{"id":540,"date":"2010-06-27T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T14:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/?p=540"},"modified":"2010-06-27T20:50:37","modified_gmt":"2010-06-28T01:50:37","slug":"voices-of-the-game-a-tribute-to-baseball%e2%80%99s-greatest-broadcasters-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/540","title":{"rendered":"Voices of the Game: A tribute to baseball\u2019s greatest broadcasters (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am a die-hard fan of the Colorado Rockies<\/a>. <\/strong>And at times, being a fan of a team in the NL West is tough.\u00a0 After all, I live in DC, so most Rockies home games don\u2019t start until around 9PM.\u00a0 And when they\u2019re on the road, sometimes I won\u2019t see the first pitch until as late as 10:15PM, which means the game ends well after midnight.\u00a0 More often than I would care to remember, I have walked into work the morning after a Rockies-Giants thriller at AT&T Park muttering, \u201cThese West Coast road trips are killing me.\u201d\u00a0 Add this to the fact that the NL West receives almost no national media attention, coupled with the fact that my Rockies have never taken home a division title in the franchise\u2019s seventeen-year history, and one can see why I might wish my team played in the weaker, more time-zone friendly NL Central.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t.\u00a0 And there are three very good reasons every year why I\u2019m glad my team plays in baseball\u2019s forgotten division. Those reasons are named Jon Miller<\/a>, <\/em>Dick Enberg<\/a> <\/strong>and Vin Scully<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n


\n<\/em><\/p>\n

An average broadcaster or broadcasting team accurately describes the events of the game as they unfold.\u00a0 A good one provides interesting analysis into parts of the game about which average fans may know little, be it a manager\u2019s decision, a pitcher\u2019s selection of a location for his next delivery, or the positioning of the defense.\u00a0 But the greatest ones bring even more than that to the game.\u00a0 They are able to make the game somehow seem bigger and more important than it really is, while still understanding that not one fan (not even Justin Abramson, veteran play-by-play announcer of five Midwest Conference Tournament baseball games) is tuning in simply to hear them talk.<\/p>\n

Too often it seems that whenever people discuss announcers, it is to rip them for a poor description of the action (see Chip Caray\u2019s horrendous call of a terrific double play in the Twins-Tigers tiebreaker last year), being a shameless homer (Dick Vitale) or simply acting like a cartoon character (Chris Berman or John Madden).\u00a0 But unlike with umpires, the best announcers should <\/em>be noticed and appreciated.\u00a0 The above three are among my favorite in any sport, and all three fall into that category.\u00a0 Here is a closer look at each one:<\/p>\n

Jon Miller, though best known as the play-by-play man for ESPN\u2019s Sunday Night Baseball, also does play-by-play for the Giants.\u00a0 Miller\u2019s easygoing style in the booth, peppered with humorous hyperbole, is always enjoyable to listen to, even when he\u2019s describing another Rockies loss at the hands of the hated San Francisco Baseball Giants.\u00a0 His smooth, calm, measured voice can almost make one think he\u2019s getting ready to read Shakespeare, until he abruptly snaps out of it with a sharp, enthusiastic cry of, \u201cTwo!\u201d after a well-executed double play.<\/p>\n

In 1996, after fourteen years behind the microphone for the Orioles, Miller was dismissed by owner Peter Angelos (certainly not the only mistake Angelos has made with his team over the past fifteen years) because of Miller\u2019s candid commentary of games, which often included very frank descriptions of poor play by the Orioles.\u00a0 However, Miller\u2019s willingness to criticize his own team was made most famous seven years later.\u00a0 During a 2003 game between the Giants and the Diamondbacks, Miller famously declared \u201cThat was the worst baserunning in the history of the game!\u201d after the Giants\u2019 Ruben Rivera made three separate baserunning mistakes on a single play in the bottom of the ninth inning, when he should have easily scored the winning run.\u00a0 And although Angelos may not have liked it, Miller\u2019s willingness to both compliment and criticize any player on the field is just another reason to spend the extra $20 on MLB.TV Premium so fans have their choice between the broadcast from the opponent and that of their teams\u2019 own announcers, in my case the acceptable-but-forgettable Drew Goodman, George Frazier and Jeff Huson on FSN-Rocky Mountain.<\/p>\n

Dick Enberg left CBS to become the play-by-play announcer for the San Diego Padres this season.\u00a0 In an interview with KFMB Radio, Dick Enberg stated that the pace of a baseball game \u201callows the announcer to be a storyteller, and to bring facets of not only baseball, but of San Diego culture.\u201d\u00a0 Enberg went on to say that although some people call the time between pitches \u201cdead time,\u201d he often calls it \u201clive time\u201d because it allows for creativity on the part of the announcer.\u00a0 Indeed, the soft-spoken Enberg is a great storyteller, as he\u2019s called football and tennis at its highest levels, not to mention his time as the announcer for UCLA basketball during the late John Wooden\u2019s run of championships.<\/p>\n

Enberg recounts many of these stories in his autobiography, entitled Oh My! <\/em>after his signature phrase.\u00a0 Unlike Miller, Enberg is more soft-spoken and prefers to avoid controversy in his comments (especially evident in his book), but still has a great passion for the game, as he gave up what was undoubtedly a higher-paying job that offered many more listeners in order to call baseball games for the Padres, a small-market team with little history and no national following.\u00a0 Though you won\u2019t hear Enberg enthusiastically bellow \u201cBack, back, back, back\u201d during a home run or rip into a manager after a poor decision, he still brings a great deal of entertainment and baseball insight to any game he announces.<\/p>\n

However, while these two announcers are among the all-time greats, in my view there is no commentator in any sport better than the Dodgers\u2019 Vin Scully.\u00a0 The 82-year-old Scully has been calling games for the Los Angeles Dodgers ever since there was <\/em>a team called the Los Angeles Dodgers.\u00a0 Nicknamed \u201cThe Transistor Kid\u201d by Robert Creamer in a 1964 Sports Illustrated article, Scully\u2019s broadcasts popularized the then-uncommon phenomenon of fans bringing their radios to the ballpark for a game.\u00a0 Surely Scully is a kid no more, but his pleasantly nasal voice continues to fill bars, restaurants and of course, cars stuck on the freeway during rush hour as Los Angeles commuters head home from work.\u00a0 Very neutral in his broadcasts, Scully can appeal to all fans who happen to be tuning in, be they die-hards who have followed the Dodgers since before they moved from Brooklyn or casual baseball fans who take in a only a few games a year.<\/p>\n

Listening to a Dodger game, one can never tell by the tone of Scully\u2019s voice whether the Dodgers are ahead or behind, and he has the very uncommon ability to keep listeners engaged even in the late innings of a blowout (readers who tuned in to listen to myself and Jake Thompson \u201910 call Grinnell College women\u2019s basketball on MWCTV know how difficult this is) by telling stories from his long career in baseball.\u00a0 Often, even in close games, he will speak between innings of events that happened thirty years ago or more.\u00a0 The most recent I heard was an account of his frustration with an umpire who would raise his right hand after every single pitch, ball or strike, to click his counter.\u00a0 Because of this, Scully had a very difficult time keeping track of the count, so he approached the umpire after the game and asked why he didn\u2019t keep his counter in his left hand.\u00a0 The umpire replied \u201cI wish I could,\u201d before holding up his left arm and revealing that he had no left hand.\u00a0 A broadcasting veteran of sixty-plus years, Scully has many more stories like this one, but never makes the mistake of assuming anything he says is bigger than the game itself, always wrapping up his story at just the right time by simply saying \u201cAnd now, let\u2019s go back to this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

These three broadcasters have the almost-unique ability to make the game bigger, more important and more fun without making themselves bigger than the game.\u00a0 So the next time Chip Caray bungles a call of a critical moment in baseball history, or the next time you roll your eyes after Chris Berman screams \u201cBack-back-back-back-back\u201d for the 50th<\/sup> time in an hour at the Home Run Derby, take a moment to remember some of the game\u2019s all-time greats.\u00a0 Because announcing a baseball game is a tough job.\u00a0 And I\u2019m just glad these guys do it.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am a die-hard fan of the Colorado Rockies. And at times, being a fan of a team in the NL West is tough.\u00a0 After all, I live in DC, so most Rockies home games don\u2019t start until around 9PM.\u00a0 And when they\u2019re on the road, sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12,18,6,11],"tags":[428,555,554,556],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":543,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}