• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 31, 2024

This is a big pet peeve of mine when watching live sports: Play-by-play announcers and analysts in the broadcast booth who ignore the games under way in front of them in favor of holding conversations with each other full of irrelevant trivia.

The trigger for this TV Blog is the World Series, which has been airing live on Fox Sports since last Friday.

Even more frustrating than the silence of the Yankee bats (until Tuesday night, that is) has been the incessant yakking of the Fox Sports booth personalities -- play-by-play announcer Joe Davis and analyst John Smoltz.

As the games proceed, particularly into the middle and late innings, the two sometimes seem to grow bored of the game in favor of sharing player histories, stats, team histories, what the manager had for lunch and other facts completely unrelated to what’s happening on the field.

Or to put it another way, whatever happened to: “Here’s the windup, and the pitch …”?

Their seeming disconnect with the subject at hand creates the same kind of disconnect between a viewer and the game.

Viewers at home are the millions of us who cannot go to the game in person. Thus, we want to know what the scene is like. 

The tiresome discussions about player backgrounds and how they bounced around the minors are meaningless because, for among other reasons, who can remember any of it, who wants to remember any of it, and lastly, who cares?

Instead, we expect, or hope for, descriptions of the play and the atmosphere, particularly when the cameras are focused on only a slice of a wider scene that is visible to our sportscaster-messengers, but not to us.

What’s going on in the infield and outfield while the cameras are trained on the pitcher and batter? 

What does it feel like to be in a sold-out stadium when a World Series championship is at stake? 

Sure, we can pick up a bit of the ambient sound while the booth personalities bore us with their baseball trivia, but that’s not enough. We want to feel like we are there.

Actually, when the announcer and commentator ignore the batter at the plate to gab with each other to our detriment, we do imagine that we are there -- like we are sitting in the stands within hearing distance of a couple of know-it-alls sitting nearby who won’t shut up.

The TV Blog is singling out Davis and Smoltz only because the World Series is on this week (unless the Dodgers ended it Wednesday night after this TV Blog was written).

Brain-numbing chitchat while games are underway happens in other sports and on other networks too.

The one that comes to mind the most are NBA telecasts on ESPN. When watching those games, you can be forgiven for almost forgetting there is a game on.

Those broadcast teams drone on with their ceaseless analysis and trivia for such lengthy intervals that I have actually given up and turned them off.

Recently, I tried the tactic of finding some game coverage on a radio station where I hoped the announcers would be more descriptive and I could watch a game on TV with the sound muted.

But if memory serves, the radio broadcast I found had some sort of delay in which the action on TV was not in sync with the radio announcers’ descriptions. 

Some, such as those who produce and direct the TV sports broadcast, might argue that radio requires descriptions of the sort missing from the TV coverage simply because TV is a visual medium and radio is not.

Thus, the TV sports personalities really do not have to lean on descriptions of the action since, the producers might aver, the action is there for everyone to see.

But I would argue the opposite. At the risk of repeating myself, major sports events take place in worlds all their own in which only a couple of tens of thousands can attend in-person.

If the TV personalities are describing some action such as windups and pitches, for example, then so be it. We can see these things too, but they have better seats.