Crowdsourcing MLB Broadcasters: Day 4 of 10

Other ballots: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago (AL) Home / Chicago (AL) Away / Chicago (NL) / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) Home / Los Angeles (NL) Away / Miami / Milwaukee.

Recently, the present author began the process of process of reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.

Below are six more ballots to the end of producing a new collection of these broadcasters scores.

For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) 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? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little 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, if so compelled.

***

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Minnesota Twins

Some relevant information regarding Minnesota’s broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Dick Bremer.
  • Color analysis is typically provided by Bert Blyleven.
  • Both Jack Morris and maybe Roy Smalley appear for select games.

Click here to grade Minnesota’s television broadcast team.

***

New York Yankees

Some relevant information regarding Yankees’ broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Michael Kay.
  • Color analysis is typically provided by Five Whole Other Guys.
  • Including guys like David Cone and Paul O’Neill and Ken Singleton.

Click here to grade the Yankees’ television broadcast team.

***

New York Mets

Some relevant information regarding the Mets’ broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Gary Cohen.
  • Color analysis is provided by Ron Darling and/or Keith Hernandez.
  • Cliff Floyd maybe appears on select games.

Click here to grade the Mets’ television broadcast team.

***

Oakland Athletics

Some relevant information regarding Oakland’s broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Glen Kuiper.
  • Color analysis is typically provided by Ray Fosse.
  • Mark Mulder maybe appears for select games.

Click here to grade Oakland’s television broadcast team.

***

Philadelphia Phillies

Some relevant information regarding Philadelphia’s broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is typically provided by Tom McCarthy.
  • Color analysis is provided by Ben Davis and/or Matt Stairs.
  • Mike Schmidt also quite possibly appears for select games.

Click here to grade Philadelphia’s television broadcast team.

***

Pittsburgh Pirates

Some relevant information regarding Pittsburgh’s broadcast:

  • Play-by-play coverage is provided by Joe Block or Greg Brown.
  • Color analysis is almost always provided by Bob Walk.
  • Plus also Steve Blass or John Wehner, probably.

Click here to grade Pittsburgh’s television broadcast team.





Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
mrmaddness
9 years ago

Cliff Floyd on the Mets broadcast team? I watch almost every Mets game and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. He’s mostly in the SNY studio.

Roger McDowell Hot Foot
9 years ago
Reply to  mrmaddness

No idea how that got there, at all. Cliffy is a nice guy but he never broadcasts and I’m very glad of it. (When Granderson retires, though…)