Sid Iyer Puts a South Asian Voice in the Low-A Booth

Sid Iyer, 28, is calling select games for the Ontario Tower Buzzers, the Dodgers’ new Single-A club. He is, as far as he knows, the only Indian-descent voice doing baseball play-by-play, and he is doing it 40 miles from Dodger Stadium in a park that did not exist last year.

Jim Alexander’s Orange County Register column this week treated that as a local origin story. The larger fit is harder to miss once you line up the summer: a South Asian player wave, a league office in New Delhi, and a new Low-A booth in the Inland Empire that finally sounds like part of it.

The Dodgers Planted a Farm Club Next to an Airport

The Tower Buzzers are the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Single-A affiliate in the California League, a first-year club born from a three-team shuffle that moved the old Rancho Cucamonga franchise east into Ontario Ranch. Their aviation-themed identity at ONT Field riffs on Ontario International Airport and on the Top Gun line about buzzing the tower. The mascot is Maverick, a bee in goggles and a flight scarf.

The park holds about 6,000 fans at 9375 E. Riverside Drive, with 325-foot lines, 405 to center, a grass berm, and a kids’ zone with a splash pad. Ontario International Airport holds the naming rights. The stadium sits inside a sports complex local coverage has priced around $100 million. Diamond Baseball Holdings operates the club. Allan Benavides is the general manager. John Shoemaker, 69, the Dodgers’ captain of player development, is managing in his 50th season in the organization.

Opening night was April 2 against the Lake Elsinore Storm. Jaime Jarrín threw a ceremonial first pitch to Joe Kelly. The Buzzers lost 7-5. Local recaps described a sold-out first crowd, the first professional baseball in Ontario since the 1947 Ontario Orioles.

Iyer shares the play-by-play with Jeff Woolson. Live games go out on iHeartRadio and MLB/MiLB TV, with some home dates on FOX Sports AM1350, part of the Dodgers radio network. He posted the hire himself on opening day.

Excited to announce I am a Minor League Baseball Broadcaster for select games of the Ontario @towerbuzzers, Single-A affiliate of the @Dodgers.

Live game broadcasts are on iHeartRadio + MLB/MiLB TV, and select home games on FOX Sports AM1350 (part of the Dodgers Radio Network)⚾️ pic.twitter.com/4kcQ7mrqaa

— Sid Iyer (@thesidiyer) April 2, 2026

The daily product is already leaking onto the club’s own clips. Through the spring and summer Iyer has been tagging Tower Buzzers highlight videos with the same two words, “On the call,” over home runs by Easton Shelton and Conner O’Neal, a triple by Ching-Hsien Ko, and a clean outing from Luis Gamez. In July the club joked that he may have coined a favorite catchphrase. That is how a Low-A booth usually proves it belongs: the team starts using your audio.

Bellarmine, a Dead Arm and Five Years of Standup

He had a ball in his hand from age three, he told UCLA Anderson in 2025. At Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose he left as the winningest pitcher at the school in 25 years, an Under Armour preseason All-American who pitched for the Brewers’ California scout team and made USA Baseball’s National Team Identification Series. Six Division I offers. He committed to UC Davis.

Then the arm went. “Obviously a hard decision” to change plans, he told Alexander, the kind of choice a pitcher is always bracing for. He enrolled at UC Berkeley as a data science student instead, wrote for the Daily Californian, and started standup his sophomore year.

“I did it for five years, went on tour, got to tour all the local L.A. comedy clubs, got to work with people who were on Netflix, ‘America’s Got Talent’, all those shows,” he said. At some point the two crafts collapsed into one job. Baseball and comedy, he decided, meet in commentary. “You’re telling the story of players. You’re telling the story of a team, the connection to a community.”

THE PATH TO THE MIC

1. High school in San Jose: Stars at Bellarmine, commits to UC Davis, then loses the arm and the scholarship path.
2. UC Berkeley: Studies data science, writes student journalism, starts standup and later tours L.A. clubs for five years.
3. After graduation: Takes an engineering job at IBM, then moves into product work while applying to UCLA Anderson.
4. UCLA, 2024-25: Contacts assistant A.D. Steven Calista, lands Bruins baseball color on Big Ten Network broadcasts with Nick Koop, and follows the club to the College World Series in Omaha.
5. April 2, 2026: Debuts on select Ontario Tower Buzzers games at a brand-new park, on iHeart, MiLB TV, and AM1350.

The comedy years are not a cute detour in this booth. Stephen Nelson, who has heard plenty of prospect voices, told Alexander that breaking into standup is “a whole other beast” compared with the usual sports-fan gauntlet around play-by-play. Iyer still tracks games like a pitcher. On the Bruins broadcasts, his favorite work was pitch sequencing, “what pitchers are thinking on the mound as they’re going after hitters.”

Who Is Sid Iyer?

Sid Iyer is a California-born former pitcher, a UCLA Anderson M.B.A. from the class of 2025, and, as of last May, a technical program manager at Dropbox who took Bruins baseball on the side. He grew up barely seeing anyone on a diamond or a broadcast who looked like him. He can name “really only three or four people of my complexion” from those years, and they all knew each other.

He told Anderson he wanted “the most balanced version of myself,” moving from a cut-and-dried engineering track toward the messier human side of a business school. The through line he keeps naming is connection: a kid waving at the press box after a Bruins game, a fan asking him back next season, a panel where he tried to make people laugh and feel less frozen.

During a midweek UCLA game in 2025, Roch Cholowsky’s mother walked up with a question that still sits with him. “By the way, are you Indian?” she asked. Then: “Roch is a quarter Indian.” Cholowsky, then a Bruins junior, went No. 1 overall to the Chicago White Sox this July. Iyer had spent a career in the sport assuming that kind of overlap was rare. Hearing it from a star’s mother, he said, was “incredibly fulfilling and cool,” and also a way “we can expand the game.”

He has said kids should be able to turn on a broadcast and hear someone like him, and also see players they have not seen before. Ontario helps on the geography. “With Ontario being within like a stone’s throw from where the Dodgers are, I think there’s that really beautiful connection.”

Rocker, Nimmala and Cholowsky Arrived First

The players got there before the booth did. Kumar Rocker, whose mother Lalitha is Indian and whose maternal grandparents came from Andhra Pradesh, debuted for the Texas Rangers on Sept. 12, 2024, and was widely identified as the first player of Indian descent in the majors. He struck out seven in four innings that night in Seattle.

Arjun Nimmala, whose parents emigrated from India and who spent summers there playing cricket before baseball won, was Toronto’s first-round pick in 2023, 20th overall, and signed for $3 million. On Aug. 3 the Angels acquired him, plus outfielder Eddie Micheletti Jr. and right-hander Angel Rivero, for José Soriano. MLB Pipeline moved him to No. 1 in the Angels system and No. 38 in baseball. He had been hitting.279/.355/.451 in 33 Double-A games; a hand laceration on an Aug. 6 slide home stopped the first look in the new org.

Cholowsky’s pro season was shorter. The Chicago Sun-Times reported the White Sox shut him down Aug. 22 with right wrist soreness after nine High-A games at Winston-Salem, where he slashed.167/.326/.333. He had signed for a reported $10.35 million.

That is still a short list. Rocker has had to fight his arm. Nimmala has already missed time. Cholowsky’s first pro month ended on the shelf. The point is not that the pipeline is overflowing. It is that the pipeline finally exists in public, and the new Dodgers affiliate in Ontario now has a voice who does not have to discover that fact in the eighth inning.

Nelson Told Him to Keep Aiming Higher

Iyer already had a parallel inside the same organization. Stephen Nelson, in his fourth season calling Dodgers games, is MLB’s only Asian American play-by-play announcer. Iyer met him at Dodger Stadium before a game and said so. Nelson, Iyer recalled, went in for the bro hug. The advice was simple: keep aiming higher. “You’re not only representing yourself.”

This isn’t just about broadcasting. I think you can widen the scope. But I think representation is a vital portion of progress. To sum it up, it’s that classic saying, see it so you can be it, right?

Stephen Nelson, Dodgers play-by-play, by phone from Atlanta

Nelson grew up in Huntington Beach watching Rob Fukuzaki on KABC and Frank Buckley on KTLA, Japanese American sportscasters who made the job look possible. “For me growing up, I turn on the TV and I could see Rob Fukuzaki doing sports, so like it was never a question that this is something I could do too,” he told Alexander. In a 2023 MLB.com interview he put the burden more sharply: being first is special, “but it will mean a lot less to me if I’m the last or the only.”

His read on Iyer was about fuel. “He’s got this hunger and this passion to get better, and it means a lot to him to represent for his family and his community. I think that kind of fuel can take him a long way.” Iyer posted on Aug. 27 that Nelson’s comments in the Register piece were “such a privilege,” then went back to work. There is almost no national argument about this hire on X. The clips are local, the thanks are local, and the job is still 132 games of Class-A baseball.

MLB’s India Office Has 2,000 Youth Players

The league has been treating India as more than a curiosity. Sports Business Journal reported in May that MLB had struck a collaboration with the Reliance Initiative for Sports and Entertainment, including a live event planned for Mumbai in October, plus marketing, social, and youth programming. Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s senior vice president of global operations and events, called it “a long-term play,” looking 5 to 10 years out, not one.

MLB has kept an office in New Delhi since 2019, with two full-time staffers. It already has a broadcast deal with JioStar and has aired postseason games there. In 2023 the league made a four-part documentary, Indian Baseball Dreams, about Nimmala’s draft path. A year later it staged a Hot Shots hitting event with cricket star Shikhar Dhawan and former big leaguer Adam Jones.

WHAT MLB HAS ON THE GROUND IN INDIA

• The horizon: Yolkut told SBJ the league is thinking in a 5-to-10-year window, not a single season of novelty games.
• The office: A New Delhi outpost has been open since 2019, staffed by two full-time employees.
• The kids: About 2,000 players and 160 teams now take part in the MLB Cup youth tournament, up from a standing start Yolkut described as “zero.”
• The next date: A live MLB event is slated for Mumbai in October under the RISE collaboration.

Two thousand players is a rounding error next to cricket. Yolkut said so himself. It is also the first time the league has a named South Asian first-rounder in the Angels system, a No. 1 overall pick with a quarter-Indian tie that a Bruins announcer learned from the player’s mother, and an Indian-American voice on the Dodgers’ new Inland Empire club in the same calendar year. The market the league is courting overseas already has a listening post 40 miles from Chavez Ravine.

A Jersey Number Still Comes With a Story

Ontario’s inaugural 2026 roster opened with shortstop Emil Morales, a 19-year-old who had just hit.339/.420/.548 in 30 games at Rancho Cucamonga and landed on several top-100 lists. Iyer caught him before the Dodgers moved him to High-A Great Lakes. The conversation that stuck was almost throwaway. Why that jersey number? “There’s a really sweet, endearing, innocent story behind it,” Iyer said. “You just realize that these are … kids.”

Nine of the Dodgers’ 2025 draft picks started on that first Ontario list, including second-round pitcher Cam Leiter and third-round outfielder Landyn Vidourek. In July, closer Edwin Díaz even used the Buzzers for a rehab night, 1 inning, 1 strikeout, 1 walk, fastball to 98, with Iyer on the call. The 132-game Low-A grind is shorter than the big-league 162 and longer than a college spring. The stories are smaller on purpose.

Iyer is still splitting those nights with Woolson as the first Tower Buzzers season runs down. The Register photographed him on Aug. 23 against the Inland Empire 66ers at ONT Field. Two days later Alexander’s column ran. Two days after that, Iyer thanked him, thanked Nelson, and called it an honor to be in the Dodgers organization. Then the schedule kept coming.