The Art of Announcing

More musings from the chair
by Bill Ribas

In the movie “Night Of The Living Dead,” there is a frantic moment when the few surviving humans realize they’re cornered in a house, and board up the windows in an attempt to keep the zombies out. This frenetic activity parallels my attempt to get the SAP working on my set prior to the kickoff of the World Series.

But first, a little backstory. I woke up okay, got the first kid on the bus, and as the rain was coming down, cleaned a few gutters of excess willow leaves. We have two willow trees in the backyard, that, while they suck up ridiculous amounts of water, also deposit a blanket of leaves every fall that find their way to the gutters. I figured with all the water we were getting, there was a chance the basement might be getting wet, and before putting the second kid on the later bus, checked downstairs, and sure enough, it looked like Marine World. Ridiculous swearing followed, with yours truly cursing everything that lived, and after a break to get the older boy off to school, I spent a good hour with a shop vac running nonstop, sucking up water like there’s no tomorrow.

Fast forward to the evening, and, after taking the kids to the mall for dinner and new clothes for school pictures (another racket, another reason to swear, but I’ll document that somewhere else), we settle home to watch the World Series begin. I frantically try to get the SAP  to work, because, after seeing Joe Buck (pictured above) I know, combined with the rotten day I’ve had, that this will not be an enjoyable game to watch, or at least listen to, no matter what the outcome.

Fortunately, early on, I amuse myself with the picture. Sure, High Definition tee vee is a boon to old farts like me with declining vision. With it, I can see for miles and miles now. Yet with the constant drizzle pelting the players in the Bronx, I am jettisoned back to the late 60’s or so, when bad reception caused an interference on the screen that was likened to snow, and I’m thinking, the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you’re too young to remember snow on a tee vee screen, ask your parents. They’ll get a chuckle.

And this game is going by too fast for me to nod off. And so I am bound to listen. Again, my attempts to get the SAP working met with defeat. I tried closed captioning for a minute, but I noticed as I was reading I couldn’t help but think of the laborious delivery of Joe Buck, and I had to take it off. And then it hit me – what makes a good announcer? And I thought a good announcer, or team of announcers, is best when it sounds like your friends in a bar. One guy knows stats going back to Biblical times, one guy is all about keeping it going, overly optimistic, and one guy is a wise cracker. Or a combination thereof. If you ever had a chance to listen to the Mets broadcast, with Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandex, and Ron Darling, you’ll understand just how close to ideal this combination is. Cohen, while not a ballplayer, mixes stories of adulation form his youth with interesting questions about situations on the field as well as hypothetical in-game situations. Both Darling, a former pitcher, and Hernandez, a former first baseman, give their takes, often with one deferring to the other due to that person’s particular experience.

With Buck, and it hit me just tonight, he is Hermey the elf incarnate (and I thought it was Herbie, but found out I was wrong). He is not an announcer by will, but was forced into the position by powers outside of him. He wants to do something else, whether it’s be a dentist or some other profession, but announcing is clearly not his game. But it’s not his fault, and I realize this now, because his heart is not into it. Witness, for example, this auditory babbling from the Phillies – Yankees game at the top of the 7th or 8th inning. Buck said:

“If there was any pressure on Cliff Lee, and he hasn’t looked at all tonight, like he’s had any on him, since the beginning, (pause) that, gives him a little more breathing room, and, as we talked about there have been problems during the regular season with this Phillies bullpen, and there’s a big hit (pause) now Rodriguez goes down on a knee, makes the play, and the inning is over.”

If you read this sentence out loud, it makes zero sense. If you picture it as something a drunken traveling salesman would say in a bar, it sounds more realistic. It’s hard to convey how it is said, with commas being small pauses, but it’s just incoherent babbling. Buck clearly doesn’t care about the game, and Rodriguez didn’t go down on a knee, he rolled over to the third base side and grabbed the ball, and it doesn’t matter, because Buck is your steward for the next couple of games, like it or not.

With the understanding that it’s not Buck’s fault he can’t announce, my take on the series now becomes something along the lines of an intervention after party. There’s a saying from a Woody Allen movie, ‘those who can, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.’ I’d add, and those who are truly hapless, announce sports on FOX.

What to do? Clearly, the SAP will not work on my set. I have performed some sort of action that karmic retribution denies the existence of SAP on my tee vee. I now pity Joe Buck, well, I still can’t stand him, but the thought of him as a misguided elf certainly softens the blow of his horrid verbiage. And I have learned that the best announcers are like a group of friends, like the Cheers gang, that combine insight with humor, respect for the other team while still pulling for home, and that makes the game better than it is. But most of all, I’ve learned that after baseball is hockey, and I don’t have to suffer through a wet game in the Bronx, because across town, the Rangers are playing.