Crowdsourcing MLB Broadcasters: Introduction
Committed baseball fans spend upwards of three or four hours per day during the season watching (or listening to) their favorite team play — and watching, via Extra Innings or MLB.TV, a number of other games outside their respective television markets. Given the interest in the sport, it’s not surprising to find entire websites (like the present one, for instance) dedicated to analyzing the performances of players, front offices, etc.
As most fans will agree, however, it’s frequently difficult to separate the experience of watching this or that team from the broadcasters whose job it is to narrate and comment upon the action. Residents of Wisconsin would be hard-pressed to imagine Brewer baseball without Bob Uecker’s constant celebration of beer and cured meat; Dodger fans have a similar affection for the aged and ageless Vin Scully; Cubs broadcaster Len Kasper is one of a growing number of announcers who’ve embraced sabermetrics; and White Sox TV play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson is… another person employed in this capacity.
It’s not uncommon to come across exasperated tweets — or entire websites — dedicated to censuring the sometimes poor behavior of broadcasters. But never (so far as I know of, at least) has an attempt been made to put a grade on each of the league’s 30 television broadcast teams. In this post, we’ll begin to attempt just such a thing.
Back in August, I asked the readers of FanGraphs to help identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each of the 30 MLB teams’ booths. Now that we’ve reached the end of the season — have reached, even, the end of the Arizona Fall League — it makes sense to begin this experiment. Whatever information comes of it will likely prove valuable for the One Night Only game previews found here during the regular season.
For each television broadcasting team (and, if the experiment goes well, for each radio team, too), the reader will be asked to grade said team on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being highest, according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.
Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? merely solid? worse than that? Analysis might be more of the scouting or more of the sabermetric variety, but ought to be grounded in reason either way. The overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Uecker, for example, provides almost nothing in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, need be.
Below is our first attempt at this — for the Arizona Diamondbacks television broadcast team of (typically) Daron Sutton and Mark Grace. Subsequent attempts will appear in the Offseason Notes column found in these pages (most) every week day.
Another question should be “How many times per year do you listen/watch these broadcasters?”
Agree.
I’m very curious to see the results of the 30 teams, but there’s a high probability that the rankings will be based on who gets more hometown votes.
I’m a Marlins fan, so Rich and Tommy are the broadcasters I know the most. Because of this, I can vote confidently on those two when the time comes. But with almost any other team, I’m not familiar enough with the broadcasters to give them a rating.
Perhaps adding a question of how many times you’ve listened to the broadcasters will give a better picture and allow you to filter those who may have listened to a team 20 or more times.
So you’re the Marlins fan.
Hey, thanks for the input here. Took your advice for the Atlanta Television crowdsourcing (on Tuesday). Will how it works out.
If Buck Martinez name appears anywhere on your home teams’ list, can you just have it auto-vote to 0?
I suggest controlling for whether respondents have satellite radio or not. I only know many of the broadcast teams because I don’t hear my home broadcasters for away games.
I also assume things will be skewed a bit for John Miller, and need to differentiate between Giants broadcasts and national broadcasters.
Feh, missed the part where you are starting with tv first. Well, my comment will apply when your series is wildly successful and you do the same for radio.
Can we skip to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver or are we saving the fun stuff for last?
I want Chris Berman
You’re with me, leather
Does crowd- sourcing mean the same thing as ‘defenestration?’ If so, I cast my vote now to crowd-source John Sterling.
USA Today undertook this exact project, albeit with radio announcers, back in 2005.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2005-07-26-announcers-overview_x.htm#al
Thanks for the link. The Jays’ Warren Sawkiw was horribly irritating–I actually couldn’t take listening to him at all. I would suspect the current Toronto team of Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby will score much better.
Does anybody know how that dude got the job? I mean he just showed up out of thin air one year, was unbearably awful and then disappeared. There were a couple of fairly terrible guys working with the acceptably mediocre, if syrupy voiced, Jerry Howarth before Ashby came on the scene and rescued the Jays stale radio sound.
Yeah, thanks for that.
Anyone read that Curt Smith book, Voices of Summer? Sounds interesting.
Regarding those ratings, it seems like there’s a pretty strong correlation between each of the individual categories. The Dodger team, for example, gets 9.5s across the board; the Nationals and Diamondbacks get 6s.
Where do Kruk and Kuip fit in your mix?
Can’t wait to rate Dick Bremer and Bert “Create a good downward plane” Blyleven.
Bert “at the Major League level” Blyleven and Bert “right here/right there” Blyleven also apply.
The White Sox announcers (don’t know their names) are really annoying. The phrase ‘he gone!!’ whenever they get a home run is among the most aggravating in sports. They are the only announcing team I cannot stand to listen to and I’ve heard almost every team’s announcers multiple times this year & for the past couple of years. Among the best are the Reds, Dodgers, Brewers & Twins. I actually don’t think Buck Martinez is that bad.
Hawk Harrelson is the annoying one. He’s mentioned above in appropriately disparaging fashion. STeve Stone i actually a knowledgable color man. He’s not so big on advanced metrics but he will teach you how to pitch – why a pitcher throws a pitch in a given situation, how to set up a hitter, really cool stuff. I can’t count the number of times he has said “if he throws [specific pitch] here he’ll get [specific result]” and then it happens. It’s really cool. Unfortunately, you can’t mute half the broadcast.
Stone is the best analyst I’ve heard when it comes to the pitcher vs. hitter battles. The guy knows his stuff.
This is a great project. Thanks for doing it.
Uecker’s not wrong. After a Wisconsin vacation this summer I came to the conclusion that the four major food groups in Wisconsin are meat, cheese, fried and beer.
On YES we Yankee fans have to deal with Michael Kay most often, so that will kill the NYY rankings. For one or two series a year we get the dream team of Singleton, Cone, and Leiter. I learn so much about baseball every time I watch their broadcasts.
Alas, the egomaniac that is Kay ruins so many games…
What Josh Wexler said. Bravo for tackling this. Disclosure: I’m a White Sox fan living in Brewers country after being subjected to the Yankees since the days of ‘Phil Rizzuto for the money sto-ah.’. Earaches? I know earaches.
It matters whether a broadcaster reflects his market. Folks-y, no-frills Uecker IS Wisconsin — we’re almost single-minded in our focus on OUR teams, to the point where no one raises a peep when an NFL broadcast from Wayne and Larry fails to mention an NFL squad other than the Packers and whoever they happen to be playing. Ueck will never mention BABIP, at least not coherently, but he’s the right guy for this job.
The problem with Hawk is that Sox fans aren’t the “He gawn” type so much as they are quick to criticize, a la Harry Caray. Me thinks his act might play better in Kansas City or Charlotte or similar smaller ooutpost. (Incidentally Hawk’s trademark is used for strikeouts of opposing batters, not home runs.)
Can’t wait to see how this plays out … and to unload once we get a shot at the John Sterling/Suzyn Waldman radio daze.
I’ve been saying this for a while now, the Yankees should trade their entire broadcast team plus Jesus Montero for Vin Scully
Anything less than Bob Uecker is a disappointment. Mr. Baseball.
This was said in the August thread, but: announcers should be rated individually. Giving Hawk Harrelson credit for stuff that Steve Stone says is like giving baseball players RBIs for hitting behind good batters.
Don’t forget the team of Jim Deshaies and Bill Brown in Houston. Houston may be cursed with a crap team, but they’ve been blessed with a rich harvest of personable, low-drama, insightful analysts going back to the unforgettable salad days with Larry Dierker and Brown.
Great project. I’ve voted on effort. If you don’t like a guy’s style, that’s one thing. But I get the sense some longtime broadcasters mail it in. Pronunciation gaffs, lack of accurate background info is really frustrating.
Thw Ranger’s color man, Tom Grieve, is super bland and provides nothing insightful in terms of insider knowlege. A 1/4 of thetime he mumbles, a 1/4 of the time he thanx the people who brought the crew food, a 1/4 of the time, he says nothing, and 1/4 of the time he,… I honestly can’t remember. On the road, he’ll talk about the restaurants he visits a lot. He’ll never be fired though. He’s just on autpilot basically. The idea of him actually prepping fora game, going over stats, etc…. would never happen with Grieve.
But after suffering RexHudler back when I live in LA, nothing will ever seem as bad. THe near-nothingness of Grieves mumblings will always trump Hudlers a squrrel-on-crack hyper-homer drivel.