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Dale Arnold didn’t need long to get his legs under him in return to Bruins for NESN
Even in retirement, Dale Arnold remains a team player. It is, after all, what hockey people do.
After 28 years at NESN — the first 12 as the Bruins’ play-by-play voice, the next 16 as a studio host — Arnold retired in April 2023. He and his wife Susan moved to his native Maine, where he stayed busy writing hockey books (his upcoming fourth, on coaches, is currently in the hands of his publisher), playing plenty of golf, and enjoying the way life should be.
“A pretty normal life,’’ he said.
When Brian Zechello, the coordinating producer for NESN’s Bruins broadcasts, called him approximately two weeks ago, Arnold figured it had something to do with last Sunday’s Centennial Game celebration of the 100th anniversary of the franchise’s first game.
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And it did. Just not in the way Arnold anticipated.
“My assumption was that for the Centennial Game they were going to bring back all of these different people from across Bruins history, and that they wanted me to show up for that reason,’’ he said. “That’s what I thought it was.”
Zechello and NESN did want Arnold back for that game — to host it from the studio, as well as upcoming broadcasts on an interim basis while Arnold’s successor as host, Sophia Jurksztowicz, remains on a personal leave of absence. Adam Pellerin had been handling hosting duties in her absence, but Arnold’s return gives him a breather while also freeing him up for in-game reporter duties, along with Andrew Raycroft.
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“When Brian asked if I would consider coming back and helping out and hosting the games again, I was shocked, but I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely I’ll help,’ ’’ said Arnold. “It was a pretty quick decision, though after we hung up, I did go talk to my wife and say, ‘I’m going to be away from home a bit here over the next little bit however long this goes.’ ”
Arnold has an easy solution to circumventing the complicated logistics of commuting from midcoast Maine to TD Garden, a trip that would take about 2 hours 20 minutes on a good day.
“My rule of thumb is: If I have two days off, I come home to Maine,’’ he said. “If I only have one day off, I will stay at one of our two daughters’ houses [one lives in Plymouth, and one in Thompson, Conn.]. I had to make sure they were still OK with Dad showing up on their doorstep from time to time, and they seem to be pretty fired up about it.”
Arnold said that when he retired, he never considered the possibility that he might be back in the NESN studios and on air again someday.
“As far as I was concerned, in my head, that was it,’’ he said.
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Arnold is quick to emphasize that he is doing it just until Jurksztowicz, who took her leave just before the start of the regular season, is ready to return.
“I’m happy to help out as long as they need me,’’ he said, “and as I said the first segment of the pregame show last Sunday, that spot is Sophia’s. I’m just there to hold it down until she’s ready to come back and then I will gladly yield it back. I’m the placeholder for her.”
Arnold said he was more nervous than he expected to be heading into the Centennial Game broadcast, which featured a two-hour pregame show.
“I hadn’t done a game in 18 months and I didn’t want to go out there and look like a fool, especially on the occasion of the Centennial Game,’’ he said. “But after the first segment of the pregame was over with I kind of settled down a little bit and the nerves settled down a little bit.”
It helped that he was working with analysts and longtime colleagues such as Raycroft, Billy Jaffe, and Barry Pederson — and, of course, given how adept hockey players are at chirping each other, they gave Arnold a good-natured hard time about his return.
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“Those guys are my best friends,’’ said Arnold. “And we give each other a pretty hard time anyway. But as I told Billy, ‘I’m retired, not expired.’ ”
History might be different
Tyler Kepner, the superb baseball writer for The Athletic/New York Times, wrote a thought-provoking column this past week on how many legendary moments in baseball history would have been altered, or never happened at all, had commissioner Rob Manfred’s gimmicky “Golden At-Bat” idea been in place.
The “Golden At-Bat” would allow a manager to use a different hitter than the expected batter once per game. So, theoretically, Shohei Ohtani could bat twice in a row in a ninth-inning situation, and that sort of thing.
Kepner’s piece made me think of all the famous broadcasting calls featuring unlikely heroes — such as Sean McDonough’s on obscure Braves catcher Francisco Cabrera’s winning hit in Game 7 of the 1992 NLCS — that probably never would have happened. And what’s better about baseball than an unlikely hero coming through, and being immortalized by a fantastic call?
NFL getting animated
On Monday, ESPN/Disney will premiere “The Simpsons Funday Football,” an animated real-time broadcast of the Cowboys-Bengals matchup that will use Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology to Simpsonize a special broadcast available on Disney+ and ESPN+. Drew Carter, who in his non-cartoon form is the Celtics’ play-by-play voice on NBC Sports Boston, will handle the play-by-play for the Simpsons version, the fourth animated alternate telecast he has been a part of for ESPN . . . Congratulations are in order for Cosmina Schulman, senior vice president of strategic broadcast and digital partnerships at NESN, who was named to Cablefax magazine’s 2024 Most Powerful Women list. Schulman was recognized as the Women’s Advancement champion for her work advancing and launching Women of NESN (WON), the network’s initiative dedicated to championing women’s sports coverage, commentary, and storytelling.
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