The San Francisco Giants and longtime PA announcer Renel Brooks-Moon — seen in the press box in 2002 — parted ways after the sides failed to reach agreement on a contract extension.
It was 2001, during Presentation High School’s career day. Renel Brooks-Moon, the San Francisco Giants’ public-address announcer, was the keynote speaker, Viñal said.
“I was on the edge of my feet, just listening and eating up everything,” said Viñal, the Giants’ in-stadium host since 2015. “You could just feel her passion, her charisma, and her warmth in everything that she said ... I was captivated by her energy”
Viñal said she vividly remembers watching from halfway up the bleachers inside the school’s gym as Brooks-Moon delivered each word of her sermon, discussing the ins and outs of her profession and how gratifying it is to work a job that you love.
Viñal recalled Brooks-Moon opening with “Hello, Presentation High!” while she spread her arms out wide, “like she was giving everybody a hug.”
Each line of her address boomed with the same unbridled enthusiasm as when she belted out to 40,000 Giants fans, “Now batting, left fielder, number 25, Barrrrry Booooonds!”
“I came home that day, burst into the house, and told my mom, ‘I know what I want to do,’” Viñal said.
More than 20 years later, Viñal is a close friend — and a now-former colleague — of Brooks-Moon.
The Giants announced last week that Brooks-Moon would not return as their public-address announcer this season, ending her 24-year tour-de-force run behind the mic in the Oracle Park press box. The team has yet to detail a clear reason for the decision, only citing stalled contract-extension talks.
In the days since the decision, Brooks-Moon has received an outpouring of love from fans, media and players alike, many pleading with the Giants to reconsider parting ways with someone who’s now woven into the fabric of the team’s identity.
The San Francisco Giants and longtime PA announcer Renel Brooks-Moon — seen in the press box in 2002 — parted ways after the sides failed to reach agreement on a contract extension.
Kevork Djansezian/Associated Press file
Brooks-Moon’s voice has been the omnipresent oratory of Giants home games for nearly a quarter-century. For fans, she embodies baseball as much as the crack of the bat, the pop of the catcher’s mitt and the smells of garlic fries and Cha Cha bowls.
At most baseball stadiums, the public-address announcer provides the underlying soundtrack, the accompanying noise in between fans’ hot-dog bites and umpires’ strike-three calls. Though many announcers have their own distinct styles, there also tends to be a homogenous quality to the sound and rhythm of their narration.
But Brooks-Moon charted a unique path and reached a level of celebrity that few people connected to the Giants, outside of the players, have ever ascended to. Friends, peers, and admirers of Brooks-Moon say she accomplished that through a combination of charm, passion, and trailblazing excellence.
For years, baseball in America has sounded like a white man. But to generations of fans in San Francisco, baseball sounds like a Black woman.
“Renel became part of the scenery at Giants games,” longtime Bay Area sportswriter Monte Poole said. “She was in the background, yet somehow she was also front and center.”
A Bay Area baseball pioneer
Kate Scott said she was six months into her career as an on-air personality at KNBR-AM, the Giants’ flagship radio station, when she received a phone call from a number she didn’t recognize.
When she answered, the voice on the other line was one that she said she knew almost instantly, one she had heard countless times before while she rooted for the Giants throughout her life.
It was Brooks-Moon, the team’s ballpark voice since it moved to Oracle Park in 2000.
Brooks-Moon told Scott how much she enjoyed listening to Scott and that she loved hearing a woman on San Francisco sports radio. Shortly after, Brooks-Moon invited Scott to lunch on The Embarcadero at Fog City Diner, where the two discussed the industry and the challenges it takes for women to climb the ladder.
“It felt like Beyoncé reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, can you come join me for this tour?’” Scott, now the TV play-by-play broadcaster for the Philadelphia 76ers, said.
Brooks-Moon is one of the first Black women to work as a public-address announcer in Major League Baseball history. Last year she was one of only three female PA announcers in MLB — and by far the longest-tenured.
“Baseball is the ultimate good-old-boys network, like nothing else in any of the other major pro sports,” said Matt Pitman, the Golden State Warriors public address announcer since the team moved to Chase Center in 2019. “She overcame a lot and and not only broke those glass ceilings of being a woman and being a person of color — but she stayed, because she’s so good.”
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Black people represented 6.2% of players on MLB opening-day rosters in 2023, a record low since the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at Central Florida began tracking demographic data in 1991. That year, 18% of major leaguers were Black. MLB, overall, received a B grade for racial hiring and a C for gender hiring across the league.
Similarly, baseball’s announcers are overwhelmingly white and male, which makes Brooks-Moon’s place in the space — and her absence now that she’s no longer with the Giants — all the more noticeable.
“It’s a testament to what’s possible,” said Poole, who hosts “Race in America” on NBC Sports Bay Area. “There was a time in this country when that just simply wasn’t even possible. A woman wasn’t possible — and a Black woman certainly wasn’t possible to be in that role.”
The Bay Area’s public-address voices have been the exception, not the rule. There’s current Oakland A’s PA announcer Amelia Schimmel, and Brooks-Moon succeeded Sherry Davis, the first female public address announcer in MLB history.
Doug Glanville has experienced dozens of baseball stadiums throughout his life — first as a fan, then as a Major League Baseball player for nine seasons. For the last 15 years, he has been a broadcaster for ESPN. He said Oracle Park has always stood out.
“I got used to certain cadences and certain voices — but then there was San Francisco,” he said. “This is different. That made you step back and think, ‘Oh yeah, this is baseball too.’”
Former MLB player and current ESPN broadcaster Doug Glanville said he was starstruck when he met Renel Brooks-Moon at a Giants game in 2022.
Doug Glanville
Glanville, who is Black, grew up in Philadelphia in a family that had a complicated relationship with America’s pastime. While they loved the sport, they boycotted their hometown Phillies because they were upset about how the fan base had treated Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who became MLB’s first Black player in 1947.
The healing process only began 50 years later, when Glanville was traded to the Phillies and his family almost had no choice but to reopen itself to the club.
He said Brooks-Moon has been part of that healing process for other families like his, coming from a historically disenfranchised community, who felt detached from a game that hasn’t always loved them back.
When he hears her voice, he said, he hears someone who shares the experience of “being Black in America.”
“It reminded me of my great Aunt Nelly in North Philly,” he said. “I see my granddad in North Carolina going ‘Are you still hittin’ that ball?’ This is the power of representation.”
The City’s summer soundtrack
Brooks-Moon’s voice has become such a staple of Giants games that many fans know no other alternative.
“You’ve got an entire generation of young women and young women of color, young people of color, who go to a Giants game, and it’s just normal for them to hear someone that looks like them, and sounds like them as as the voice of the Major League Baseball team in your city,” Pitman said.
“For her to normalize having a female voice being the voice of a ballpark of a sports team — and not just a woman, as a Black woman, in a very white sport — to normalize all of that ... that just speaks to her talent, her light, her courage, her awareness of what she was doing for so many years,” Scott said. “As a woman in this industry, I’m so grateful for that.”
Carmen Kiew, co-host of the Giants’ weekly TV postgame show “Summer Sunday,” said Brooks-Moon’s counseling was vital for her as she climbed the industry as both a woman and ethnic minority in a sport largely filled with white men.
“She validated a lot of my experiences,” Kiew said. “She just made us feel worthwhile. And we’re making a difference for women in this space.”
“I needed that, because at the time that I started, my self-esteem was so low … I just felt like I didn’t belong,” Kiew said. “And over time, I think just being exposed to her and seeing how she dealt with certain things made me feel more comfortable in taking up more space in baseball.”
As the Giants’ in-stadium host for the last nine years, Viñal worked with Brooks-Moon in a between-innings duet of sorts. She said the two developed a strong camaraderie almost right away.
When the Giants first hired Viñal in 2015, she said, she approached Brooks-Moon, overcoming how starstruck she was. She told Brooks-Moon how the voice of Oracle Park had provided the foundation for everything she built in her career.
Brooks-Moon started crying, she said.
“From that day forward, Renel said, ‘you know that I got your back. I’m here for you. Mama Renel has you,’” Viñal said.
