For Phillies’ Spanish-language announcer, big calls, bigger wins, and the certainty of World Series victory

Relax, Philadelphia.

The Phillies are going to win the World Series in six games.

Take it from Oscar Budejen, who knows something about seizing opportunity — and overcoming obstacles.

He is the team’s Spanish-language play-by-play announcer, a broadcaster whose soaring calls of the Phils’ most thrilling moments — cue the tape of Bryce Harper’s pennant-winning home run against San Diego — make the hairs on your arm stand up.

But long before that, Budejen was simply a boy obsessed with sports, who lived with a radio earpiece stuck in his ear to hear the games. He was born and raised in Venezuela by parents who were neither Venezuelan nor, until the Cuban revolution drove them to South America, intended to build their lives in the country.

“I’m a citizen of the world that’s found a home in Philly,” said Budejen, 60, speaking from Houston before the Phils were to face the Astros in Game 1 on Friday night.

This magical World Series season marks Budejen’s second year with the team, building on his tenure in broadcasting, global business, and sports marketing. He and booth colleague Bill Kulik serve an audience that’s projected only to increase.

An estimated 42 million Americans speak Spanish at home. Among Latinos, 68% speak Spanish in their homes — it’s 93% for those who immigrated — and their numbers are growing rapidly.

Latinos represent the second-fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, behind Asians, increasing 70% to more than 60 million people between 2000 and 2019.

The number of Latinos in Pennsylvania surpassed one million in the 2020 census, while in New Jersey the population grew in all 21 counties to nearly two million people. Similar growth is occurring in Philadelphia.

The Phillies’ Spanish broadcasts pull listeners from the region and the world. Some fans live in baseball-loving nations such as Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, others in Holland, Germany, Spain, and Argentina. Some are English-speakers who struggle to understand Budejen’s calls but are drawn by a love of baseball, the joy of his presentation, and a desire to learn Spanish.

Sitting in the visitors’ dugout in Minute Maid Park on Friday, Budejen carried a sense of wonder about where he — and the Phils — now found themselves.

“I pinch myself knowing that we are here in the World Series,” Budejen said. “Nobody expected us to be here. Look, it’s not how you start, but it’s how you finish.”

Budejen’s path to the Phillies’ broadcast booth included leadership positions with Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Aramark, where he worked with top professional teams and players. In the 1990s, he helped Disney reimagine the Coke experience in the theme parks and worked to connect the NBA brand to the world.

That could have never happened, he said, without the sacrifices of his parents and grandparents.

His father, Nagib Budejen, was 18 when he left his native Lebanon, having no money for college and few prospects. He traveled by ship from Beirut to Italy, sailed again from Italy to New York, then drove south to Miami. Not knowing a word of Spanish, he caught a plane to Cuba, where an uncle offered a chance for firmer footing or at least a line on a job.

Nagib Budejen taught himself Spanish. He got into radio and eventually took a job with Ralston Purina, the big pet-food company.

Something else happened in Cuba. Nagib Budejen fell in love. Maria Elena Fernandez was 18, born in the capital of Havana, and living in Guantanamo.

Their courtship changed after Castro’s revolution.

In late 1960, Budejen was taken from his job at gunpoint, as the Cuban government nationalized industries. A few months later, on their way to a wedding at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, the couple were stopped and interrogated by soldiers.

It was time to leave. They decided he would go first and she would follow. Budejen left Cuba with $20 hidden in a tube of toothpaste — it was forbidden to take money out of the country — and arrived in Mexico to find that the cash had disintegrated.

Ralston Purina wired money. They wanted Budejen to work for them in Venezuela.

The couple’s son, Oscar, was born in Caracas in 1962.

Most summers, family ties took Oscar to Atlanta, and when he was 18, he came permanently to the United States. He spent a year at Georgia Tech, working to improve his English, then tackled the undergraduate and MBA programs at Mercer University.

At 19, he approached the CBS Spanish-language program in Atlanta, convincing the producers that he could improve their reporting. Still a teenager, he was soon doing the sports news on television. On weekends, he’d go to see the Atlanta Falcons, the city’s historically awful football team. Budejen figured out where the coaches sat on the stadium’s upper tier and moved near them, so he could hear their inside-the-game discussions and ask questions, making himself a student of the sport.

In coming years, his broadcast work took him as far as sports could reach: covering major-league baseball, the NFL, the NBA, and college football. He’s covered multiple Super Bowls, World Series, and NBA Finals, and also works as color analyst for the Eagles’ Spanish radio broadcasts.

Last year he got a call from Kulik, the longtime Phillies broadcaster who had established the Spanish Béisbol Network. He wanted Budejen to fill an opening in the booth.

The work has been more fulfilling than Budejen could have imagined.

“We have the best fans in the world in Philly,” he said. “What the fans bring to the game, that’s the love I bring to our broadcast. In Spanish, you convey the passion of baseball to another level, and that’s what our fans bring to us.”

That energy propels Budejen, but it made the moment electric when Bryce Harper clubbed his home run in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. Budejen calls it “campanazo” — not just ring the bell, but smash it.

“I just dream of a priest being inside the church, smacking the bell — calling people to church. That smacking, when one of our guys hits a home run, you got to bring it,” he said. “It goes in the history of these moments in Phillies baseball that will live forever.”

With the team, Budejen started Phillies Latino Heroes, a program that honors the contributions of everyday people, and a continuation of his engagement with such organizations as Congreso de Latinos Unidos in Philadelphia and the National Hispanic Corporate Council in Washington.

So what does he expect during the next week or so?

“We’re here to make history,” Budejen said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to win a World Series. All you can ask in life is to have the opportunity. Then it’s what you do with it.”