Crowdsourcing MLB Broadcasters: Names and Places

Each summer, baseball fans spend upwards of three or four hours per day with the broadcasters for their favorite teams. With the advent, and increasing ubiquity, of services such as Extra Innings and MLB.TV, fans have become acquainted with broadcasters from other markets, as well.

It’s not uncommon to come across exasperated tweets — or entire websites — dedicated to censuring the sometimes poor behavior of broadcasters. The present author has even attempted a couple reviews of baseballing broadcasts. 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.

The present post represents the beginning of an attempt to do just that. Much as we attempt, each winter, to facilitate fan projections for players stats here, we will also attempt to do the same for the league’s broadcasting teams.

The first step: to arrive at some understanding of who, exactly, we’re grading. The names you see below are intended to represent the main broadcast teams for each of the league’s 30 clubs. The information here is taken from a combination of Wikipedia and MLB.com, but would certainly benefit from readers who know and care about such things.

Again, the idea is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth. Many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, but isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more streamlined, if slightly less nuanced.

So, how do these look?

Arizona: Daron Sutton, Mark Grace

Atlanta: Chip Caray, Joe Simpson

Baltimore: Gary Thorne, Jim Palmer

Boston: Don Orsillo, Jerry Remy

Chicago Americans: Ken Harrelson, Steve Stone

Chicago Nationals: Len Kasper, Bob Brenly

Cincinnati: Thom Brennaman, Chris Welsh

Cleveland: Matt Underwood, Rick Manning

Colorado: Drew Goodman, George Frazier

Detroit: Mario Impemba, Rod Allen

Florida: Rich Waltz, Tommy Hutton

Houston: Bill Brown, Jim Deshaies

Kansas City: Ryan Lefebvre, Frank White

Los Angeles Americans: Victor Rojas, Mark Gubicza

Los Angeles Nationals: Vin Scully

Milwaukee: Brian Anderson, Bill Schroeder

Minnesota: Dick Bremer, Bert Blyleven

New York Americans: Michael Kay, Paul O’Neill

New York Nationals: Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, Keith Hernandez

Oakland: Glen Kuiper, Ray Fosse

Philadelphia: Tom McCarthy, Gary Matthews

Pittsburgh: Tim Neverett, Bob Walk

St. Louis: Dan McLaughlin, Al Hrabosky

San Diego: Dick Enberg, Mark Grant

San Francisco: Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow

Seattle: Dave Sims, Mike Blowers

Tampa Bay: Dewayne Staats, Brian Anderson

Texas: Dave Barnett, Tom Grieve

Toronto: Buck Martinez, Pat Tabler

Washington: Bob Carpenter, F. P. Santangelo

Thanks to concerned citizen Sean McNally, who forwarded this suggestion to us via the Twitter.