On (day of week), the Padres acquired (talented pitcher) from the (spendthrift team) in exchange for a seeming pittance, including (name of decent but not overwhelming Padres prospect). Now, surely, AJ Preller is done. Or is he?

Oh, hello there! Sorry about that. That’s actually the Mad Libs-esque form that I normally use to cover Padres pitching transactions. Today, I’ve got some details for you. It’s Joe Musgrove heading to the best weather in baseball, Hudson Head and Endy Rodriguez highlighting the group headed out (in a three-team trade involving the Pirates and Mets), and Andrew Friedman gently whispering words of affirmation to himself: “We’ll still win the long game, we’ll still win the long game, the Dodger Way can’t be beat.”

Musgrove isn’t an ace, at least not in the way that new teammates Yu Darvish and Blake Snell are. He would have been Pittsburgh’s number one starter this year, which isn’t the same thing. In San Diego, he’ll slot in as the Padres fourth starter. Let the words of Anakin Skywalker speak for the rest of the NL West: “This is outrageous! It’s unfair!”

Seriously, take a look at our Depth Charts predictions for the Padre rotation:

There simply aren’t other teams throwing out pitchers like Musgrove after a whopping three other pitchers. We think that the Padres, Yankees, and Mets will accrue roughly equal value from starting pitchers next year, but the New York teams are doing it with Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, the consensus best two pitchers in the game. Yu Darvish is nice, but not that nice. The Padres are building their own Death Star rotation, and they’re doing it with volume. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Ken Rosenthal reported that owners are unlikely to pursue expansion plans in the near future. At first, that sounds strange. Why would owners who are experiencing a cash crunch turn down a quick cash infusion, reportedly nearly $70 million per team? As it turns out, the math is straightforward. Let’s talk about perpetual cash flows, debt equivalence, and other fun stuff like that.

Per Rosenthal’s reporting, owners would stand to make an aggregate $2 billion from expansion fees, or $1 billion per new team. Split 30 ways, that amounts to $66.7 million per team, which would go a long way for clubs who are acting phenomenally cash-light. In exchange, however, they’d give up a small share of a lucrative enterprise that makes owning a baseball team a cash cow.

Again per Rosenthal, the league projected to make $2.4 billion in central revenue in 2020 before the pandemic laughed in the face of advance planning. Central revenue is everything generated by MLB rather than by individual teams — national TV contracts, national sponsorships, streaming revenue, consumer product sales, and assorted other line items, with TV contracts comprising the lion’s share of the money.

That works out to $80 million per team, and adding two teams to the mix would dilute teams’ share of the pie. With 32 teams, each team would only get $75 million in central revenue per year. That might not sound like much — $5 million over time weighed against $67 million in cold hard cash right now — but big enterprises like baseball teams don’t need to act to maximize their liquidity. They instead seek to maximize net present value, which is a financially stylized way to consider the value today of money you might receive in the distant future.

This is going to get annoyingly math-y, but I’ll try to keep it in somewhat relatable terms, so bear with me. Say your friend offers you the choice of $100 today or $200 in a year. Presumably, you’d prefer the $200 — it’s twice as much money! Things get trickier, however, if it’s a choice between $100 today or $110 in a year, or between $100 today and $200 in 20 years. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Liam Hendriks signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox that will pay him $54 million. Craig Edwards covered the signing, and Tony Wolfe took a look at the South Siders’ new bullpen, which is now one of the best in baseball. But there was something confusing about Hendriks’ contract. It will pay him $54 million, but how many years he’ll play to earn that money isn’t yet set.

A quick overview: over the first three years of his deal, Hendriks will receive $39 million. After that third year, the White Sox have a team option to bring him back for a fourth year with a $15 million salary. If they don’t want to pay him for that year, they can pay him a buyout instead, a common structure in contracts with team options. Here’s the rub: that buyout is for $15 million, the same amount as the option salary. It’s deferred over multiple years, so it isn’t exactly the same, but Hendriks will get $54 million in cash, and he’ll do so whether he plays for the Sox for three or four years.

Why design such a strange tax structure? It’s in pursuit of one of the oldest American pastimes — tax avoidance. Let’s quickly walk through how Hendriks’ contract works in Chicago’s favor, and take a quick jaunt through other contract structures while we’re at it.

When the league came up with the CBT, they put some thought into working around loopholes. Consider, for example, a team who has plenty of room under the tax level in 2021 but projects to go near it in 2022. Now imagine that they sign Trevor Bauer to a two-year, $80 million deal. If they paid him $40 million in each year, it would look like this:

Assuming a tax threshold of $210 million, they’d be $30 million under the line in ‘21 and $20 million over in ‘22. Why not, then, pay Bauer $60 million in year one and $20 million the next year?

Why not? Because the league doesn’t fall for that nonsense. For the purposes of the CBT, salaries are spread out evenly across the term of the deal. Design wild roller-coasters all you want; a two-year deal for $80 million will count for $40 million each year, no matter when the actual checks go out.

Next, let’s consider a different way around the tax, and a different way the league closed that loophole. Consider a team going for it this year. They’re right up against the tax in this hypothetical world, and they’d prefer not to pay it. Instead, they offer a different deal, this time to a hypothetical closer. In year one, he’ll receive $10 million. Year two is a team option with a salary of $30 million. Should the team decline the option, they’ll pay a $10 million buyout.

One of two things will happen: either our closer will make $40 million for two years of service, or he’ll make $20 million for one year. That feels like a reasonable contract for both sides — and if the league didn’t look too hard at it, they might give the team a tax number of only $10 million in year one.

Let’s make it more absurd, though. What about a one-year deal for $5 million, with a team option for a second year at $60 million and a $15 million buyout. Now the team will certainly pay the buyout. Our pitcher still gets his $20 million over one year. Would anyone think that’s really only a $5 million salary in year one, though?

The league doesn’t. Buyouts of team options are treated as part of the total salary paid in guaranteed years. What does that mean? Let’s take a look at Ronald Acuña Jr.’s contract to explain it. His contract looks like this:

That’s $90 million over eight years. After that, there are two team options, the second of which we’ll ignore (given that it only kicks in if the team exercises the first one, CBT math ignores it). The first team option is for $17 million, with a $10 million buyout. That brings the total guaranteed money in the deal to $100 million over eight years — $90 million in salary plus the buyout. What’s Acuña’s CBT number in each year? $12.5 million, or $100 million split evenly over eight years.

Should the Braves exercise Acuña’s option, they’ll pay him $17 million in 2027, but $10 million of that will already have counted against their tax numbers in previous years. How does that hit the salary cap? The league has left it purposely ambiguous, but one interpretation is that the tax number will be lower to account for that previous hit. In Acuña’s case, he has another $10 million buyout the next year, so it’s hardly a lock, but we’re just using him as an example. Again, we don’t know exactly how the league accounts for buyouts — but in my mind, there’s a decent chance that having the cost of the buyout on previous years’ CBT numbers decreases the number the league uses in the option year.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get back to Hendriks. He’s due $39 million over three years, an average of $13 million per year. After that, there’s his buyout, which also counts against the tax. It’s for $15 million deferred over time. The league discounts deferrals slightly, and without getting into the exact math there, let’s assume that they treat Hendriks’ buyout as worth $13 million in present-day terms. That means he’s due $52 million over three years for the purposes of the tax.

Should he remain with the team for a fourth year, the deal has only $2 million in “new money” — the difference in value between a deferred and present-day $15 million. That makes for big tax numbers in the first three years — roughly $17 million per year — and a minuscule $2 million hit in the fourth year. Again, I’m not certain that this is how options are treated — but it’s a reasonable guess, at the very least, and one of the best reasons I can see for structuring a contract in such a strange way.

Why would a team want to do this? The Sox are no dummies. They’re nowhere near the CBT threshold in 2021 — they check in around $160 million even after Hendriks’ contract. Will they be so far below the threshold in three years? It’s far less clear! Lucas Giolito will need a new contract by then. Nick Madrigal, Dylan Cease, Michael Kopech, and Codi Heuer, just to name a few, will be in their arbitration years. If they’re planning on keeping Lance Lynn, he’ll surely earn more than this year’s $9.3 million salary.

By taking a bigger tax hit now, the White Sox are setting themselves up to avoid paying taxes in the future. Are they actually considering declining the option? Almost certainly not. Why would they? Short of Hendriks being out for the season with an injury, they’ll keep him, because the difference between $15 million now and $15 million over 10 years simply isn’t much in the grand scope of things.

One thing worth monitoring: I’m not actually sure if the league is going to allow this nonsense. I feel reasonably confident that they wouldn’t have allowed a $15 million team option with a $15 million buyout if there were no deferrals involved. Even including that fig leaf, I don’t think there’s much confusion about what’s going on here. The league can treat vesting options that are very likely to be triggered as guaranteed, and it wouldn’t shock me if they did that here. For now, though, it sounds like Hendriks’ contract counts as $54 million over three years in the eyes of the tax man.

In other words, Hendriks signed a four-year, $54 million dollar contract this week. It won’t be reported the same way everywhere — it’s a complex contract, after all. At the end of the day, however, the White Sox wanted to pay Hendriks $54 million to secure his services for the next four years. They did just that — with a little financial chicanery thrown in for good measure.

Planning a starting rotation for 2021 carries innumerable pitfalls. Nearly every pitcher in the league saw a reduced workload last year, and they did it in strange circumstances to boot. It’s not merely that the short season set everyone’s innings back — though that’s a huge component. A large number of cancelations and postponements also meant more doubleheaders and more cobbled-together games, another way to throw pitchers off their rhythm.

Put it all together, and protecting arms sounds like an appealing plan for 2021. The Mariners announced that they’ll use a six-man rotation next year, a continuation of the plan they leaned on for all of 2020. The Red Sox are talking workload management. Since initially publishing this piece, Jeff Zimmerman pointed out that the Tigers will use a six-man rotation as well. Is an embiggened rotation the solution to this universal problem? Let’s do the math.

It depends, first of all, on what you give up. The innings tradeoff of a six-man rotation is straightforward. Giving your pitchers an extra day off limits their workloads, naturally enough. The math on that is straightforward if you assume it doesn’t affect their in-game workload. Take a pitcher who averages six innings per start. In a five-man rotation, that’s 192 innings of work. Adding a sixth pitcher to the rotation cuts that down to 162 innings.

How much do those 30 innings of work matter when it comes to health? I’ll level with you — I’m not sure. We simply don’t have the data to say with any amount of certainty, because the number of comparable situations is so small. Pitchers have light workloads all the time, but in most cases it’s due to age or injury. Looking at what a 21-year-old pitcher did in first building up stamina probably can’t tell us much about how many innings Jake Odorizzi, to pick a random example, should throw in 2021. Likewise, a pitcher’s workload in his first year back from Tommy John surgery can’t tell us how many innings Trevor Bauer can be effective for. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the plight of the base stealer. In the 1980s, their role was sacrosanct. Get on base first, then cause havoc. For fans of speed and baserunning, it was a veritable golden age. Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman each stole 100 bases in three separate seasons. Since 1980, the 13 top seasons in terms of stolen bases per plate appearance were 1980 through 1992.

Alas, the scurrilous forces of math and efficiency conspired to dethrone the stolen base. As it turns out, advancing one base is less good than creating an out is bad. It’s bad enough, in fact, that you need about three successful stolen bases to make up for the downside of getting caught once. The very best thieves managed that level of efficiency, but in aggregate, the league only crested a 70% success rate once from 1980 to 1992. Steals simply weren’t advancing teams’ goal of scoring as many runs as possible.

For a time, there was a reasonable counter-argument: what if attempting a stolen base has positive value that isn’t solely contained in reaching second base? Perhaps the pitcher has steals on the brain, or the defense loses its cohesion while attempting to cover the base for a throw. It doesn’t need to add much edge to make the math add up.

In 2007, the authors of The Book took up this question. They found a large advantage to batters when a runner was on first — exactly what proponents of steals suggested. There was a big problem, however. That advantage was for all runners on first base. The faster the runner, the smaller the advantage. In addition, actually attempting a steal carried a huge hit to the batter, more than enough to offset the advantage of having a runner on base. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020, the Nationals had an outfield problem. You might not have noticed it, because of human cheat code Juan Soto, but think of it this way: Soto accounted for 2.4 WAR. The outfield as a whole, Soto included, managed 2.0 WAR. The other six players accounted for a whopping negative 0.4 WAR, and you don’t need a fancy analyst to tell you that’s bad.

On Saturday, the team made a step toward remedying that weakness for 2021. They signed Kyle Schwarber to a one-year deal worth $10 million, immediately upgrading their second corner outfield spot from Andrew Stevenson (projected near replacement level in 2021) to Schwarber’s league-average stylings. Jesse Dougherty first reported the deal.

What you think of Schwarber depends on when you picture him. If your mental image was formed in 2015, he’s an up-and-coming slugger with defensive issues. If it was formed in 2016, he’s a World Series hero. If it’s been formed since then, he’s an inconsistent but exciting hitter with a problem on defense, a cypher who might have his best days ahead of him but who might also never re-scale the heights of his 2015 debut.

When Schwarber is at his best, he embodies baseball’s move toward whiffs, walks, and home runs. In fact, that’s true even at his worst: in each of his seasons, he’s had a higher walk rate, strikeout rate, and isolated power than average. Whether each of those seasons turned out well or poorly depends on the balance between those three factors.

In 2020, nothing worked quite right. His strikeout rate, a gruesome 29.5%, might sound like a problem, and it’s certainly not great! It was also only 1.5 percentage points higher than his career average, and it wasn’t the worst single-season mark of his career. His 13.4% walk rate wasn’t the culprit, either: that mark is almost exactly the same as his career rate. No, the problem was in the power.

How do you think of power? Home runs are one obvious metric, and Schwarber set new lows in that category in 2020, though only marginally. He cranked 11 homers in 224 plate appearances, a 4.9% home run rate. That’s the worst mark of his career, but it’s only narrowly behind the 5.1% rate he posted in a disappointing 2017. In fact, if you care instead about home runs per fly ball, Schwarber’s 25.6% mark was instead his best.

Doubles are another important component of power. Schwarber managed only six in 2020, the second-worst rate of doubles per plate appearance of his career. In all, he produced extra base hits in 7.6% of his plate appearances, the worst rate of his career, and nowhere near his nearly 10% rate entering 2020.

Another way to measure power is to ignore the outcomes completely and focus on process. Schwarber’s barrel rate dipped from 13.8% (career before 2020) to 11.2%, and his groundball rate spiked above 50%. More grounders and fewer smashed balls in the air go hand in hand, and they conspired to limit the number of chances Schwarber had to get the extra bases he thrives on.

If you’d prefer to separate barrels into two categories, as Alex Chamberlain outlined here, something interesting emerges. Chamberlain created a new subdivision of barrels that he calls “blasts.” Essentially, they’re the hardest-hit half of the population of barrels, the most valuable half of the most valuable subset of batted balls. In this category, Schwarber’s 2020 looks different (my numbers differ slightly from Chamberlain’s because I removed untracked balls from the denominator):

In fact, that’s a more honest way of describing his most recent campaign. The balls he hit hardest, the ones that carry the most predictive power from year to year, looked basically like every other Schwarber season. An 11.2% barrel rate is solid — it places Schwarber in the top 25% of the league in terms of power on contact. He fares better in terms of blasts, where he’s in the 92nd percentile. In other words, Schwarber is still a premium power hitter, even if his doubles and homers wouldn’t tell you that in 2020.

Should we worry about the walks and strikeouts? Maybe a little bit, at least if Schwarber repeats his 2020 walk and strikeout rates. Expressed as one number, he would need to be 4% above average when he puts the ball in play to end up average overall. That’s not a problem — again, he’s a great hitter when he makes contact — but it helps set a rough idea for what Schwarber will be. His plate discipline will hurt him slightly, his power will make up for it, and it will probably work out to an above average but not standout offensive line.

Of course, baseball is more than just offense. Schwarber has to play the field — at least unless and until the NL switches to a DH for 2021 — and the picture there is decidedly less rosy than it is at the plate. Schwarber is a large gentleman — he’s listed at 6-foot and 235 pounds — and saying that he’s been bad on defense in his time in the majors undersells things. Schwarber is bad on defense in the way that Cleveland likes saving a little money or AJ Preller enjoys the occasional trade.

Per Statcast, Schwarber has been 29 runs below average as an outfielder in his career. That’s the fifth-worst mark in the majors over that period, ahead of only noted butchers Nick Castellanos, Matt Kemp, Melky Cabrera, and Shin-Soo Choo. He put together one solid defensive season, in 2018, and that season shows the best case scenario for Schwarber: he tallied a whopping 11 outfield assists that year, only one off the league lead, which was worth between 7 and 8 runs per both UZR and DRS.

Schwarber’s arm is no joke. When he first reached the majors, the Cubs still considered him a part-time catcher in large part because of that cannon arm. If the Nationals can somehow entice runners to take off against Schwarber, they might be able to wrangle another positive defensive season out of him despite his lack of range.

More realistically, Washington is hoping for a DH slot where they can hide Schwarber. With Howie Kendrick’s retirement, the Nationals don’t have an obvious candidate to fill that role, which means they can slide Schwarber there without losing anything on offense. That would leave them with Stevenson and Soto flanking defensive standout Victor Robles, which sounds to me like a solid defensive outfield. With Schwarber’s offensive value firmly in the green, that sounds like the best possible case here.

How does this deal work out poorly for Washington? The worst-case scenario is this: the NL plays 2021 without a DH, Schwarber’s plate discipline takes a step back, and he ends up as an average bat with painful outfield defense, more of the replacement level soup that they ran out around Soto in 2020. Even that, though, is hardly a disaster: at only one year, there’s no chance of this deal sticking around to haunt them.

For Schwarber, this contract fits his needs as well as can be expected. First, there’s the money: Schwarber will earn more on this deal than he projected to earn in arbitration with the Cubs. That’s a clear upside. Second, he’s still eligible for free agency after 2021 — his contract has a mutual option for 2022, but that’s merely a fancy way of telling a player you like them; the player can, after all, always decline his end of the deal.

More importantly, Schwarber will get everyday playing time in Washington. After the first five years of his career, I’m not sure that any team is clamoring to give Schwarber a long-term deal. That remains the brass ring for players: after six seasons at collectively-bargained low wages, free agency theoretically unleashes the forces of capitalism in their favor. For Schwarber, however, those forces aren’t yet guaranteed to work; bat-first corner types have found soft markets as teams realize they can replace those players with pre-arbitration talent without losing much on-field production.

For Schwarber to strike it rich, he needs to rise above the fray of slightly-above-average bats to become a premium one. For teams to believe that, he needs to do so in as big of a sample as possible. In that sense, the best thing Schwarber could do for himself is find somewhere with thin outfield and DH depth, and Washington fits the bill exactly. As a bonus, they’ll be playoff contenders, which is always a plus.

After their disappointing 2020, the Nationals could use some offensive help. After his arrested development, Schwarber could use some exposure. With this deal, both sides are getting what they want, at a rate that should make everyone happy. That’s a solid outcome for everyone — other than the rest of the NL East, perhaps.

Over the course of this offseason, FanGraphs is compiling a crowdsourced ranking of our readers’ favorite broadcasts. Last month, we announced the results of the crowdsourced vote on TV broadcasts. Now we are once again asking for your help, this time for each team’s radio broadcast.

The radio broadcasts will follow the same general format as our earlier TV broadcast surveys. When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of radio teams will
be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. Of note, this doesn’t mean sabermetric or statistical analysis, though some broadcast teams certainly excel in that area. Rather, it covers all the ways in which a broadcast team attempts to inform listeners about the players on the field and the game situation they find themselves in.

Is a color commentator particularly adept at breaking down a hitter’s adjustments? That’s excellent analysis. Does a broadcaster mention a player’s DRS, then use that number without context to explain why someone is a good or bad defender? That’s bad analysis, despite its use of advanced metrics. This category’s score should represent how much you feel you learn about baseball while you listen to the game. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, rumors have circulated that Francisco Lindor was available in trade. Cleveland, ever penny-pinching, always looked unlikely to sign him to an extension. He’s due to reach free agency after this season, which put a clock on the situation. Today, that clock struck midnight. As first reported by Jeff Passan, the Mets have acquired Lindor and Carlos Carrasco in exchange for Amed Rosario, Andrés Giménez, Josh Wolf, and Isaiah Greene.

It’s easy to like New York’s side of the deal. Lindor is one of the 10 or so best position players in baseball, and at 27, he’s just entering his prime. In addition, he’s one of the best defensive shortstops in the game, a huge upgrade for a team that induces a ton of grounders.

He’s a free agent after this year, of course, which limited Cleveland’s return for him, but the Mets have talked all offseason about signing marquee free agents, and Lindor blows this year’s crop out of the water. None of the available free agents this winter project for more than J.T. Realmuto’s 4.1 WAR, and none of the top 10 are younger than 30. Lindor is better, younger, and arguably more marketable than anyone on that list, and it’s not particularly close.

Most of the best hitters in baseball get there by, well, hitting. Lindor does that too — Steamer and ZiPS think he’ll be the third-best batter at the shortstop position in 2021 — but he gets an outsize proportion of his value from defense. From 2018 to 2020, he’s been the second-best shortstop defender in baseball per UZR, behind only Andrelton Simmons. DRS has him fourth, behind Simmons, Paul DeJong, and Nick Ahmed. Per Outs Above Average, he’s second only to Ahmed. No matter how you slice it, his defense is stellar.

If you plug Ahmed or Simmons (and probably DeJong, too) into your lineup, you’re sacrificing offense for defense. Not so with Lindor. His worst season at the plate was 2020, but even then, he managed a .258/.335/.415 line, good for a 100 wRC+. For his career, he’s a .285/.346/.488 hitter, a line buoyed by his phenomenal contact skills. Despite an aggressive approach at the plate, he strikes out only 14.1% of the time while walking at an average rate, which gives him a high floor.

Though he brings plenty of other positive qualities to the table, that contact skill is his only true standout offensive ability. He displayed shocking power in 2018, barreling up 9.3% of his batted balls on the way to 38 home runs, but for the most part, he gets to his stats by being roughly average when he makes contact while making far more contact than the average hitter. In his career, he’s accumulated a .383 xwOBA on contact and a .380 actual wOBA on contact, a hair higher than the .376 and .370 marks the league as a whole has accrued over the same time period. Even average power plays up when you get so many opportunities, though, which is how he put together three straight 30-homer seasons from 2017 to 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of this offseason, FanGraphs is compiling a crowdsourced ranking of our readers’ favorite broadcasts. Last month, we announced the results of the crowdsourced vote on TV broadcasts. Now we are once again asking for your help, this time for each team’s radio broadcast.

The radio broadcasts will follow the same general format as our earlier TV broadcast surveys. When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of radio teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. Of note, this doesn’t mean sabermetric or statistical analysis, though some broadcast teams certainly excel in that area. Rather, it covers all the ways in which a broadcast team attempts to inform listeners about the players on the field and the game situation they find themselves in.

Is a color commentator particularly adept at breaking down a hitter’s adjustments? That’s excellent analysis. Does a broadcaster mention a player’s DRS, then use that number without context to explain why someone is a good or bad defender? That’s bad analysis, despite its use of advanced metrics. This category’s score should represent how much you feel you learn about baseball while you watch the game.

The “Charisma” score covers the amount of enjoyment you derive from listening to the announcers. Does the booth’s camaraderie make you feel like you’re listening to a game with friends? Does an announcer’s wistful recounting of his playing days leave you in stitches? Do you find yourself just downright having fun listening to their stories? All of that is contained in this category.

The “Coherence” score was the most difficult category to name. It covers how well the broadcast explains the action on the field as it happens. Is the play-by-play crisp and informative? Do the announcers keep listeners abreast of the count and game situation in discussing team strategy? When a strange situation comes up, do they convey what happened and what it means for the two teams effectively? I expect that this category will prove more divisive in radio than it did in the TV ratings, because play-by-play announcers carry more weight when there’s no visual component. Read the rest of this entry »