Working Drafts

I'm kind of sorry I asked. Two balls and two strikes on Dansby Swanson.

Pat Hughes, May 31, 2025

And so it went with the odd, mildly hilarious, multi-year saga of the Chicago Cubs radio booth explaining the origin of Buckethead.

If you listen to Cubs games on the radio long enough, you start to recognize the rhythms. The way innings breathe. The silences. The hilarious commercials for adult diapers. Pat and Ron, and sometimes Zach. There’s room for digression too. The good kind. The kind that knows when to step aside for a line drive into the gap.

This is why Pat Hughes is so good. He can do several things at once. Call the game cleanly. Keep the tone light. Quietly rescue a bad story by turning it into something else entirely.

The Buckethead bit first surfaced, to my knowledge, in 2024. Nick Lodolo trivia. Same high school as Mark McGwire. Same high school as a guitarist named Buckethead. Pat says the name out loud. Pauses. Admits it feels strange and sort of nice to say “Buckethead” on Cubs radio. That alone gets the laugh. Not the story. The moment.

Ron Coomer plays his role perfectly. Dry. Patient. Curious in a way that never feels urgent. He doesn’t need the payoff. He’s happy to let the thing wobble.

Then Zach Zaidman jumps in.

Zach has facts. Zach has research. Zach has quotes from Guitar Player magazine. Zach has, unfortunately, a story that does not improve with repetition.

Buckethead wears a KFC bucket on his head. Halloween 4. A mirror. A revelation. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not a story so much as a Wikipedia paragraph that wandered into a live broadcast.

What makes the bit funny is not Buckethead. It’s the social geometry of the booth.

Pat humors it. He lets Zach run. He pretends, just barely, that this is all worth hearing. He asks gentle questions that sound polite but land sharp. “Don’t feel like you have to get through this story quickly.” “I will sleep better tonight knowing that.” Each line acts as a pressure-release valve.

Ron needles from the side. Colonel Sanders. Cassettes. Tidbits “really not worth much.” He knows exactly what’s happening and keeps nudging it along just enough to make it stranger.

Zach, meanwhile, seems convinced that if he just tells it one more time, it will finally land. Which is how the story comes back in 2025. Twice. Treated as if it’s new. Treated as if we all haven’t already been here.

By the third telling, Pat doesn’t even bother hiding it. “I’m kind of sorry I asked.” That line kills me every time. It’s honest. It’s earned. And it slides right back into a called third strike without missing a beat.

This is why I love Cubs radio. These voices are the sound of summer. They fill the empty space between pitches without stepping on the game. Even the bad bits become useful. They reveal who’s trying too hard. Who knows when to stop. Who can turn mild annoyance into comedy without ever raising their voice.

I’m looking forward to the new season, and to spending my days again with Pat and Ron on the radio.

Bartlett Giamatti, in his book Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games, wrote…

“Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball (and someone whose baseball card I once owned), is also the late father of actor Paul Giamatti, who starred in one of my all-time favorite movies, Sideways.