I have learned from my local baseball broadcast crew that the pitcher does best when he keeps the ball down, except when he gets batters out by throwing high; also, that when you score more runs than the other team, you usually win.
This may reflect more on my Tennessee Titans homerism and my relative ignorance of the finer points of football, but the team on Titans Radio of Mike Keith and Frank Wycheck never fail to provide insights and details on the team, the coach, the likely next play, the difficulties the injury situation may be causing as well as personal details in the players’ lives at the time. The fact that Wycheck played for the team for many seasons is a help in that sense, but he and Mike always have more to say of interest than the clowns on CBS or Fox aho may be providing the picture I’m watching. I never turn up the sound on the TV but listen to the radio (103.3 FM for other Middle-TN types) instead.
For boxing, Teddy Atlas is great. Other sports don’t matter enough to me to comment.
Our hockey announcer is Mickey Redmond. He amazes me when he says in the middle of bodies and waving sticks exactly what happened to the puck. He has said a puck came off a players skate and only slow motion proves it. My son and I always defer to him. If Mickey says it happened we know he will be proven right.
Too many sports “analysts” lecture us like a locker room coach. Nothing but “You MUST…, you CAN’T…, NEVER EVER…” etc.
In golf, I can think of CBS’s Ken Venturi and his replacement Lanny Wadkins who both do that.
On the other hand, some just give their expert opinion in a balanced, low-key message. Someone like Ian Baker-Finch.
I don’t like Paul Azinger. He has spent his entire life with his head down on a golf course hating his opponents. That certainly shows up when an American is competing against a non-American.
In Tennis, I like the personalities of the NBC crew led by John MacEnroe. But even those guys fall into the trap of always having to present the current situation as “The Story”. Tennis matches last for hours and there will be highs and lows for both players.
Another vote for Jerry Remy. Until he came along, I’d never thought about why it might be a bad idea for the runner on second to try to steal third when the batter is a lefty.
Boxing and NASCAR both have informed announcers.
Teddy Atlas is good. Better than Manny Steward who will, like, in the 6th round say, “I’ve noticed all fight that Joe’s been coming over the top of the jab.”
I think that Manny forgets that he’s there to comment. He’s needs a lot of goading.
Kyle Petty has been pretty good on TNT. He’s not a technical guy, but he puts you in the driver’s mind. Best of all, the previous week, he was out racing with the guys he’s commenting on. He’ll say, “Well, Jeff knows that such and such. . .”.
And, then there are issues that other announcers like to always bring up that they think are huge, “when the sun goes down, the track changes, and the crew chiefs gotta tell these drivers.”
Kyle will go, “these guys have been racing cars their whole lives. They know that tracks change.”
Most informative commentator? Alton Brown on the American Iron Chef, hands down. I learn something new from him every week.
Remy can also be relied on to provide effective pickup lines, dance moves, and telestrator enhanced man-scaping instruction. The man is a national treasure. His book, Watching Baseball, is a great guide for learning about the game from the comfort of your couch. Best in the business.
Al Leiter is very good, almost as insightful as Jim Kaat. The problem is we rarely get to hear him or Joe Girardi who is also very good.
We mostly get Ken Singleton who adds nothing, Michael Kay who is good but adds nothing insightful and John Flaherty who adds nothing. We also get a few games with Bobby Murcer who is not good but at least has some good Yankee stories. On a few rare occasions, we get Paul O’Neill who is a natural and adds a lot of hitting insights and Yankee Insights. An ideal night was some of the Subway series games when we got Kay, Leiter and O’Neill.
Jim
I always enjoyed when Al Leiter would demonstrate different pitching grips. I kept a baseball on my coffee table so I could pitch along with Al.
Pitchers and catchers seem to make the most insightful commentators. Probably because the two positions take the most amount of brains. Steve Stone also always delivered some sage wisdom.
I remember watching that reality show, “Making the Team” or whatever it was, where amateurs competed to get an NHL contract. The commentary from the judge/coaches was phenomenally insightful; you’d see a bunch of guys skating around and they all looked the same, and the coaches would talk about how Jim’s turning radius was a foot too wide when he turned to the left and that’s why he keeps getting beat by a half step when the other squad dumps to the left side - observations I wouldn’t notice, but they do, and it was cool to hear it.
You just never hear that sort of insight from color commentators. Watching the Senators playoff run I don’t think I heard any insightful critique of a single Sens player beyond “He playing great” or “he needs to play harder” or “Emery needs to give up fewer rebounds.” No talk about how a player was playing, or what his technical strengths or weaknesses were, unless someone made a blatantly stupid play or fell over his own skates, which of course I don’t need them to point out because anyone who does not use a white cane can SEE a guy tripping over himself or passing the puck to the wrong team. Christoph Schubert had probably the worst playoff run I’ve ever seen by a player whose team was winning, 20 games of absolutely nightmarish incompetence, and not one single time did I hear an announcer comment on what the hell was wrong with him.
Meanwhile, during the summer, Blue Jay commentary now is the black hole of Pat Tabler, who never says anything of any value at all; he could be replaced with a voice synthesizer running Baseball Cliches For Windows XP. I’ve been listening to that idiot for years and never heard him once say anything that constitutes real color commentary. He’s like Rain Man, repeating the same things over and over:
“We got us a ball game now.”
“They need a hit here.”
“They wanna move this runner over.”
“Johnson’s a scrappy kinda guy.”
“We got us a ball game now.”
“Could really use a big hit here.”
As every pitcher is introduced Pat goes over how that pitcher needs to pitch to be successful; his brilliant insights are things like “He needs to avoid the long ball” and “Needs to throw strikes.” You should avoid walking guys and allowing home runs? The hell you say! Pat absolutely cluster-spunks when the Jays are in Minneapolis because he gets to say seven times an inning that it’s hard to pick up the ball against the Metrodome roof.
By comparison, the radio team of Jerry Howarth and the new guy’s not bad, but the new guy’s angle is more statistical than technical and the thing is, I’d rather have an Al Leiter guy who knows stuff I don’t.
Joe Morgan actually said that during a playoff game a few years ago. He observed that the reason the Braves had won the previous game (over the Astros, IIRC) was that the Astros had not scored as many runs as the Braves had. I was aghast. Of course, I immediately went to get a notebook to write down this example of unparallelled genius. Were it not for the oracle of baseball wisdom that is Joe Morgan, I would never have picked up on something as subtle as the team with the most runs being awarded the win.
Greg Millen, of all people, made a good point in the Pittsburgh series that Phillips and Volchenkov were doing an excellent job of “gap control” against Crosby’s line, which accounted for him getting shut down so thoroughly.
That’s about the only insight I can remember from the playoff run.
One problem is that the commentators are meant to be entertainers. So they bring in people who keep things interesting, not those who have interesting insight, if that makes any sense at all.
John Davidson was the best color commentator I’ve ever heard in hockey. And, coming to the sport relatively late (I didn’t grow up with it; I only started watching in my mid-twenties), he taught me a lot about the game and the ways in which players were doing well or screwing up. Part of the success of any color man, I think, is due the interaction with the play-by-play man. The NY Rangers broadcast team on the MSG network for years was Sam Rosen and John Davidson (Davidson recently took a position as President of the St. Louis Blues), and when JD was commenting on replays or whatever, in the instances where JD might have glossed over some detail, Sam Rosen usually drew out some deeper analysis by asking a pertinent question. The two worked well together, and Rangers fans have missed JD’s astute commentary.
Count me in with What Exit? as a fan of Girardi, Leiter and O’Neill when they team up in various combos with Michael Kay for Yankees games on YES. I really enjoy it when Girardi and O’Neill are the team with Kay…
A bit of a hijack, but since Joe Morgan has been mentioned but I don’t recall seeing if Keith Hernandez was mentioned: when I first relocated to the East Coast and realized that baseball mattered (growing up in the Bay Area during the Montana years - sorry, but Giants baseball was pointless at the time), I read a bunch of books on baseball. Joe Morgan wrote one - I think Baseball for the Complete Idiot - it was not great. I read McCarver’s Baseball for Brain Surgeons - meh. But I read *Pure Baseball by Keith Hernandez ** (and a ghost writer) - the hands-down BEST baseball book I have ever read. He breaks down to mid-season, run-of-the-mill games (one goes to extra innings) pitch by pitch. I learned so much about the strategy of the game.
If you like baseball and haven’t read Pure Baseball, I can’t recommend it highly enough - it will change how you watch games…
*Best = Baseball 101 and strategy books; I am not including books like Ball Four or Summer of '49, etc… those are in a different category IMHO…
I wasn’t always a Madden basher- far from it! In the early Eighties when he first came along, he was superb at predicting plays and explaining what was happening. He was a huge breath of fresh air (younger fans may not believe that). But he stopped doing his homework 15 years ago, and it shows.
Has there ever been a player as great as he was that has such little understanding why he was great?
Outside of people that have already been mentioned, I like Max Kellerman (for now), Teddy Atlas, Manny Stewart, and Mickey Redmond (he does Red Wings hockey games. He’s completely amazing at picking out who and what the puck bounces off of at full speed. I mean it. He’s frickin’ uncanny. The puck will go through a pile of 4 bodies, including the goalie and he’ll point out that it was deflected by the stick of the guy laying on the ice and off of the goalie’s glove hand.)
Edited to Add: Rats, Teddy Atlas was mentioned. He’s still damned good, though. Joe Tessitore is also a very good boxing announcer as well. Very underrated.
I agree with this one. I like seeing how the pitches are thrown. I eat that stuff up.
Being born and bred a Laker fan, and despite the team’s recent history, I was always a fan of Stu Lantz. He had to play second fiddle to the legendary Chick Hearn, and when he did manage to squeeze in a comment, quite often it was insightful. He actually seemed to know his facts in a pre-computer data base world, and would manage to be respectful with the occasional correction when Chick started losing it in his latter years.