Longtime Southern California chart caller Schneider retires Sunday

The job description defies logic. Accurately describe placings and margins of all runners in a race, write a narrative text of those performances, double check everything rapidly, and repeat the process every half-hour.

That has been the job at Southern California tracks since the fall of 1993 for Mike Schneider, who retires Sunday as a chart caller. In a few days, Schneider, 64, and his wife, Kathleen, will fly to New Orleans where they plan to retire.

Schneider, a diehard Oakland Raiders and Oakland A’s man, has lost count of the number of charts he has written since his career started in 1984 and in the last 27 years at Del Mar, Los Alamitos, and Santa Anita or the closed tracks Fairplex Park and Hollywood Park.

“I can’t even begin to think of it,” he recalled Thursday afternoon from his home in Los Angeles. “I can’t do math like that.”

The job of chart caller is a public one, with in-race margins being scrutinized by racing fans as well as the five or six word comments that appear in past performance lines, an abbreviated version of the text from full charts.

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Schneider is one of few chart callers with an old-fashioned approach. As a race unfolds, he calls out the names of horses and the margins between them – not their saddle cloth numbers. The rat-a-tat style is a daily soundtrack of racing for anyone seated nearby in the press box.

Schneider’s retirement has been planned. Kathleen spent years as a private chef for Dolores Hope, the wife of Bob Hope, and more recently at Google in Santa Monica, before she retired a few years ago.

The couple have long held an affection of New Orleans where they own a home. Plus, Schneider’s Raiders have moved to Las Vegas. Heck, why stay in California?

Schneider admits Sunday evening, at the end of a marathon 12-race program to close the Santa Anita winter-spring meeting, will feel odd. There will be a heartfelt departure from working alongside Ken Davis, his Equibase colleague of 13 years who will remain in his position with new chart caller Curtis Treece.

But there will be no grand farewell from press colleagues, who have not been allowed at Santa Anita since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic. A statistical legend – a man capable of producing the equivalent of a baseball box score in 30 minutes – will walk away without applause.

“I think it will be like the day we walked out of Hollywood,” he said of the famous track’s closing in December 2013.

“We gathered our stuff and walked out. It will be weird.”