Former Eighties Mets Broadcaster: Steve Zabriske (1983-1989)

Steve Zabriske was born May13, 1947 in Palo Alto California. After college, Zabriskie began covering sports for a television station in Austin, Texas during the early 1970's.

The station made him change his name to Steve Zanon, saying his real name sounded to Polish. He then moved on to doing sports news in Tulsa, Oklahoma and became known as “the Big Z”.

He started doing MLB baseball games on the USA Network in the early days of cable television. In 1980, MLB did an early TV experiment that had 22 teams take part in Thursday Night Games of the week on the USA Network. Zabriskie did broadcasts for the last two years of its run from 1981-1982.

From there he joined the New York Mets broadcast team in 1983. Steve was the Mets Channel 9 & Sports Channel announcer along with Ralph Kiner & Tim McCarver from 1983 -1989. He was a very straight forward announcer with a dry sense of humor, his style worked well with Ralph Kiner.

His most famous broadcast was doing the play by play in the 9th inning in September 1986, when the Mets clinched the N.L. Eastern Title. As more games got onto cable TV, Zabriske fell out of the picture.

He had a brief stint on ESPN then disappeared from the broadcasting scene. In 2003 he wrote a children’s baseball book called “Be A Hitter”. These days Zabriske is the news director on KZST radio in Sonoma County California.