Before Tom McCarthy and Tom McGinnis were voices of Philly sports, a minor-league broadcaster gave them a hand

The club level at the old minor-league ballpark was a keg of beer under the stands, there always seemed to be a line for the bathroom, and most of the fans sat on metal bleachers. College Park opened in 1940 and probably didn’t look much different in the early 1990s than it did when Ted Williams was passing through Charleston, S.C.

For Tom McCarthy and Tom McGinnis — two voices of Philadelphia sports — the dive was a gateway to their future. The booth didn’t have air-conditioning and the press meal was either a hot dog or nachos, but College Park did have Richard Jablonski behind the microphone. And he gave the future Philadelphia mainstays a chance.

“He gave me a hand,” said McCarthy, the Phillies’ lead TV broadcaster since 2009. “And he also gave me the platform to realize I could do this.”

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McGinnis, the Sixers’ radio voice since 1995, started as a TV sports anchor in Charleston before transitioning to broadcasting. He did play-by-play for a Continental Basketball Association team in La Crosse, Wis., and returned to South Carolina on vacation in the summer of 1991.

McGinnis went to College Park and saw Jablonski, a former sports columnist for the Charleston Post-Courier, calling Rainbows games. Hoping he could record himself doing a few innings, McGinnis asked Jablonski if he could just sit in the booth with him while the single-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres played.

“I think he might have been one of the 228 listeners to a Rainbows game one night,” Jablonski said.

The next summer, McCarthy did the same thing. Then a sportswriter in Trenton, McCarthy parlayed his weekly minor-league column into a vacation in Charleston, and asked Jablonski if he could watch him work. McCarthy wanted to get a feel for the business as he was considering a move from writing to broadcasting after someone heard him on Marc Narducci’s WIP-AM high-school sports radio show and told him he had a good voice.

“Why did I really welcome those guys? In a sense, I felt like they were doing me a favor,” Jablonski said. “It was a great and fortuitous marriage if you have ever spent 4 hours and 15 minutes at a Class A ballgame solo. Having the two Toms with me took a lot off my load and also made the broadcasts more of a discussion.

“When you’re sitting in the booth at the old College Park, and wins were few and far between, it was something that you really had to want to be there. Those guys clearly wanted to be there. I said, ‘Heck, yeah. Why not?’”

Jablonski didn’t just let the aspiring broadcasters visit the booth. He gave them both a microphone. McGinnis called about a dozen games with Jablonski, leaving College Park with “tape” that he could send to potential employers. McCarthy did a few games, returned home to New Jersey, and drove back in August to get more experience.

“If you see a person who goes to an art school and you see that huge black thing that they’re toting around, that’s their work,” McGinnis said. “For us, it was mailing out tapes. You had to have a tape and prove you could do it.”

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Before McCarthy and McGinnis were broadcasting the World Series and NBA Finals, they were looking for their way into a new field.

McGinnis, while working at a TV station in Panama City, Fla., drove to Atlanta to record himself calling Hawks and Braves games. He sat on press row at the Omni and called play-by-play of Dominique Wilkins vs. Michael Jordan into a tape recorder.

McCarthy did radio play-by-play of high school and college baseball in New Jersey while covering the game for the newspaper. He was “The Sports Moron” on Big Daddy Graham’s radio show in Trenton.

They were hustlers. That’s how they found their way into Jablonski’s booth.

“I always thought it was remarkable that this guy didn’t know me from Adam and he was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’” McCarthy said. “Whether he realized it or not, it laid the groundwork. He let me do play-by-play without even knowing me. He just let me do it.”

McGinnis was just as surprised.

“In a field like broadcasting, there’s so much ego and no one wants to share the limelight,” McGinnis said. “I still don’t forget it and I remember the sentiment.”

McCarthy used his Rainbows tape — an inside-the-park grand slam by Shane Andrews was the highlight — a year later when he left sportswriting to become the broadcaster for the double-A Trenton Thunder. Years later, Jablonski saw McCarthy on TV doing a college basketball game.

“I said, ‘Doggone. Is that the same guy,’” Jablonski said. “Lo and behold, yes. It was so long ago that we met in Charleston that I had a hard time remembering what year it was.”

McGinnis stayed in Charleston, becoming the broadcaster for an expansion minor-league hockey team called the South Carolina Stingrays. After McGinnis spent a season doing minor-league hockey in Cleveland, the Sixers soon hired him. Like McCarthy, McGinnis eventually came across Jablonski’s TV.

“This was when the radio guys would sit behind the bench and I say, ‘Is that McGinnis?’ I looked it up and lo and behold, it was Tom McGinnis,” Jablonski said. “Now he’s an institution. He has trademark lines and has the whole thing going.”

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A year after McCarthy’s visit, Jablonski started working for a medical university and eventually left broadcasting. He grew up on Long Island and his career took him from Montreal to Charleston, but it was becoming too much to juggle a family, a full-time job, and his broadcasting gigs. So it is always a thrill to stumble upon the two Toms he gave a microphone.

“It makes me happy that they were able to transition in part through some time they spent with me making some tape,” Jablonski said. “But really, both of those guys, if they never met me or never worked with me at all, they both would have been perfectly fine finding employment in the industry.

“I get a real kick out of seeing those two guys doing as good as they are and happy doing what they’re doing. To me, that’s one of the reasons they are good at what they do, because they’re happy and comfortable doing what they do.”

The Sixers traveled before this season to Charleston for training camp at The Citadel and the team bus drove past College Park. McGinnis aimed his phone to the window and snapped a photo of the old ballpark. McGinnis is broadcasting the NBA playoffs this month and describes the happenings every night of the league’s MVP, but there’s still something special about his early days in South Carolina.

“I remember when I didn’t get help,” McGinnis said. “‘Hey, is there any way I could come by and grab lunch with you?’ I got, ‘No.’ I’m like, ‘No? Are you serious?’ You’re not going to get lunch with everyone, but how hard is that? It says a lot about Richard Jablonski, right? You have so many people who help you out and this is neat. It’s pretty cool.”

McCarthy will often call or e-mail Jablonski on opening day, thanking him for helping him get started. The former sportswriter balances his Phillies duties with NFL, college football, and college basketball games. His son, Pat, is working this season in the Mets’ radio booth. And maybe none of that is possible without Jablonski’s passing him the microphone in the press box at the old ballpark.

“It was run-down, but I was like ‘This is great,’” McCarthy said. “I remember doing those games and thinking, ‘Wow, what a natural high. This energy in the ballpark, the music in the background, the echo in the press box, all this stuff.’ I thought I really want to do this for a living. Rich probably had no idea that he would have that much of an impact for two bald guys in one market. It’s pretty remarkable.”