The radio broadcasters reminded listeners of the final score, invited them to tune in again the next day, and signed off. The Dodgers had lost Saturday, so the sounds of “California Stars” wafted through Dodger Stadium.
“Well,” Charley Steiner said to his colleagues in the broadcast booth, “they’re still playing this song.”
The little things can be the ones we remember the most. On Saturday, for the first time in three years, Steiner called all nine innings of a Dodgers game.
In 2024, he beat cancer into remission. The first sign was back pain. He later suffered three back fractures, and to this day the pain is still there.
“It’s gone from intolerable to tolerable,” Steiner said.
He left Dodger Stadium in a wheelchair Saturday. He can walk, but the trek from the broadcast booth to the parking lot is too much, at least for now.
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Yet he was in the booth, and on the air for nine innings, so Saturday was a very good day indeed.
Steiner returned for opening day in 2025, but he wore down and left midway through the game. He has called a few games this season, for a few innings each time, building up his workload as if he were a pitcher in spring training.
On Thursday, after Steiner called six innings, he said he would like to try seven the next time. Duane McDonald, the Dodgers’ radio producer, encouraged him to try the full nine.
And so Steiner did, his voice sounding raspy and rusty in the early innings but getting stronger with each successive inning.
He called the statistics put up by Milwaukee Brewers prodigy Jacob Misiorowski “Koufaxian numbers.” He translated an infield single with an exit velocity of 37 mph into everyday language: “That’s driving in the school zone.”
And, on an afternoon Dodgers starter Justin Wrobleski gave up two home runs — that’s 11 homers surrendered in his last 19⅔ innings — Steiner did not miss a beat when reading an advertisement: “Toyota dealers: they make it easy. Wrobleski makes it hard.”
The Dodgers have consistently and graciously told Steiner to take all the time he needed to get better, but recovery is slow, uneven and ongoing.
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“Who would have ever thought that sitting could be painful?” Steiner said.
“I get home after a game, and I’m sitting with three ice packs on my back. It’s like I’ve completed playing.”
In the broadcast booth, he sometimes alternates between standing and sitting, or puts his feet up on a table, anything to avoid sitting for hours on end.
The happiest person next to Steiner on Saturday was the one who has been next to Steiner for two decades in the booth: Rick Monday, who checked on Steiner almost every day the past three years and who teased him unmercifully on Saturday, at times using words best left out of a family newspaper.
“You can’t invent chemistry,” Steiner said.
You also can’t invent what is now a lifelong bond.
“I had fun watching him, because I know he has gone through hell,” Monday said. “His world shrunk. We’re used to 50,000 people and you saw, what, one or two a day?”
Steiner nodded.
“Housebound,” Monday said.
“The last three years have been P.T. [physical therapy],” Steiner said. “Every day. Social life? Scratch that.
“If I want to go out to eat, it’s not necessarily where, but what’s the seating like? I can’t sit in a wooden chair.”
It’s too uncomfortable, he said, without cushion or support for his back.
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Steiner is 77. He does not have to endure discomfort in the booth. He does not have to be here.
Or, perhaps, he does.
“It’s just nice being back at the park,” he said.
“It’s home.”
He is still building back his strength, no pun intended. His next goal: call a game on consecutive days, just as a relief pitcher has to prove he can pitch on consecutive days.
“But there ain’t going to be no Timmy Trumpet for me,” Steiner said.
That second consecutive day won’t be Sunday. From his home, he’ll do a segment with Monday for the pregame show.
And when might he be back in the broadcast booth on a regular basis? He had a twinkle in his eye, and seven of the most famous words in Dodgers broadcasting lore at the ready.
“Day to day,” he said, “but aren’t we all?”
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.