How do announcers know such interesting trivia about players as they come to the plate? For example: John Doe has hit 7 doubles in his last 8 at bats, all to center field, or Joe Shmo hasn’t faced a pitcher younger than him yet this season, or John Smith grew up in Boston and used to pitch on his father’s little league team? Who feeds them this information? Are there people who make a list of tidbits about every player? The announcers have to fill the airtime with something if nothing is happening on the field at that moment. For me, on WOR Mets Radio, Howie Rose and Josh Lewin seem like geniuses with the stuff they are spouting. And also, what kinds of skills are necessary to be a good sports announcer? I know that’s a broad question, but it can’t just be the ability to do play-by-play. Do they do research themselves before the game? What kind of preparation is involved before each broadcast?
If it’s anything like college sports, then the teams have designated people who look stuff up like that. In college they’re Sport Information Directors (SIDs) and they literally sit in the press box and feed stats and information to everyone
According to Roger Kahn’s book The Boys of Summer, back in 1950 or so, the Brooklyn Dodgers hired a team “statistician” whose entire job was to figure the players’ current batting averages, how they hit against left-handers and all the rest of that stuff. He sat in the press box during games and passed those nuggets of trivia to the reporters and announcers throughout the game. That’s how it got started.
As for the rest of the stuff, the clubs put out media guides stuffed with every kind of trivia from birthplaces to pets’ names. And many, if not almost all, local announcers actually spend time in the clubhouse getting to know the players and coaches, while the network announcers at leasty try to talk to the coaches before the game.
If you see the announcers speaking on camera during the game, you’ll notice they all have an earpiece. That’s used to relay them information, both from the director and from whoever is handling stats for the game. The announcers also keep a scoresheet to show what the player did earlier in the game.
I thought Elias Sports Bureau was the big name in the field.
But yes, the broadcasting companies subscribe to a service that provides the announcers with talking-point lists for every game, and the production crew (either in the truck or back of the booth) provides prompts.
AIUI Elias, or whoever, also has stats geeks on call to do database mining if something weird happens in a game and the announcers wonder if it was the first time or when was the last time or whatever.
Elias is the official statistician for pretty much every major sport. So they compile the data that goes into the history books.
Stats Inc. (now apparently Stats LLC) provides research, data feeds and media content, including for broadcast support.
