within the next few years he plans to make the next step up.

“It’s just like the players,” Bacon says, “I don’t want to be stuck in one place for too long and be known as that guy, the minor league guy that never makes it up.”

The ultimate goal for both Bacon and Dan Watson is to make it to the Majors, although Watson says that his real dream is to broadcast for his hometown team, the Cleveland Indians.

Both professional broadcasters stated that the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League helped prepare them for their current positions by giving them much-needed experience that all employers look for.

“It’s just a good introduction to get better. You get to learn by trial and error with a laid-back atmosphere with a lot of encouragement. If you mess up, you can fix it, learn from your mistakes,” says Watson.

And they still see many of the players they called games for in the GLSCL, as the players move up the ranks as well, but the play is comparable.

“With the Great Lakes League, they’re looking to diversify players. For example, if a pitcher has a really good fastball and curve, they’ll try to get him to work on a slider and change up. Here, at the higher levels, the players are looking to perfect what they already know well, rather than expand their repertoire,” says Scott Bacon.

Watson agrees saying that the play is comparable because the higher leagues get the best players from all of the wood-bat leagues, like Great Lakes, from across the country, making the competition that much steeper when the best of the best are present.

However, although Bacon and Watson have both stepped up to the high Class A leagues, they still hold fond memories of working with the GLSCL.

Bacon says his best came from the Columbus All-Americans’ win of the League championship in 2003, the year he started with them. Watson cited that calling the All-Star game for the League two years in a row in Athens, OH was his personal favorite, along with the people he worked with, including Scott Bacon and Commissioner Kim Lance.

The League, and others like it, the pair said, is just one more rung on the ladder toward Major League Baseball. Although the climb is a little slower for broadcasters, it seems the two that the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League has sent up to the minors are well on their way to their dream jobs.