The Worst Announcing Duo in Baseball

Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, who called the Yankees-Cubs game on Fox on Saturday, are the worst announcing duo in baseball.  Buck, the play-by-play man, sounded like he was narrating a funeral the entire game.  He's always been bad, but literally everything he said on Saturday had a downward inflection on it.  The two also contribute plenty to the East Coast bias that Fox is a big part of in MLB.  This doesn't make listening to these two a good experience for fans.

Fox continues to promote Buck to the top of their sports broadcasters, and he's certainly at the top now.  He called Super Bowls 39, 42, and 45 and does NFL games every Sunday for Fox.  In addition to calling MLB games every Saturday afternoon for Fox, he also calls the World Series and one of the two LCS.  But I've never seen the potential in him.  He has a professional, booming broadcaster voice, but he wastes it with a lack of enthusiasm and just a boring style.

McCarver, on the other hand, is known for some of the biggest broadcaster blunders of all time.  He often says obviously simple statements, possibly in an effort to simplify the game for the fans at home, but he just ends up looking stupid.  "One thing about ground balls; they don't leave the ballpark."  Did that statement add anything to the broadcast at all?  In context or out of context, it's too obvious to even be said.  "It's better to have a fast runner on base than a slow one."  Really?  During the 2005 All-Star Game, he said "with Guerrero, it's not so much a strike zone as it is a strike area."  During the 2005 World Series, he said "Roy Oswalt is a drop and drive pitcher.  What is a drop and drive pitcher?  He is a guy who drops and drives.  Very simple."

These pieces of 'analysis' have become infamous in the broadcasting world.  Comedy show Family Guy mocked such analysis in a episode about ten years ago.  But the irony there is that Family Guy is a Fox show, meaning the Fox producers allowed one of their comedy shows to make fun and criticize one of their top sports broadcasters.  The begging question is if Fox is willing to allow this criticism, why don't they just replace him with any of the other dozens of competent color commentators around MLB.

World Series TV ratings were the lowest of all time last year.  It probably isn't a coincidence that Buck and McCarver called the Series.  For as long as these two are in the booth for Fox, Saturday broadcasts, the LCS, and the World Series will continue to be a monotonous drone of talk about how "David Ortiz, from the Dominican Republic, can obviously read lips in Spanish."