First, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Becky! Hope it's a great day.
I had already intended to follow up Monday's entry in which I did a "literary analysis" of baseball, with a piece on baseball's "narrators," that is the game's announcers, when word came down that ESPN was dumping Jon Miller and Joe Morgan from its Sunday night broadcast. Baseball's current narrators are not as good as the generation past. Miller and Morgan are examples of what I'm talking about, although I must confess that I don't listen to them that often because I refuse to watch the Yankees versus the Red Sox every other Sunday night. Nevertheless, Miller, certainly in his final years in Baltimore, came to believe that he was the entertainment rather than the game. The play-by-play man's job is to be entertaining while focusing the listener's attention on the real entertainment--the game. Harry Cary, Ernie Harwell, Phil Rizzuto, Herb Carneal, Chuck Thompson, Jack Brickhouse and others understood this principle. LIstening to those guys was like going to the game with your favorite uncle. He pointed out things about the game that you might not have noticed, but he didn't chirp in your ear to the point that you couldn't enjoy your hotdog or the sunshine or your own thoughts.
As for Joe Morgan, he and Tim McCarver both suffer from FAS or "Football Announcer Syndrome" which is the notion that every single play is important and must be analyzed with the utmost technical seriousness.
In literary terms, the insights that these baseball and football color analysts offer may be interesting, but the "read" is tedious. Indeed, football itself has removed all the colorful description from its own terminology, substituting scientific-sounding euphemisms that do nothing to help the listener visualize what's going on. I mean the first time that I heard the term "neutral zone infraction" I thought that perhaps the two Koreas were back at war.
On the most recent Monday Night Football broadcast, Ron Jaworski commented that a Pittsburgh running back "caught the ball on the periphery with space in front of him," and for a second I thought I was listening to a description of a shuttle mission. Of course, listening to Jaworski gush about "cover twos" and "gap integrity" and every two yard gain as if it were the greatest event since the invention of the hand pump to keep the footballs firm, is only slighly less painful than if you were to collect a sack full of alley cats, throw the sack in the dryer, and then turn it on high heat.
Color analysts should provide what the name clearly states--color. I don't need to be assaulted by everything they know. The best I ever heard in the TV booth was former Oriole outfielder John Lowenstein. "Hitting the ball over the fence tends to minimize the outfielders' mobility," he once remarked. Now that's some colorful narration!
"Brother Lo": 1980 Topps
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