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Blocker enjoys going to his son's baseball games
and his daughter's soccer games |
Name: Larry Blocker
Position: Marlins Senior Dir of Game Presentation & Events
Age: 45
Where I’m from: Alexandria, Va.
Where I call home: Miami
Focusing on right now: Upcoming 10-game homestand and concert series events.
Best advice: Work hard and at all times. You never know who’s watching, and if you work hard, people are going to notice. That’s how you're going to get promoted up through the ranks. People who you don’t think know your name will know your name when they see you’re always giving it 100 percent, always smiling no matter how many long hours that you work.
A must for a new hire: It’s all about the personality. You have to be able to fit in. You always have to be able to smile, because we’re an extended family. We work 10 days in a row, 10-hour days. You’re here together, so you have to be able to get along. If you’re 100 percent serious all the time, it’s not going to be a good mix with all the long hours.
Exec I admire most: Univ. of Florida Exec Associate AD/External Affairs MIKE HILL. He’s the one who gave me my first shot in sports, and he’s the one who always told me to work hard all the time. One of the first tasks he ever gave me to do was to walk up and down University Ave. in Gainesville with a stack of volleyball posters, and it was a hundred degrees outside. He said, “Go get these in every storefront.” It was sort of a test that he gave me, and it showed that I had the dedication and was able to work hard, and I kept going.
Best book I’ve read this year: We tend in our business to be much more into movies, movie trailers and looking out for the next big music theme, song, something you can edit a video to. For us, it’s more about the movies and music.
First thing in the morning: It’s "SportsCenter." I always have to know what’s going on in the world of sports. When you work for a pro sports team, anyone you encounter thinks you know everything about every sport and always wants your opinions on it. I want to always be well-versed on all sports, no matter from golf, to tennis, to baseball, to basketball, you name it.
Talking tech: When I started in game presentation, my choice in music was two CDs and a CART tape. Now you have whatever music you want at the click of a button. You can set a hot key for whatever song it is, it’s just a click away and you can have a thousand choices. I literally used to say, “Queue up CD 6, song 8 at 38 seconds in,” and you’d do that for the second one, and you’d have a CART ready. Being digital now, there’s no more tapes or video.
Must have music: I like a lot of different types of music, but I’m big on U2 and big on BRUCE SPRINGESTEEN. Those have to be my two top favorites. But I can always run to PINK, believe it or not. That always gets me fired up.
Food for thought: We tend to go out to sports bars the most. There’s a local place called Flanigan's, that’s our favorite place to go.
How I unwind: In the morning, I'll go to the gym, run or work out. At night, my son plays high school baseball, and I love going to his games. My daughter grew up playing soccer, so I’ve always spent my time at ball fields.
Day in the life: We run five departments under game presentation: game presentation itself, video production, broadcast engineering, digital signage and ballpark events. The synergy is all there. We’re literally running the games, we could have a great play by our shortstop, be editing a TV commercial that’s going to go out that night to air tomorrow, and they can use that play.
