Courtesy photo Nashua's Tim Neverett, foreground, was socially distant from broadcast partner Orel Hershiser when calling Dodger games on TV this past season.

NASHUA – Tim Neverett was heading to his car in the parking lot outside a quiet and deserted Dodger Stadium one night around 11 this past summer.

He happened upon an unusual site. Near his car, about 20 yards away, was a coyote.

“I was like, well, this wouldn’t be happening if it was a (normal) season,” said Neverett, the Nashua native who is part of the Los Angeles Dodgers broadcast team. “There’d be traffic, there’d be people. They wouldn’t come down from the hills.

“You’ve got to understand how close we are to downtown L.A. there. And there’s coyotes running around Dodger Stadium all the time. So I hadn’t seen that before. It was part of the new Bizarro Baseball World we were in.”

Indeed, it was a strange footnote of an even stranger season that was one that will give Neverett his second World Series ring in the last three years. He was part of the radio broadcast team for the Red Sox when they won the the 2018 Series over, ironically, the Dodgers. It included testing, protocols, strange ways of broadcasting a game that wasn’t where the broadcasters would be, and even an earthquake.

“It was bizarre,” Neverett said. “I think from the baseball side it was what was expected. But until you actually get in the middle of it, you don’t even know how it’s going to be.”

The Dodgers missed just one game due to civil protests, but not due to any virus concerns or positive tests.

“Once you saw what was happening with the Marlins, then the Cardinals, and then the A’s had a positive case, you were thinking it’s just a matter of time,” Neverett said. “But then we were able to avoid it. Our players and staff took big time precautions, and the Dodgers as a team did, too. They went over and above, and made sure we had everything we needed. They had people bringing hand sanitizer to the booth every day. The human resources team was in touch every day.”

Unfortunately, Neverett wasn’t able to do any of the Dodger post season games, as the national television networks take over. Broadcaster Charley Steiner and former Dodger Rick Monday did the NLCS and World Series broadcasts remotely, Steiner from his house.

“The day before I didn’t know, they ended up not sending anybody,” Neverett said. “All the games they did were from Dodger Stadium or Charlie’s house.

Neverett said it was strange not to be part of it.

“It was weird,”he said. “I kept a scorebook anyway, I watched every pitch of every game, it was still my job to do that. It was just different doing it from home as opposed to being at the ballpark.”

Neverett worked on the Dodgers’ pre and postgame shows during the season, and watched all the games, whether he was on the game broadcast or not, from the front row of a luxury suite at Dodger Stadium – both home and away.

“They took us out of the radio booth because they felt it wasn’t big enough,” Neverett said. “They put us in the suite where we could spread out and be socially distant.”

The TV booth, Neverett said, was just big enough, so that when he worked as part of the television broadcast, he was six feet away from color commentator and former Dodger pitching great Orel Hershiser.

“It worked out, it was fine,” Neverett said.

The TV games he did were all road games. He would be at an empty Dodger Stadium, doing the games off monitors.

“We were at an empty Dodger Stadium, and when nightfall came, we were at an empty and dark Dodger Stadium,” he said.

There was a main TV monitor that had the view everyone was seeing from home, then another where it was split up into quadrants that would show each bullpen, then an overhead view of the field so one could see how the defenses were alligned, and another square showing the scoreboard of the whatever stadium it was so you could see all the stats, the linescore, etc.

“It was all well thought out,” he said, “except when we did games that were in Anaheim, we couldn’t see the bullpen. They had cameras from different locations to shoot the bullpens, it was a little more difficult to see who was warming up there. … You’re at the mercy of the director, etc. of the other team’s telecast. The other team could slip in a pinch runner and if they didn’t know it, we didn’t know either.”

There were some other differences. “You couldn’t call a home run with conviction,” Neverett said. “You could know pretty much where it’s going to end up. We could only communicate with our producer in the truck helping us. And he can’t tell whether a ball is gone or not because he’s in the truck.”

Neverett said there was one situation when Mike Trout was up, hit a ball that sounded good coming off the bat, but Neverett could not tell where the ball was. Dodger center fielder A.J. Pollock gave up on it at the last second, but the ball had bounced off the green grass and came back onto the field.

“You’re not 100 percent sure,” Neverett said. “We had situations during the course of the season that were difficult to manage. I had to tell myself that if there’s a line drive and comes off the bat, and I think it’s going to left center field, don’t say it.”

Radio games were a little easier. The one odd thing, besides no fans, was Neverett would be staring at the back of the cardboard fan cutouts. The front had faces, the back were plain white.

“It looked like rows and rows of plain white gravestones,” Neverett said.

Neverett did praise the audio crew that produced the artificial crowd noise at Dodger Stadium, complete with concessionaire sounds as well as Dodger chants. “It was like you were at a Dodger game,” he said. “You’d close your eyes, and you’d think there were people in there. And when you’d listen on the radio, it sounded more like a regular game than watching it on TV.

“It was really different.”

In fact, Neverett said there were times when the video that Steiner had was a bit behind Monday’s, and they had to work around that. Challenges galore.

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SAFETY PROTOCOLS

Neverett said he was tested once a week, the team would handle the test registration, etc. He would actually self administer the test as a cheek swab, and drop it in a bucket on the way out and the next morning he’d get texted the results.

“If you got a phone call, that was trouble,” he said. “I never got a phone call.”

There were daily temperature checks and the typical health and safety questionaire that a lot of sports facilities use. He would be masked the entire time at Dodger Stadium, unless eating or on the air.

“It was just very different in a lot of ways,” Neverett said. “Not traveling was strange. A series was over, and you didn’t turn in your luggage or get on the team bus. A lot of that wasn’t there.

“The whole thing was totally different than a regular major league baseball season. But I give the players a ton of credit. They played hard. There was no difference noticable in the way the games were played. They were very professional in the way they went about that.”

Neverett said he thinks that if things do return to some semblance of normal, there will still be changes.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we have less access to the clubhouses,” he said. “Video conferences after games instead of everybody (in the media) cramming into the same room. … Baseball and the way it’s going to be covered, the day-to-day aspect of it, is going to change somewhat in the future.”

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DODGERS DROUGHT ENDS

One thing that won’t change is Neverett was part of a Dodger organization – Dodger broadcasters are team employees , different from when he was with the Sox – that won its first World Series Championship in 32 years.

And remember, the Dodgers were down 3-1 to the Braves in games in the NLCS.

“To come back against the Braves I thought was remarkable because the Braves are really good,” Neverett said. “They have really good pitching, but the Dodgers kept making adjustments, kept figuring ways to get on base and get guys across.”

But there was one familier sight that told Neverett all he needed to see.

“When Mookie Betts would get on base, they’d win,” he said. “It was that simple, because he could make plays with his feet that nobody could make.

“So I thought he was the difference maker. After watching last year come up short in the Division Series (in 2019), a team I thought was capable of making it to the World Series, after seeing a World Series the year before I felt I had some qualifications to see that.

“Once they came back and beat the Braves, I thought there was no way they’d lose to the Rays. Even with the pitching challenges the Dodgers were facing, I thought Dave Roberts managed a brilliant series and managed the pitchers exceptionally well. … Mookie was the difference maker and Clayton Kershaw was what he was supposed to be.”

Of course Neverett had special insight with Betts, whom the Red Sox traded to L.A.during the winter.

“I began as soon as spring training games started in Arizona (back before the pandemic hit),” Neverett said. “I would tell Mookie stories then, and any interviews I would do with people about him, I’d say it was going to take L.A.less than five minutes to fall deeply in love with him.

“And they have. And that’s without fans going to the ballpark.”

Neverett said the one thing people overlook is the fact that Betts “is the best baserunner in the game. … I would stress that fact.”

Neverett said Betts has had six three homer games, and he has broadcast five of them.

“Once they moved him into that leadoff spot, things really changed,” Neverett said. “(The Dodgers) were thinking having him hit second, maybe third, but I saw what he did in Boston as the leadoff hitter. Once he was moved into that spot, I said he was going to take off, especially with Corey Seager hitting behind him. A great one-two punch.”

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THE ARLINGTON EXPERIENCE

Neverett said the players weren’t too happy with the Arlington, Texas experience.

“It was wake up, eat, go to the ballpark, play the game, go back to the hotel, rinse, lather, repeat,” he said.

Neverett felt it was ironic all the virus-related issues with Justin Turner, who was pulled from Game 6 after testing positive and then was on the field celebrating with the team.

Turner, Neverett said, was one of leaders who wanted strict COVID protocols.

“It was really strangely ironic that he had a positive test,” he said.

Neverett said there was more to the story that Turner was on the field.

“He actually told some temmates ‘I don’t think I should go out there'” he said, adding that Major League Baseball said it had fault in the incident too. “His teammates were urging him on to go out there.”

Neverett said Dodger players were all tested soon after Game 6, at 2 a.m.after the game and possibly when they returned to L.A. Players were not allowed to take commercial flights back to their homes; they either had to take private jets or drive.

“To be honest, there’s a lot of people that say, ‘Well, it was only 60 games, what’s the big deal’,” Neverett said. “That’s not the case. Because of all things they had to go through and do differently, the things they had to do to stay safe.

“The fact that when they were home, they could go to the ballpark, maybe to a store, but really couldn’t move around very much. I know I didn’t.”

Neverett went to the ballpark, one grocery store, one pharmacy and the hotel he was staying at. “It makes it easier that way for the contact tracers, if you get it, if you limit your movement,” he said.

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EARTHQUAKE

Neverett was in a hotel suite the whole time while in L.A., and actually was in an earthquake one night there. His suite was on the 22nd floor.

“The thing was, it wasn’t a huge earthquake by L.A.purposes, I think it was a four-point something (on the richter scale),” he said. “That’s not big for L.A. But when you’re on the 22nd floor, and the tower starts swaying. … I’ve been in earthquakes before, but never on the 22nd floor.”

The earthquake, he said, lasted 30 seconds. “But it seemed like an hour,” he said. “It was at 11:30 at night, the game had just ended, a road game, so I had already gone back to the hotel. All of a sudden, I was like, ‘What’s going on here?'”

Neverett had a five gallon water jug that burst. “It looked like the ocean in a storm,” he said. “Water was just going all over the place. Things were shaking in the room, the floor was moving.”

Neverett grabbed his hotel key, ran for the door, and figured he was going to ride it out in the hallway. But then it stopped, the hotel announced elevators were safe, building was clear, etc.

“Needless to say,” Neverett said, “I didn’t get much sleep that night.”

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SERIES RING

Neverett will get his second ring, and likely be presented it sometime in the spring.

He showed his Red Sox ring to a class he’s been teaching this fall at Emerson.

Neverett is planning on next season with L.A., but, as he said, “We don’t know what the season will be like next year.

“The pandemic stinks, it’s changed people’s lives, but it’s going to change baseball. It’s changing the game from the business side. Many other businesses and people have lost their jobs.”

But the 2020 baseball season for Neverett in Los Angeles was one he’ll never forget, for so many reasons.