Who’s your least favorite sportscaster? Who annoys you more than anyone else? For me, it’d have to be Josh Lewin. That annoying little prick that does some of the Fox baseball broadcasts. He’s also done some work for the Cubs. The little f*cker has a little lisp (I’m not condemning him for that, but one wonders why he opted for a career in broadcasting) that drives me up the wall. And he knows shit about baseball. I could walk in off the street and do a better job. Whoever sits in the booth with him just has to feel like bitchslapping him. God knows I do.
I am so gonna get flamed for this.
Tied for first place: Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan. These two prove that good athletes do not automatically make good commentators. Actually, Joe proves that. Tim proves that some people won’t make a good commentator no matter how mediocre an athlete they were. Thank heaven they don’t work together.
A close third: Jon Miller. You want to over-enunciate every Latino player’s name, go get a job at ESPNdeportes. I swear to God if I hear “raf-AY-ell FOUR-cal” one more freaking time I’m going to scream.
Bobby Unser, former racer and now commentator on NASCAR races. I can’t say I hate him exactly, but his voice is so damn funny and his comments so inane that I have to single him out. If the Unsers were the Kennedys, Bobby would be Teddy.
John Madden. I can’t stand him. Talk about your verbal diarrhea. Just once, I’d like him to either shut up or say something useful and/or interesting. What an ass.
Lionel Bienvenu at Fox Sports is so fucking smarmy. I also can’t stand his co-worker Van Earl Wright, who just strikes me as a blow-dried idiot.
Oh, now that I’m thinking about it: Jerry Glanville. Damn, his voice is irritating.
I don’t watch sports if I can help it, but my dad does.
If I have to hear that guy that always says something like “All the way, BABY!!!” in an insanely loud and annoying voice one more time, I think I may have to hire a hitman to exterminate him. (Dick Vitale?)
You guys have no idea what bad broadcasting is. JOE MORGAN? Pshaw.
You have not heard bad baseball broadcasting until you have head Brian Williams of CBC do a Blue Jays game. It is simply beyond adequate description; it’s a surreal experience.
Williams is the head of CBC Sports and has worked there since before the invention of the printing press. His usual job is as host of the Olympic games telecasts, which in Canada are 18-hour-long-all-live-feed affairs - no tape delay - so the fact that he stays awake and coherent is pretty impressive. So in 1994 they decided to have him be the lead man on their Jay broadcasts. Boy, was that an error.
- He Knows Nothing About Baseball.
IT’s pretty obvious, listening to Williams, that prior to 1994 he never watched a baseball game. He really doesn’t understand anything he’s describing, cannot grasp baseball tactics, and isn’t even good at perceiving the play.
The best example of this is that he screams “WELL HIT!” every time a ball is hit in the air. I mean EVERY time. Home run? “Well hit!!” Fly out to the warning track? “Well hit!” Routine, short pop? “Well hit!” Popout to the shortstop? Yes, he’s screamed “Well hit!” then, too. Those of you who go to a lot of ball games will know that the first few times you watch an MLB game it’s hard to judge the power of a fly ball when it’s first hit. Well, Brian Williams still hasn’t figured it out.
Williams also seems to not understand even the most basic statistical concepts. The other day he said - I am not making this up - that “Boston has an ERA of 3.23. Toronto’s is 4.34. More than a run. Well, that’s not much of a difference!” His colour man, John Cerutti (who is a pretty damned good colour man) just sat there in shock before finally saying “Well, a run a game is a big advantage.” Gosh, I’ll say it is, Williams, you fucking idiot. In the same broadcast he said “And with that double, Carlos Delgado has set quite a statistical standard… he is now TENTH ON THE ALL TIME BLUE JAYS DOUBLES LIST!” He practically shrieked this completely irrelevant fact. So now we know that a WHOLE RUN A FRIGGING GAME isn’t a big difference, but Carlos Delgado having more doubles than Ernie Whitt is a matter of Biblical importance.
Cerutti will sometimes launch into detailed explanations of baseball physics, defensive positioning, or strategy. Williams invariably sits in stone silence. He’s out of his league.
- He Hates Baseball.
Williams is invariably ranting about how games are too long, players make too much money, they aren’t as good as they used to be, they’re all jerks, things were better back in 1957 when the Yankees won it every year, blah blah blah. You hear this a lot but he never shuts up about it.
- He’s Insulting.
Brian Williams liberally refers to players as “jerks” and other such things. On the air.
- He Has The Memory Of My Senile, Dying Grandma
Williams has been known to refer to Kelvim Escobar as “Juan Guzman.” He STILL does it. It is fair to note that Guzman hasn’t pitched for Toronto for four years now. Remember when Harry Caray uised to always mix up names? Williams is worse - twice as worse, at least. Listening to Brian Williams trying to pronounce Hispanic names is like listening to Chewbacca trying to play Hamlet.
It’s rare for him to get through a game without screwing up ten names. Ten. He also cannot remember numbers, events, places, or personalities.
- He Holds Grudges.
Williams is the ultimate prima donna of sports broadcasting. There is no American equivalent to his breadth of exposure or influence; if you can imagine Bob Costas with the corporate influence of Peter Jennings, you’d be close.
Consequently, Williams holds grudges against anyone who doesn’t fellate him. Sportswriters are infamous for this anyway - whena sportswriter writes somethin negative about a player, it usually has nothing to do with facts or evidence and everything to do with how much the player sucked up to him in the last interview. But Williams is AMAZING. I quite literally cannot remember the last time he broadcast a game and did not insult Jose Cruz (a nice young man by everyone else’s account.) He gets a shot in at Albert Belle every game, even now that Belle is retired. Williams invariably refers to at least five or six players, every game, as “jerks” or some sarcastic insult. Anyone else would have been fired.
Al Micheals. IMHO, he kind of has a “I know I’m considered to be a great sportscaster, now listen to me show you what they are talking about” attitude. And sound of his voice. Not excatly nails on a chalk board, but a little grating.
But why is Marvin Allen back? He’s a pervert and they put him back on TV. Let him rehab somewhere else.
ESPN doesn’t use him anymore, but CBS did on the College World Series.
Ray Knight. He is incredibly awful and his voice is annoying.
Locally here in L.A., we get Rick Monday on the radio, who has absolutely no original thoughts and puts extra syllables into players’ names. For a few years, the Dodgers third baseman was Todd A-Zeile.
Dan-Fking-Dierdorff.**
I can not stand this man. I was so thankful when he left Monday Night Football!
Cris Collinsworth. A more bitter man you will not find. What a loser. I don’t know what he had against the Broncos, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he called their second Superbowl Championship in as many years a fluke. Look, you don’t have to like the teams, or the players. You aren’t paid to like them. But insulting the Denver Broncos, and by extension, the entire NFL is out of line. I would have fired him that second. And he does this every chance he gets! I’m not watching FOX so I can see how bitter and twisted Collinsworth’s soul is. Honestly, you can be a good sports commentator without shitting on the teams.
I second the Vitale nomination for college hoops. JUST SHUT UP DICKEE BABYYYY!
For football: Glanville and Joe Theismann of ESPN Sunday Night NFL. That guy is the worst: very much a partisan towards certain teams (or against others, like the 49ers), no insight, and a grating voice.
I sure do like Keith Jackson for college football though. WHOOOOA NELLIE!
Dierdorf, Musberger and Theisman. I have a visceral response to these guys.
The first guy that popped into my head was Jon Miller, but I think he is just the worst baseball announcer. The only baseball guy that I think was worse than Miller was Harry Carrey (sorry Cub fans).
John Madden has to be the worst announcer in any sport. He never says anyting relevant to the game, he just uses his stupid catch phrases over and over again. He sounds so stupid that every time I hear him it completely blows me away that he was once an NFL coach.
As for baskeball, Dick Vitale is the most annoying announcer out there. The only reason he isn’t worse than Madden, is that Vitale at least knows a little (very little) about the sport he covers. Vitale, like Madden just uses the same catch phrases over and over and over again.
Also in basketball, I think Marv Albert and Bill Walton are pretty bad, but they don’t hold a candle to Vitale.
Vitale is a blowhard, suck-upping nitwit. He doesn’t really know anything about hoops either. All he knows is that whoever the player and/or coach in front of him at that moment is the greatest ever. Man, I hate that guy.
But here’s another vote for Tim “Aren’t I Clever” McCarver as the absolute worst. What a patronizing SOB. I’d like to take him out to the woodshed and nail his tongue to the wall.
Are you sure about this? I’ve watched a couple of the Fox broadcasts and don’t remember seeing him. He isn’t on MRN either. Besides, the Unsers never raced stock cars, they raced Indy cars.
Hey, I like Al Michaels’ voice. It just means Monday Night Football to me.
What I can’t stand, however, is everyone in the booth on ESPN Sunday Night Football. Gaaaaahhhhh! I can’t listen to them at all, especially Thiesmann. What a windbag.
And Jerry Glanville, WTF? What programming director could listen to more than 10 seconds of this guy and decide he should be an announcer?
Keith Hernandez pisses me off. He’s always either reminiscing about his own playing days and how great they (he) were (was), or else he’s shoveling out nasty comments about how poorly a particular player (usually an infielder and often a first baseman) executed a particular play. This implication is clear: Hernandez wouldn’t have played it that sloppy. Hernandez would have handled it better. Hernandez could probably still show these snot-nosed kids a thing or two, where’s my glove, dammit, I’m going down there and win another Gold Glove.
I’ve heard him take this attitude and go on forever even though the out was made. Keith! They got the guy out! Maybe it wasn’t a clean play. It wasn’t a thing of beauty. It wasn’t choreographed by Jerome Robbins, but they completed the play.
I think Keith Hernandez is cocky and has a nasty streak. That, to me, is worse than annoying catch-phrases, incompetence, annoying voices or anything else other sportscasters do.
There are very few TERRIBLE sportscasters. Dennis Miller is one of the few, and I regret saying that. I had high hopes for him, and I was disappointed to see how bad he was. But the absolute WORST is another guy on “Monday Night Football”: Eric Dickerson. What idiot hired HIM???
Surprisingly, Dan Fouts turned out to be pretty good. I say “pretty good” because, as a college analyst, he was typical of the ex-jock color analyst.
MOST ex-jock color analysts are useless in the broadcast booth. Not terrible, mind you. Not annoying. Most are personable, pleasant, reasonably articulate, fairly intelligent. ALL of them know far more about their sport than I do, AL of them must have interesting, funny anecdotes they could share… and yet, none of them ever do!
Perfect example: Phil Simms. I was a Giants fan for years, and I LIKE the guy. He’s smart enough, articulate enough, likeable enough… and yet, I can honestly say he has NEVER told me a damn thing about football that I didn’t already know.
I don’t mean to pick on Simms- I could say the same about Dan Dierdorf, Randy Cross, Boomer Esiaison… et al.
I mean, when Kurt Warner throws a great pass to Isaac Bruce, could SOMEBODY say SOMETHING more than, “You just can’t throw the ball any better than that.”?
When Terrell Davis takes a vicious hit, and is lying on the Astroturf, could we hear something more than, “Gosh, you hate to see that happen”?
What’s the point of paying a fortune to ex-jocks, if all they’re going to give us is the same old cliches?
To me, the problem isn’t the handful of HORRIBLE sportscasters. It’s the overwhelming majority of MEDIOCRE sportscasters who have nothing new or interesting to say.