Over the course of last week, we released the results of our television broadcaster rankings — themselves the product of reader crowdsourcing that started in late November. (See the final rankings here.)
I’m not lying when I say that the success of the project exceeded my expectations — both for (a) the degree to which, as a consumer of televised baseball, the results generally reflected my own rough sense of the league’s broadcasters, and also (b) the civility with which readers conducted themselves (this being the internet, I mean, itself not known as the home of well-tempered discourse). As such, I’ll begin publishing ballots for radio broadcast teams, starting today, in the Daily Notes column found in these pages.
The first step: to arrive at some understanding of whom, exactly, we’re rating. The names you see below are intended to represent the main radio broadcast teams from 2011 for each of the league’s 30 clubs. The information here is taken from Wikipedia, but would certainly benefit from editing by readers who know and care about such things.
Again, the idea is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth in 2011 — even if there have been changes this past offseason. This way we can establish a frame of reference for all 30 teams and then revisit it as readers become familiar with their team’s new broadcasters.
Also note that, while many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more streamlined, if perhaps slightly less nuanced. Finally, don’t hesitate to indicate if a club has a dedicated home and (different) away broadcast team, as the Dodgers do on the television side.
Below is the preliminary list. Teams marked with a “(?)” are the ones about which I’m least sure.
Arizona: Greg Schulte, Tom Candiotti
Atlanta: Jim Powell, Don Sutton
Baltimore: Joe Angel, Fred Manfra (?)
Boston: Joe Castiglione, Dave O’Brien
Chicago AL: Ed Farmer, Darrin Jackson
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