Hey hey, ho ho, Buck & McCarver's got to go.
Every Baseball postseason, I simultaneously look forward to the drama of the playoffs while dreading the encroachment of mediocre Network broadcasters into the television play-by-play game calling.
Since I got my new car this January, I have had access to every major league team's radio broadcasters via XM Radio. What XM does is broadcast the radio stream of whichever team is hosting the games. So if the Giants are playing at Los Angeles, I get Vin Scully and the rest of the Dodgers' crew. If the Giants are hosting, I get Dave Flemming and Jon Miller.
I've learned a lot of things about MLB broadcasters. First and foremost, good broadcasters are few and far between. I am not just being biased when I say that the Giants' team contains some of the best baseball broadcasters out there. Jon Miller is a bona fide legend in the field, and Dave Flemming has only improved over the years of being paired with Miller. Miller is brilliant at bringing the action to life, never omitting any of the play. On the TV side, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow are folksy and humorous while also sharing volumes of insider knowledge about the game. However, the SF team doesn't have a monopoly on quality.
Vin Scully, though he works for the hated Dodgers, can easily be called the best baseball play-by-play man out there. He seamlessly weaves a tapestry of biographical information and relevant anecdotes in and out of his game-calling without sacrificing the narrative of the game. Plus, his voice is a pleasure to listen to; sonorous and expansive without being pompous. The Red Sox' radio team is also quite good, with Joe Castiglione providing expert game-calling. The Angels have an excellent team of Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc. I have also come to appreciate Joe Angel's work with Baltimore. Though he annoyed me as a Giants' broadcaster, having heard countless crappy play-by-play teams makes me appreciate his skills.
So who are the bad ones? Public enemy #1: John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman of the Yankees. Sterling's play-by-play is lackluster at best; criminally cursory at worst. Where Jon Miller will tell you that the batter swung, grounded to short, the shortstop fielded the ball and made a strong throw to first to retire the hitter, often the most Sterling can be bothered to relate is that the batter swung and was thrown out. There is no richness to his call. And Waldman is superfluous, providing little color beyond a bluntly-stated reliance on the TV replay to determine events that occurred on the field. She also has a knack for attempting and failing to relate backstories (an example I recall is her referring to a player who had been at Scranton until 24 hours prior to the current game. There was nothing else to the story; no account of why he had gotten the call nor what chain of events brought him there). And then there is the team for the Pittsburgh Pirates. If you tune into a Pirates' home game on XM, you can go for as much as 45 seconds to a minute before the broadcasters will even say anything. I tend to attribute this to "TV syndrome," where broadcasters are used to doing TV where many events narrate themselves. However, the Pirates' team is ridiculously taciturn, often speaking after half a minute of dead air only to crudely sketch the play before lapsing back into silence. The Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals' play-by-play announcers are also unsatisfying to listen to on the radio. The Cubs team is amusing, especially so because Ron Santo is the most unabashed homer in sports; constantly referring to the Cubs as "we". Objectivity be damned!
I ramble about all this because while there are some broadcasting teams worse than Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, they are precious few. Having watched significant portions of the first two games of the world series, their bias toward the National League team is once again painfully obvious. Buck's father was a career-long broadcaster for the Cardinals, as was Buck himself prior to 2008. McCarver was a long-time catcher for both the Cardinals AND the Phillies. It is impossible for McCarver to be unbiased. He may not even be aware of his own prejudice, but it is obvious in the bent of every piece of commentary that he and Buck favor the NL team. Dismissing the Rays based on prior track record alone would be forgivable - if uncharitable, given that they are the best team in the American League - but it is aggravating to listen to a constant stream of adulation for Charlie Manuel and the Phillies, and how the new sports complex in Philadelphia is one of the greatest in the nation.
Additionally, Buck and McCarver are bad game analysts. Their assumptions about a player's actions are often not borne out, and they are constantly backing and filling throughout the call of a game. They always sounds stilted and amateurish to me. Watching a Giants broadcast is so rewarding because Mike Krukow has encyclopedic knowledge of the game and how (and WHY) it's played, and on numerous occasions I have seen him predict exactly what will occur on an upcoming play. McCarver seems to have no such acumen as a color man; his anecdotes are as colorless as Buck's narration is bland.
Overall, Fox does a poor job of representing baseball. They appear to be trying to force it into the mold of their football coverage with such gimmicks as micing players in the dugout, and playing "in-game" interviews with coaching and/or management personnel (actual interviews occur between innings). These interviews often step on actual real-time game action, forcing McCarver and Buck to (badly) catch the viewer up on what has occurred during the usually vapid "sideline interview."
The solution, in my mind, is to take baseball away from Fox and give it back to ABC, which would then pave the way for Jon Miller and Joe Morgan to call the Postseason. Now, I find Joe Morgan to be McCarver-esque in his ineptitude, but Jon Miller is there to offset Morgan, and being on TV does not make Miller lazy or prone to omission. Miller and Morgan do the radio call for ESPN, and it is far more enjoyable than Fox's coverage. If not for the delay between TV and radio, I would mute the TV and put the radio on.
My ideal scenario, however, would be for the network that owns MLB postseason rights to contract with each team to have the home team's broadcasters take over the play-by-play for national TV when the series is at their team's park. That way, viewers get exposed to the talents of multiple broadcasters (who knows, besides XM subscribers and residents of Tampa/St. Pete, that the Rays have quite a good team of announcers?), and they get a little of the hometown flavor for each team. I'm sure it'll never happen.
Fox owns the rights to the MLB postseason through 2013, and seems determined to relegate the MLB postseason to crushing mediocrity. The MLB Network, scheduled to launch in 2009, does not appear poised to alleviate this. I guess I can dream that, come 2013, some knight in shining armor will rescue the MLB postseason from Fox and raise their coverage above its current suckitude.
Since I got my new car this January, I have had access to every major league team's radio broadcasters via XM Radio. What XM does is broadcast the radio stream of whichever team is hosting the games. So if the Giants are playing at Los Angeles, I get Vin Scully and the rest of the Dodgers' crew. If the Giants are hosting, I get Dave Flemming and Jon Miller.
I've learned a lot of things about MLB broadcasters. First and foremost, good broadcasters are few and far between. I am not just being biased when I say that the Giants' team contains some of the best baseball broadcasters out there. Jon Miller is a bona fide legend in the field, and Dave Flemming has only improved over the years of being paired with Miller. Miller is brilliant at bringing the action to life, never omitting any of the play. On the TV side, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow are folksy and humorous while also sharing volumes of insider knowledge about the game. However, the SF team doesn't have a monopoly on quality.
Vin Scully, though he works for the hated Dodgers, can easily be called the best baseball play-by-play man out there. He seamlessly weaves a tapestry of biographical information and relevant anecdotes in and out of his game-calling without sacrificing the narrative of the game. Plus, his voice is a pleasure to listen to; sonorous and expansive without being pompous. The Red Sox' radio team is also quite good, with Joe Castiglione providing expert game-calling. The Angels have an excellent team of Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc. I have also come to appreciate Joe Angel's work with Baltimore. Though he annoyed me as a Giants' broadcaster, having heard countless crappy play-by-play teams makes me appreciate his skills.
So who are the bad ones? Public enemy #1: John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman of the Yankees. Sterling's play-by-play is lackluster at best; criminally cursory at worst. Where Jon Miller will tell you that the batter swung, grounded to short, the shortstop fielded the ball and made a strong throw to first to retire the hitter, often the most Sterling can be bothered to relate is that the batter swung and was thrown out. There is no richness to his call. And Waldman is superfluous, providing little color beyond a bluntly-stated reliance on the TV replay to determine events that occurred on the field. She also has a knack for attempting and failing to relate backstories (an example I recall is her referring to a player who had been at Scranton until 24 hours prior to the current game. There was nothing else to the story; no account of why he had gotten the call nor what chain of events brought him there). And then there is the team for the Pittsburgh Pirates. If you tune into a Pirates' home game on XM, you can go for as much as 45 seconds to a minute before the broadcasters will even say anything. I tend to attribute this to "TV syndrome," where broadcasters are used to doing TV where many events narrate themselves. However, the Pirates' team is ridiculously taciturn, often speaking after half a minute of dead air only to crudely sketch the play before lapsing back into silence. The Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals' play-by-play announcers are also unsatisfying to listen to on the radio. The Cubs team is amusing, especially so because Ron Santo is the most unabashed homer in sports; constantly referring to the Cubs as "we". Objectivity be damned!
I ramble about all this because while there are some broadcasting teams worse than Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, they are precious few. Having watched significant portions of the first two games of the world series, their bias toward the National League team is once again painfully obvious. Buck's father was a career-long broadcaster for the Cardinals, as was Buck himself prior to 2008. McCarver was a long-time catcher for both the Cardinals AND the Phillies. It is impossible for McCarver to be unbiased. He may not even be aware of his own prejudice, but it is obvious in the bent of every piece of commentary that he and Buck favor the NL team. Dismissing the Rays based on prior track record alone would be forgivable - if uncharitable, given that they are the best team in the American League - but it is aggravating to listen to a constant stream of adulation for Charlie Manuel and the Phillies, and how the new sports complex in Philadelphia is one of the greatest in the nation.
Additionally, Buck and McCarver are bad game analysts. Their assumptions about a player's actions are often not borne out, and they are constantly backing and filling throughout the call of a game. They always sounds stilted and amateurish to me. Watching a Giants broadcast is so rewarding because Mike Krukow has encyclopedic knowledge of the game and how (and WHY) it's played, and on numerous occasions I have seen him predict exactly what will occur on an upcoming play. McCarver seems to have no such acumen as a color man; his anecdotes are as colorless as Buck's narration is bland.
Overall, Fox does a poor job of representing baseball. They appear to be trying to force it into the mold of their football coverage with such gimmicks as micing players in the dugout, and playing "in-game" interviews with coaching and/or management personnel (actual interviews occur between innings). These interviews often step on actual real-time game action, forcing McCarver and Buck to (badly) catch the viewer up on what has occurred during the usually vapid "sideline interview."
The solution, in my mind, is to take baseball away from Fox and give it back to ABC, which would then pave the way for Jon Miller and Joe Morgan to call the Postseason. Now, I find Joe Morgan to be McCarver-esque in his ineptitude, but Jon Miller is there to offset Morgan, and being on TV does not make Miller lazy or prone to omission. Miller and Morgan do the radio call for ESPN, and it is far more enjoyable than Fox's coverage. If not for the delay between TV and radio, I would mute the TV and put the radio on.
My ideal scenario, however, would be for the network that owns MLB postseason rights to contract with each team to have the home team's broadcasters take over the play-by-play for national TV when the series is at their team's park. That way, viewers get exposed to the talents of multiple broadcasters (who knows, besides XM subscribers and residents of Tampa/St. Pete, that the Rays have quite a good team of announcers?), and they get a little of the hometown flavor for each team. I'm sure it'll never happen.
Fox owns the rights to the MLB postseason through 2013, and seems determined to relegate the MLB postseason to crushing mediocrity. The MLB Network, scheduled to launch in 2009, does not appear poised to alleviate this. I guess I can dream that, come 2013, some knight in shining armor will rescue the MLB postseason from Fox and raise their coverage above its current suckitude.