Another vote for both Joe Angel and Jon Miller.
Another great one is Denny Matthews, the Royals radio guy. He’s so good he gets me to listen to Royals games!
I know he’s not well liked, but I appreciate Gary Cohen. I miss him on the Mets radio broadcasts.
I also like Dan Shulman and Dave Campbell, who did the radio broadcasts together on ESPN Baseball for several years (I don’t think they work together regularly anymore though).
Wow, those are pretty damn funny! Thanks!
I’ll toss another grenade at Morgan. He sucks. I like Marty Brennaman.
Yup. And a bonus is getting to hear Frank White, my favorite player growing up. Frank can be a little Joe Morgan-ish some times, but it’s worth it to hear him talk about those old Royals teams that used to pound on the Yankees.
As much as I can’t STAND Joe Morgan and have a slight distaste for Tim McCarver, this is the guy I wanted to comment on. That Hawk guy.
“that’s a can of corn!”
or “Bad guys 2, good guys coming to bat!”
"Cinch it up and hunker down:
I’m not alone in my RAEG: http://www.heavethehawk.com/
Is this a whoosh? Are you saying that Joe Morgan claimed that Billy Beane wrote Moneyball and, therefore, you believe the aforementioned Joe Morgan over the Amazon link that KennerTheGreat just provided?
Moneyball is about Billy Beane and the A’s but it is assuredly written by Michael Lewis.
That’s a joke. A haw haw.
Let me ask YOU a question. Who was the game’s greatest second baseman of his era and a key member of the Big Red Machine?
And, wouldn’t you take his word over Jeff Bezos? Who, I hear, throws like a girl.
Wow - the incredibly rare double whoosh! It’s like watching Eckstein hit an inside-the-parker!
Oh, I forgot to mention Will McDonough – does he just do Red Sox games? I like him quite a bit.
Edit: Of course, I meant Sean McDonough, Will’s son. Will used to write for the Boston Globe and died in 2003.
I spent a summer in the Baltimore area when I was a kid, and I’m still a big Jon Miller fan. I’ve got little to add about Morgan and McCarver. But there’s a view that McCarver loves the Yankees (or Derek Jeter, at least), and if you think that makes him more enjoyable for Yankee fans, I’ll tell you it doesn’t. But neither of those guys is as useless or aggravating as Hawk Harrelson. Absolutely horrible. He does nothing but shtick.
Bill Walton is retired from play by play, I think, but I did like him at least in small doses. Maybe it was just a so-bad-it’s-good thing.
As a longtime Cleveland Indians fan and Cleveland area resident, I just want to say that all our announcers: Tom Hamilton, Rick Manning, Mike Hegan and Matt Underwood, (link) all suck.
Underwood sucks less than the others, but they all suck. Not any insight or a good sense of humor in the lot of them.
Joe Tait, the Cavs radio announcer, used to do Tribe games too. He was great. “It’s beautiful day for baseball!”
Rick Manning is from Da Falls, and you won’t be surprised to hear that the Esteemed Leaders saw fit to name a street after him.
You will, however, get smug satisfaction from seeing the abject “beauty” of his street.
My favorite was the the time that McCarver found it “remarkable” that there are more runs scored on average in innings that start with a leadoff home run compared to those that start with a walk. He was flabbergasted by that completely unsurprising fact. Another time he and Joe Buck both believed that the weathervane in Yankee stadium was indicating wind from left to right, even though (to anyone who has seen a weathervane before) it was clearly indicating that the wind was from right to left, and nearby flags were starched out to the left. They said that you should ignore the flags, and that only the weathervane (which they were reading backwards) gave the true wind direction. They believed this, they said, because Don Mattingly had told them so. Now, if somebody had told me something that stupid I would not have believed him even if he was Don Mattingly, but more likely they just misunderstood him, because I can’t believe there could be THREE people that stupid in the same stadium at the same time.
I can’t believe that you can’t believe that three other people in one stadium couldn’t believe that the weather vane was wrong.
For basketball, I would have to go with Bobby Knight. Ron Franklin and Fran Frischella always used to do most of the Big 12 basketball games on ESPN. This year for some reason we got Brent Musberger and Bobby Knight. Knight may have been a Hall of Fame coach but he’s an f’ing idiot in the broadcast booth. During one of the Kansas games, where first team All-American Sherron Collins was having an off-night, Knight had the gall to suggest that he should be benched to start the second half. Musberger was so flabbergasted I don’t think he even knew how to respond to that. Knight also had a tendency to go off on tangents completely unrelated to what was happening in the game or what his broadcast partner was discussing. I sure as hell hope we don’t get that clown next year.
Maybe he has daddy issues. His old man was one of the best ever.
To be fair, it really is surprising how close the percentages are between those situations (in terms of multi-run innings after each occurence). And (slightly) in McCarver’s defense, multi-run innings occur far more often as a total percentage of total innings after a leadoff walk then a leadoff HR, because there are far more leadoff walks then leadoff homers.
Oh yeah. For Phillies fans Chris Wheeler is the worst announcer known to man. I have a problem with play by play men who have difficulty figuring out the difference between a fly ball to center field and a foul ball. I have a problem with a color men who have never played the game professionally, or at all. Somehow, Wheeler is able to do both jobs poorly. His insights are hackneyed and he is the worst sort of non selfaware homer.
Scott Graham was a Philly guy who I considered the heir apparent to Harry Kalas, but he was dumped from the broadcast team without much ceremony. I am not sure what the deal was, but I think it is a shame. Tom McCarthy is fine, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Graham. The radio guy is pretty good, though. Graham is doing NFL Films, so it is nice to hear he got to replace Kalas in some way. Too bad it isn’t for baseball.
Jack Buck certainly is one of the best of all time. I agree with that, Shoeless. Maybe you are right, he just got dragged to too many games as a kid.
Darryl Waltrip actively cheers certain drivers during races. I can’t stand Brad Daugherty, everything to him is great! He’s just so glad to be there because everything is so fantastic! Rusty Wallace nearly drove me to drink with his “draft-lock” talk. Luckily, they moved him to a lesser role. I don’t want cheer leaders, I want Bob Jenkins and Ned Jarrett actually calling a race.
Not meant as a challenge, but do you have a cite somewhere for that?
I have to add the White Sox’ guy to this. I have virtually no opinion of the White Sox but I really hope they don’t do anything of note this year so I don’t have to hear that dipshit call it. It never occurred to me that a perfect game could (almost) be ruined by the announcer.
Didn’t Fox or someone staff the secondary/regional Saturday afternoon games with one guy from each team’s booth? Why the hell isn’t that more common? Sure it’s hit-or-miss but I suspect there’d be more hits than misses, and I can’t imagine someone like Mike Krukow or Dave Flemming being unpalatable to the casual TV viewer.
That was a bit of hyperbole on my part. He says he barely watches sports during the week. He would rather watch the Bachelorette. That baseball is too long for people to invest their time in night after night. He never comes out and says he doesn’t like baseball. But, it does sound like he prefers a reality show over it.