NEW YORK — Emmy, Tony and Olivier Award winner Bryan Cranston is a leading face of Major League Baseball’s promotional campaign ahead of opening day for the second straight season, recording a video at Dodger Stadium highlighting several stars.
The actor is the voice of an “Anything Can Happen” campaign that launched Monday after last year’s video promoting rules changes. The new ad features two-way star Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers along with fellow MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. of the Atlanta Braves, Arizona’s Corbin Carroll and Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz.
“Here I am at 68 years old and I’m walking around this citadel of my childhood,” he said during a Zoom interview last week. “When I first went to Dodger Stadium, it was this monolith, this magnificent, huge place.”
Cranston has memories of attending games dating to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in 1961, the year before Dodger Stadium opened, and lists players who stick out in his mind: Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Wally Moon, Don Sutton, Duke Snider, Bill Russell, Davey Lopes, Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, Rick Monday, Fernando Valenzuela and Kirk Gibson.
His production company is named Moonshot Entertainment after Wally Moon, whose opposite-field drives over the Coliseum’s short left-field wall were dubbed Moon Shots by Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully.
Cranston still has his old programs.
“My little chicken scratches attempting to keep score when I was 6 or 7, and then I got better at it,” Cranston said.
As a kid, Cranston envisioned himself wearing Dodger blue. He played infield at Canoga Park High School, where he said he missed a season after tearing an ankle ligament.
“There was only one element that prevented me from becoming a Major League Baseball player, and that was talent,” he said with a laugh.
While he was on location in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the production of “Breaking Bad,” which aired from 2008-13, Cranston became friends with John Traub, general manager of the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.
“I’m finishing the day and I look at my watch, I go up there in the seventh inning,” Cranston said. “I would drive to the stadium, go through and say hello to the folks, and they’d say hello to me, and I take pictures and stuff. I got to see two innings of professional baseball players.”
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