Give ‘em a break

My friends and I watch a lot of sports. Most of us also played sports competitively and are intelligent guys (and girls). So it really annoys us when we hear announcers screw up. Whether its calling a slider a curveball, mispronouncing somebody’s name, telling us something blatantly obvious like “they’re gonna have to score some runs this inning if they want to win the game,” when a team is losing in the ninth, or even telling us that on a 3-2 count the runner on second will be going on the pitch when there is nobody on first, it really annoys us. We make fun of announcers almost as much as we talk about the game itself, we sit back and critique these professionals so hard that I almost feel bad for them, but I never do. Every sports fan does this throughout the country and it’s always the same jokes and the same critiques, but I am here to tell you to go easy on these guys, don’t stop but go easy on them because 95% of the time they are doing a good job.

In your average baseball game, an announcer will screw something up about two or three times. Some of them will be blatant and others not so much but they always get caught by the guys I watch sports with. But let’s think about what they are dong for a second. An average AL game in 1997 lasted 2:57, NL 2:47. That’s almost 180 minutes or 10,800 seconds. Now if we take out time for commercial breaks, let’s say 30 minutes that’s 9000 seconds. We expect announcers to say about a word a second and chide them when there are long silences, which leaves us at about 9000 words during a baseball game. When was the last time any of you said 9000 words without sounding stupid? Never, I bet, and I know all your friends never said 9000 words without saying something you found stupid.

Now I do understand that there are definitely some announcers out there who say more stupid things than others but on the whole, announcers are doing a great job by not being an idiot the entire time they are on T.V. or the radio. I’ve spent time on the mic for college basketball games and I have a friend currently announcing for an independent league baseball team. Announcing is harder than it seems. (Although my friend Aaron makes more fun of other announcers than anyone else I know.)

If you ever think to yourself, ‘man these announcers are terrible I just wish they would get rid of them’. Either remember, or read up on, the Dec 20, 1980 “silent game” and change your mind about announcers once and for all. They are very important to sports, they are better at what they do than you are, and what they do is not a cake walk.

-David Ringold

Note:

Congratulations to Scott Allen, for having his Mets finally throw a no-no. As someone constantly berated for being a Mets fan, he finally has at least one thing he can hang his 20 orange and blue hats on. At least until another September collapse.