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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/sports/baseball/23sandomir.html
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: October 22, 2009
The best announcers and game productions should always be on display
in the postseason.
Baseball in the fall has featured play-by-play voices like Red Barber,
Mel Allen, Vin Scully, Joe Garagiola, Curt Gowdy, Bob Costas and Al
Michaels, all smart broadcasters at the peak of their talents. Great
announcers are great guides; you can watch with the sound muted, but
if you’ve got great voices, why would you? From more than 40 years of
watching baseball and 18 years of writing about what I’ve seen, here
is my manifesto:
GET THE BEST ANNOUNCERS A simple rule ignored by TBS in hiring and
sticking by Chip Caray for three seasons of mistakes, bad judgments
and clichés when someone like SNY’s Mets broadcaster Gary Cohen is
available. Caray’s role as TBS’s No. 1 baseball announcer is even less
explicable in light of decisions by past Turner Sports executives who
hired top-flight N.B.A. announcers on TNT, including Marv Albert and
Charles Barkley.
Turner management did not unilaterally endorse Caray’s return on
Thursday. David Levy, the president of Turner Sports, said in an e-
mail message that as in other sports, “we will take some time during
the off-season to assess all aspects of the production, including
talent, and decide what we can do to improve.”
CHOOSE LOCAL VOICES TBS’s postseason rights present a problem. Caray
is its season-long Sunday afternoon announcer but he has had three
different partners: Ron Darling, Buck Martinez and Dennis Eckersley.
You can’t build chemistry that way. Then, in its exclusive division
series coverage, three other two-man teams are cobbled together, none
of whom are partners during the season. TBS must find the best pairs
of local announcers with camaraderie and high baseball I.Q.’s and
build its postseason booths that way. Start with Cohen and Darling.
MORE LOCAL OPTIONS From the mid-1960s to the mid-’70s, NBC added a
local announcer from each team in the World Series, bringing the likes
of Chuck Thompson, Lindsey Nelson, Phil Rizzuto and Dick Stockton to
national audiences. TBS and Fox should return to that practice. No
matter how well informed their announcers are, the locals know more.
If neither network adopts that system, how about turning over a half-
inning per game to the audio of the local radio announcers, so the TV
audience can hear, say, Vin Scully from the Dodgers’ radio booth.
SILENCE IS A GOOD THING At Fox, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver have
embraced staying quiet more than I can recall, evidence of the comfort
they have after so many years together and their respect for the game.
But Caray could not hush up, and spoke often at an overly high volume,
as if he were too nervous to let the video images hold sway.
MODULATE, DON’T EXAGGERATE Baseball doesn’t need announcers whose
words distort what the screen is showing. What is the value? Fictional
excitement? But Caray too often engages in this practice, or, as I’ve
written before, his vision is suspect. “Break out the tape measure,”
he said over a replay of James Loney’s home run Wednesday night. Why?
Tape-measure home runs strike light towers, scoreboards and facades —
they don’t land a dozen or so rows into the Citizens Bank Park
bleachers. Caray lauds easy catches as difficult plays and describes
obvious line drives as fly balls, as he did when the Dodgers’ Matt
Kemp singled on Wednesday.
BASEBALL ANNOUNCERS NEED RHYTHM Buck understands this more than Caray.
Buck is not a shouter, and he raises his voice at the most appropriate
moments. He has cut back on a joking demeanor that many fans dislike;
he is almost a stripped-down version of himself this October,
effecting a noticeable improvement. But Caray fills the air with
volume that the action does not sustain. There is a cadence to
baseball, a musical accompaniment. Caray lacks it. Stockton, who
called one of the division series for TBS, understands it. Scully
perfected it.
TECHNOLOGY — AND UMPIRES — ARE IMPERFECT Fox and TBS use SportVision
to create their strike-zone graphics. The company’s chief executive,
Hank Adams, says the technical toy can track pitches to within a half-
inch of reality. Buck and Caray have called it an approximation of
reality. Yes, there is value to seeing how a pitcher works a hitter.
But if the tool is not perfect and each umpire has different versions
of the strike zone, we are left with confusion. Example: on Wednesday
night, on a 3-1 count to the Phillies’ Chase Utley, TBS’s PitchTrax
showed three pitches in the strike zone. Who was wrong — and on which
pitch? Advice: use it even more judiciously than Fox does, and not
nearly as often as TBS does, only in HD. |
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