Crowdsourcing Radio Broadcasters: Names and Places
It both seems like and also actually was just last week that the present author announced his intentions of revisiting 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.
The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, those results have become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.
Last week’s post represented the first step towards a new set of broadcaster rankings — namely, to assemble an actual list of all baseball’s main television broadcast teams. The current post is the natural complement: an attempt to identify all the relevant members of baseball’s radio broadcasts. The information here is taken from a combination of Wikipedia and MLB.com, but would benefit from readers who possess a more intimate knowledge of how each club’s broadcasts are executed.
Again, the idea is to identify the broadcasters most frequently found in each team’s booth in 2016. While many clubs have occasional color commentators and guest announcers, isolating the most regular contributors will make this process more efficient, if perhaps slightly less nuanced.
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, Jim Hunter
Boston: Joe Castiglione, Tim Neverett
Chicago (AL): Ed Farmer, Darrin Jackson
Chicago (NL): Pat Hughes, Ron Coomer (?)
Cincinnati: Marty Brennaman, Jeff Brantley
Cleveland: Tom Hamilton, Jim Rosenhaus
Colorado: Jack Corrigan, Jerry Schemmel
Detroit: Dan Dickerson, Jim Price
Houston: Robert Ford, Steve Sparks
Kansas City: Denny Matthews (?)
Los Angeles (AL): Terry Smith, Mark Langston
Los Angeles (NL): Charley Steiner, Rick Monday
Miami: Dave Van Horne, Glenn Geffner
Milwaukee: Bob Uecker, Jeff Levering
Minnesota: Cory Provus, Dan Gladden
New York (AL): John Sterling, Suzyn Waldman
New York (NL): Howie Rose, Josh Lewin
Oakland: Ken Korach, Vince Cotroneo
Philadelphia: Scott Franzke, Larry Andersen
Pittsburgh: Basically same as TV crew
St. Louis: Mike Shannon, John Rooney
San Diego: Ted Leitner, Jesse Agler
San Francisco: Jon Miller, Dave Flemming
Seattle: Rick Rizzs, Aaron Goldsmith
Tampa Bay: Andy Freed, Dave Wills
Texas: Eric Nadel, Matt Hicks
Toronto: Jerry Howarth, Joe Siddall
Washington: Charlie Slowes, Dave Jageler
Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.
Joe Angel/Fred Manfra are the main guys for Baltimore. Hunter is more the generic play by play backup for both TV and radio.
Manfra is only doing 50 games this year. It’s only been announced that Hunter and Ben McDonald are splitting the remaining 112, but considering McDonald only does a series or two per season I’d guess Hunter ends up doing the most games this season (and probably into the future).