Baseball 2024

Who else is on MLB Network? And who are your favorite announcers? Having been a Dodger fan for about 75 years now most of my life has been spent listening to Vin Scully, the gold standard of baseball announcing. With his passing Dodger broadcasting has gone from the best of the best to a cluster of round robin wanabee's, none of which has distinguished himself. Except Orel Hersheiser who is about as bad and boring as it gets. His attempts to present himself as cool and famous are just cringe worthy.

I certainly don't watch all of the games but I like to have the sound on and hear the cadence of the games, the sound of summer to me that will be all over too soon. Some teams that I don't really follow have good announcers and I listen/watch their games just for the quality of the broadcast. These are guys that are baseball centered and haven't gone down the rabbit hole of being hip, cool, famous, suave and above all, comedic.

Right now I think the best booth in the business is the New York Mets, very astute and knowledgeable. The San Francisco Giants have a pretty decent crew and the Cubs Jim Deshaies is a good color announcer. Bob Brenly of the Diamondbacks is a good observer and student of the game. Many of the rest belong to the gags and giggle set, usually accompanied by some broken down ex-jock telling us about how it was "back in the day....." Pay attention dude, there is a game going on! I'm trying to watch a ball game, I can watch the History Channel all winter if I want.

Who are your favorites and candidate for worst of the worst?
 
iveofione said:
Who else is on MLB Network? And who are your favorite announcers? Having been a Dodger fan for about 75 years now most of my life has been spent listening to Vin Scully, the gold standard of baseball announcing. With his passing Dodger broadcasting has gone from the best of the best to a cluster of round robin wanabee's, none of which has distinguished himself. Except Orel Hersheiser who is about as bad and boring as it gets. His attempts to present himself as cool and famous are just cringe worthy.

I certainly don't watch all of the games but I like to have the sound on and hear the cadence of the games, the sound of summer to me that will be all over too soon. Some teams that I don't really follow have good announcers and I listen/watch their games just for the quality of the broadcast. These are guys that are baseball centered and haven't gone down the rabbit hole of being hip, cool, famous, suave and above all, comedic.

Right now I think the best booth in the business is the New York Mets, very astute and knowledgeable. The San Francisco Giants have a pretty decent crew and the Cubs Jim Deshaies is a good color announcer. Bob Brenly of the Diamondbacks is a good observer and student of the game. Many of the rest belong to the gags and giggle set, usually accompanied by some broken down ex-jock telling us about how it was "back in the day....." Pay attention dude, there is a game going on! I'm trying to watch a ball game, I can watch the History Channel all winter if I want.

Who are your favorites and candidate for worst of the worst?
Click to expand...
YES Network are the WORST by far. Michael Kay thinks he's the most interpersonal of all time coupled with him being wrong about stuff happening in front of him. His partner is Paul O'Neal, who sounds like a punch drunk ex-boxer who is concurrently sauced up drunk.

Giants crew, Royals crew, and Brewers crew have been enjoyable when I've caught them
 
iveofione said:
Who else is on MLB Network? And who are your favorite announcers? Having been a Dodger fan for about 75 years now most of my life has been spent listening to Vin Scully, the gold standard of baseball announcing. With his passing Dodger broadcasting has gone from the best of the best to a cluster of round robin wanabee's, none of which has distinguished himself. Except Orel Hersheiser who is about as bad and boring as it gets. His attempts to present himself as cool and famous are just cringe worthy.

I certainly don't watch all of the games but I like to have the sound on and hear the cadence of the games, the sound of summer to me that will be all over too soon. Some teams that I don't really follow have good announcers and I listen/watch their games just for the quality of the broadcast. These are guys that are baseball centered and haven't gone down the rabbit hole of being hip, cool, famous, suave and above all, comedic.

Right now I think the best booth in the business is the New York Mets, very astute and knowledgeable. The San Francisco Giants have a pretty decent crew and the Cubs Jim Deshaies is a good color announcer. Bob Brenly of the Diamondbacks is a good observer and student of the game. Many of the rest belong to the gags and giggle set, usually accompanied by some broken down ex-jock telling us about how it was "back in the day....." Pay attention dude, there is a game going on! I'm trying to watch a ball game, I can watch the History Channel all winter if I want.

Who are your favorites and candidate for worst of the worst?
Click to expand...

Couldn’t agree more. Trying to listen to a game on the radio or TV while being force fed useless stats and data while driving at night has gone the way of the mammoth. It makes my hair hurt. I associate trying to enjoy a game now with trying to have a meal with my wife in a fast casual restaurant (non top ten chain) while being in the proximity of three or four 20 something’s rehashing shit they received on their internet feed the night before.
Basically sounding like 5th graders talking about sex.

I call bullshit on the majority of today’s announcers…especially TV. Can’t watch them at all. Zero faves now.

Give me the following and I could stay awake all night:

Bob Prince Pittsburgh Pirates 1960’s KDKA Iron City Beer
Vin Sculley Dodgers because he never tried to make the game about himself
Chuck Thompson Baltimore Orioles 60’s 70s WBAL and his National Bohemian Beer commercials.
Jack Buck KMOX St Louis Cards. Can’t remember the beer sponsor but by the 7th inning Jack “was into it big time”
Curt Gowdy Boston Red Sox 50’s 60s Narragansett Beer. He even did some games with Mel and the Yanks, and of course Wyoming and flyfishing counts for a shitload also.

Unfortunately they all also now sleep with the fish….and just had to toss the beer sponsors in
 
Growing up with the Expos in Montreal, used to listen to someone few others would ever hear (or hear of), Dave Van Horne, though I guess he went on to the Marlins after - he was great, but his colour guy at least for a while, was as good as they get, Duke Snider; could that man tell a story, he knew the game inside out, what a joy to listen to.

For the Royals, we have the HoFer, Denny Matthews, I find him a little dry at times, but again, he really knows the game. I have to admit, while I admired Vin Scully, he was never a favorite, sometimes found his reaching for Shakespearean references and his efforts to demonstrate his literacy a little annoying, but he was great, and had a great voice.

cheers and GO ROYALS!!
 
MLB continues to shoot themselves in the foot. The latest foolishness is a proposal to require starting pitchers to go 6 innings for a win rather than the current 5. Huh? The details on this are not clear yet and just what they are trying to accomplish is not evident but they just can't resist the urge to keep fucking with the game. Arm injuries to pitchers are already rampant in baseball, every team has pitchers on the IL and many have pitchers recovering from Tommy John surgery.

Throwing a baseball 100 mph is hard and unnatural for the human arm to begin with then asking it to do it longer and quicker seems to fly in the face of logic. This year's plethora of arm injuries is increasingly being blamed on the 15 second pitch clock as it doesn't allow enough time between pitches for muscles to recover for the next pitch. I don't know much about lactic acidosis but I suspect that it has a role in exhausting pitchers that are being rushed between pitches. There is a reason we don't fish for 5# trout with a 2 wt rod, we can do it but at the risk of a high mortality rate. And we can rush pitchers to throw more often but at the risk of dead arms. We are seeing that right now.

Pitchers are much bigger and stronger and throw harder than they did 50 years ago yet complete games are more rare than ever. In 1952 Bobby Shantz at 5'6'' and 140 pounds started 33 games and had complete games in 27 of them and won 24. Nowadays a pitcher with 10 complete games would be regarded as a superman. It is unlikely we will ever see another 24 game winner. So why punish pitchers by making their workload even harder, they already have the toughest job on the team throwing every pitch?

Last year nearly 71 million people attended MLB games and I don't believe their lives are divided into 30 minute segments as the TV moguls want us to believe. They don't go to the games because they are in a hurry to get somewhere else. MLB seems determined to manipulate games down to entertainment segments much like a game show or sit com on TV. At some point they might kill the goose that played the golden egg and see their revenues retreat. Even the most patient of us have a bullshit threshold that we cannot exceed....
 
Meanwhile, the Mariners continue to shoot themselves in the foot...

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Only 38 games left, better hustle.

#0.540
 
Not sure if this is a free article or not. But an interesting weird bit of MLB history to-be where a player might end up in the box score for two different teams. The cause is a rain delayed game and a deadline trade.

www.nytimes.com

Danny Jansen could make history by playing for Red Sox and Blue Jays in the same game

Toronto and Boston, who completed a trade for Jansen at the deadline, will resume a suspended game from June on Aug. 26.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

EDIT: here's another article about the situation:

www.mlb.com

'That'll be funky, right?' Jansen can be first to play for both sides in game

Circle your calendars for Aug. 26, because you could see something that's never happened in Major League Baseball history: The same player playing for both teams in the same game. That day, the Red Sox will face the Blue Jays at Fenway Park in the continuation of a game that
www.mlb.com www.mlb.com
 
Good chance the Mariners finish under .500 at this point...
 
What's the problem? The Mariners are playing typical Mariner baseball, they are as good as ever.

I have been rooting for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers for over 75 years now and had some real ups and downs during that time. This year it looks like they are faltering as they have a slim lead in their division but checking the standings they have won more games than any other team in baseball! It doesn't seem possible with their cobbled together pitching staff, all but one of their starters has been on the IL this year and two of their best offensive players are just coming off of months on the IL. Like any other sport it all boils down to who gets hot and stays the healthiest at the end. To that end I am more of a baseball fan than I am a Dodger fan. I like to see teams come from behind in the stretch and win it all no matter who they are. Except the Astros and the Yankees.
 
Was listening to Tough Out (or something like that) on MLB radio on the way home from fishing yesterday. Every Monday the two hosts have their Power Rankings. Both of them had my O's as the #1 team. Great we are still getting some love. And yes all the top teams have been having a tough go of it as of late. But to have the O's as #1 in baseball right now. Just a joke and I am as big an O's fan as anybody on the planet.
 
DID YOU KNOW?: The Seattle Mariners have the same number of playoff appearances in their 47-year history (five) as ruptured testicles suffered by their players.


Meanwhile, the Mariners, 1995-2022, have three ALCS losses and two in the Division Series under their belts.
 
Dipoto and Servais no doubt deserve credit for assembling the finest starting pitcher rotation in all of baseball. By the same token, by virtue of what they have accomplished with it, they probably deserve to be fired. Given that they are definitely making money for ownership that most likely won't happen though Serviais may well become the sacrificial lamb.
 
When I was 10, Ken Griffey Jr was a Golden God, and the Sonics were a legit playoff team while the Seahawks were a dumpster fire. I never would have imagined it would be the Seahawks to win a championship, and now that was 10 years ago and their first SB appearance is nearly 20 years ago. Fuck I am getting old…
 
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