Sid Iyer Sells the Stories Ontario’s New Club Needs

Sid Iyer calls Single-A baseball for the Ontario Tower Buzzers, a first-year Dodgers farm club in a new 6,000-seat park 40 miles from Los Angeles. He is 28. He shares a microphone in a market that already has the Dodgers, and his nights are spent making fans care about teenagers who will not stay.

The club can sell a splash pad and a Top Gun joke. It still has to sell the kids.

Ontario’s New Park Sits 40 Miles From Dodger Stadium

The Tower Buzzers play at 6,000-seat ONT Field east of Los Angeles, at 9375 E. Riverside Drive, with fences at 325 feet down the lines and 405 to center. The park is the showpiece of the 190-acre Ontario Sports Empire, a sprawl of youth diamonds, football fields, and multipurpose pitches west of the Rockies. Fans walk in through Arrival Gates. Group spaces are billed as Luxury Flight Suites and Flight Cabins. The San Gabriel Mountains sit beyond the bowl.

The name comes from Ontario International Airport and from a line in Top Gun. Maverick, the mascot, is a bee in aviator goggles. The last professional club in town, the Ontario Orioles, lasted one season in 1947. Seventy-nine years later the Dodgers’ Single-A team arrived from Rancho Cucamonga, where the Quakes had been the affiliate.

Diamond Baseball Holdings operates the club. The 2026 California League shuffle was a three-team swap, not a clean expansion.

THE 2026 CALIFORNIA LEAGUE SWAP

• Ontario: The old Rancho Cucamonga Dodgers affiliation moved here as the Tower Buzzers.
• Rancho Cucamonga: The Quakes name stayed, now filled by the former Inland Empire 66ers as an Angels club.
• San Bernardino: The Modesto Nuts moved south and kept the 66ers identity as a Mariners affiliate.

Holdings also runs other California League clubs in that eight-team circuit, which means the Inland Empire’s Single-A map is now a family business with three nearby road trips. Ontario opened April 2 against the Lake Elsinore Storm and lost 7-5. The next two nights it won 16-0 and 6-4. John Shoemaker, 69, manages the team in his 50th season in professional baseball after the Dodgers named him captain of player development in 2015.

Cheap Tickets After a Sold-Out First Pitch

Opening night filled the new bowl. By the first week of September, with the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes in town, secondary get-in listings sat as low as $6, with an average around $11 and a high of $17, and demand marked low. A midweek outfield seat had been listed around $5 before the season. Forty miles west, Dodger Stadium still eats the region’s baseball attention.

ONT FIELD IN BRIEF

• Listed capacity: 6,000 seats, with berms, a splash pad, and a right-field food hall called the Baggage Hall.
• First pitch: April 2, 2026, a 7-5 loss to Lake Elsinore in a sold-out park.
• Late-season board: Quakes at Ontario, Sept. 1 through Sept. 6, with get-in prices that no longer look like a debut.
• The bind: A family can buy a Single-A night for less than a Dodgers beer, and still has to be given a reason to care who is batting second.

That reason is not the aviation puns. It is whether anyone remembers the shortstop after he is gone.

Why Sid Iyer Ended Up in the Booth

Iyer grew up as a pitcher. Bellarmine College Preparatory’s athletics account logged a complete game in a 5-1 win over Valley Christian in March 2015 and a two-hitter in a 4-2 win over Capuchino the next spring. He had a Division I offer from UC Davis, took it, then hurt the arm. “Obviously a hard decision” to change course, he said. “But as a pitcher that’s something you’re wary of, making sure you stay healthy and keep the arm as OK as possible.”

“It was such an important part of my life. It was, and still is, the most important sport to me,” he said. “You learn so much by playing baseball, being around the game. You learn about failure. You learn about how to bounce back. And then even if you go 0 for 4, give up two home runs or whatever, you’ve always got another game coming up.”

THE PATH TO THE ONTARIO BOOTH

1. March 2015: Throws a complete game for Bellarmine in San Jose.
2. After the UC Davis offer: An arm injury ends the pitching track, and he becomes a student rather than a student-athlete.
3. The comedy years: Five years of standup, including L.A. clubs and bills with people who had been on Netflix and America’s Got Talent.
4. UCLA: Broadcast work on Bruins sports and the Big Ten Network while he works toward an MBA, including a 2025 run that reached the College World Series in Omaha.
5. May 29, 2025: UCLA Baseball tells fans Nick Koop and Sid Iyer will call regional games on the Bruins Audio Network.
6. 2026: Joins the Tower Buzzers and shares play-by-play with Jeff Woolson.

The club’s own game stories lists Jeff Woolson as play-by-play broadcaster, and the team feed leans on Woolson for rehab nights and extra-inning wins. Iyer is the other voice in a new booth, which is a quieter job than the park’s branding and a harder one than reading balls and strikes.

Five Years on L.A. Comedy Club Stages

The injury did not hand him a headset. Comedy did. He spent five years onstage, toured local L.A. rooms, and worked with comics who had already been on television. Baseball never left the DVR. Then the two jobs occupied the same sentence.

Wait, baseball and comedy, the middle ground of the two is just commentary. It’s more than even just telling the play-by-play of a game. You’re telling the story of players. You’re telling the story of a team, the connection to a community.

Sid Iyer, Ontario Tower Buzzers play-by-play

Ontario sits a stone’s throw from the Dodgers, in his phrasing, and he treats that as a feature. A Single-A broadcast that only recites the count will lose a listener who can drive to Chavez Ravine. A broadcast that can tell you why a 19-year-old wears a number might keep that listener through the fifth inning of a 16-0 night.

He said the click was simple once it arrived. He wanted the middle ground, and the Buzzers, in year one, had more middle ground than most clubs. New park, new name, new kids, old big-league shadow.

Ontario Lost Emil Morales to Great Lakes

The club named its inaugural roster in March, an international group of arms and a thin everyday core that included infielder Emil Morales, plus 2025 draft names such as pitcher Cam Leiter and outfielder Landyn Vidourek. Morales was the headliner. In May the Dodgers sent him to High-A Great Lakes. Ontario had him for the first chapter and not the rest of the book.

Iyer remembered an early-season talk with Morales before that promotion. “We went down and we were just chatting with him and, you just realize that these are kids,” he said. “You ask them a question as simple as, ‘Why’d you pick that jersey number?’ And there’s a really sweet, endearing, innocent story behind it.”

Those stories walk out the door when the big club needs a shortstop in Michigan. The 132-game Single-A grind looks like the majors’ 162 on a calendar and nothing like it in the clubhouse, because the faces change when a prospect gets hot. Iyer also drew a different kind of night: a rehab inning from Dodgers closer Edwin Diaz. Iyer said he called Diaz’s third outing with the Buzzers on MiLB TV and iHeart, 1 inning, 1 strikeout, 1 walk, fastball touching 98. Woolson drew Blake Snell. The stars pass through. The teenagers leave for good.

If the booth only calls the score, the fan has no one to miss. If the booth has already asked about the number on the back, the promotion feels like a send-off instead of a vacancy.

Kumar Rocker, Roch Cholowsky and a Quarter-Indian Shortstop

Iyer is, as far as he knows, the only broadcaster of Indian descent calling baseball. He grew up seeing almost no one who looked like him in the sport. “Growing up I barely saw anybody that looked like me,” he said. “Off the top of my head, I can think of really only three or four people of my complexion that I ever really saw. And we all kind of knew each other because it was like, you know, small world.”

The pipeline is no longer empty, which is why his booth talk keeps landing on names that still surprise people in the stands.

INDIAN AMERICAN NAMES ON THE BOARD

The Cholowsky moment happened on a midweek Bruins broadcast. The player’s mother walked up and asked, “By the way, are you Indian?” Then she said Roch was a quarter Indian. Iyer called it incredibly fulfilling. “There’s that connection, but it’s also just the way we can expand the game, too.”

Nimmala’s move west puts another Indian American shortstop inside the same Southern California orbit as Iyer’s club, even if the Angels and Dodgers do not share a farm. Kids who find the Buzzers on iHeart can hear a voice that sounds like the names they are starting to see on prospect lists. Iyer put it without a speech. “Kids can watch TV or listen to a broadcast and they can see someone like me or hear someone like me, but also see players like that who maybe they haven’t seen before.”

Keep Aiming Higher, Nelson Told Him

Dodgers radio and TV voice Stephen Nelson, in his fourth season and the only Asian American broadcaster in the majors, is the person Iyer can point to one level up in the same organization. They met at Dodger Stadium before a game. Iyer told him the parallel. Nelson went in for the bro hug. “That is so cool to hear. I love that,” Nelson said, in Iyer’s telling. The advice, as Iyer heard it, was to keep aiming higher. “You’re not only representing yourself.”

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? And we’re fortunate having grown up in the Southland, where there’s such a strong and large Asian American population. 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.

Stephen Nelson, Dodgers broadcaster, by phone from Atlanta

Nelson also sized up the comedy years. Breaking into standup, he said, is a whole other beast from surviving sports callers. “He’s just really a joy to talk to. 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.”

On Aug. 27 Iyer posted that the profile was an honor and thanked Nelson by name, calling it a privilege to be in the Dodgers organization.

An honor to be profiled by the @ocregister (@JimAlexandersB1) for my broadcasting work with the @towerbuzzers.

Special thanks to @Dodgers broadcaster @StephenNelson for his comments about me as well. Such a privilege to be part of the @Dodgers org. 🎙️⚾️https://t.co/CAXUUgfw7U

— Sid Iyer (@thesidiyer) August 27, 2026

The Buzzers still have a homestand to finish and a winter to reassemble a roster that will not look like March. Iyer will be back on the air asking a new shortstop why he picked that number, because the park is no longer new and the $6 ticket does not come with a story attached.