'Frank TV,' take two

Frank Caliendo doesn't do many baseball impressions, but it's not because he doesn't love baseball.

"You don't actually hear a lot from baseball players. I mean, I guess they could hold up a 'trade me' sign," he jokes.

Instead, the comedian, actor and executive producer of his own Emmy-winning comedy sketch show "Frank TV," which launches its second season on TBS Oct. 21, tends to take aim at the most blustery figures in sports -- and he points out that baseball doesn't really have nationally-recognized personalities with the kind of braggadocio intrinsic in the personas he so famously imitates.

The 34 year-old Milwaukee native admits he's probably most famous for his impressions of John Madden, President George W. Bush and more recently, former NBA star Charles Barkley. And the devil is in details like Barkley's Philadelphia-style vowel pronunciation. (Last year, The New York Times reported that Caliendo "found Charles Barkley in the way he pronounced 'terrible -- as 'turr-ble.')

But baseball?

"Tim McCarver," he says, adding a perfectly intonated "bayyyysebawwwl" for effect. "There's something there with him...And if we did a spoof on the World Series, I'd probably bring back Harry Carey as a ghost."

Caliendo, who said he had great fun tailoring his Bush and Madden characters to ads for the Postseason , has no baseball spoofs in the new season of his critically acclaimed show. Instead, fans this fall can look forward to an election night special that gleefully takes aim at politicians of both parties, a sketch where Madden is desperate to start kowtowing to a new quarterback, and a William Shatner kidney stone charity sketch.

As he blazes through the season's highlights, his voice slips in and out of character-appropriate pronunciations with such alacrity and grace, you have to wonder how, even in a phone interview, he seems to switch voices and personas almost innately.

"If you want to compare it to baseball, it's like when you have your swing muscle memory and it just becomes a reaction," he explains. "That's what I do with the voices. But the muscle memory is in my throat instead of a reaction to a pitch."

That's something he's been able to do for many years, though. Marshalling the good ideas and funny moments into a narrative show -- and staying funny on camera -- are the big challenges.

"We shoot the stuff out of order and then put it back together like a puzzle. So you have to know what you're doing going in and have the jokes and writing and then put it all together, it's the same as any type of acting that way," he explains.

"It's easier for me because I can start talking like John Madden," he says forcefully, "Al Pacino," he says in a soft and gravelly voice, "or Robin Williams," he says with Williams' high-pitched timbre and hyper cadence.

Shooting the TV spots for MLB, in which he improvised around the script as President Bush and then as Madden, was an exciting first for Caliendo. In addition to his own show, the actor is currently a member of the FOX NFL Sunday pregame show. But he's never before collaborated with MLB, despite having baseball in his blood.

Caliendo's father played in the Minor Leagues for the White Sox farm system in the '60s. And Caliendo himself was named an All-American left fielder on the 1988 junior Olympic traveling team he played with in the mid-West.

"Our [1988 traveling] team, we were all 14 and under. And we had a pitcher who ended up pitching at Michigan and blowing out his arm, but he was 6'4" at 14. He threw 88 mph pitches, and we had another guy who was 6'3" who also later blew out his arm," he recalls.

"Having all these farm boys was like having [The Natural's baseball prodigy] Roy Hobbs on the team. But that's my claim to baseball fame."

As for the 2008 postseason, Caliendo's loyalties are as diverse as the characters he impersonates.

"Wouldn't it be fun to see the Cubs win?" he asks, perhaps hinting at the fact that he was born in Chicago.

"But I have friends in Philly and I'm from Milwaukee. I'm a weird guy. I like to see dynasties. People don't realize how hard to is to win that much. An underdog can win but to do that constantly is amazing. I picked the Giants last year for the Super Bowl but I thought it would have been great to see the Patriots win. That's the great thing about sports how much things turn around in a year. And how did the Mets blow that again?"

At the end of the day, Caliendo watches baseball with the kind of critical eye with which an actor might regard another thespian's performance.

"I like to see great pitching performances, hitting, the fundamentals of the game," he says. "That's the cool thing about baseball: battling a little bit, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. And the strategy that goes into it. It's such an amazing game."