Pretty good discussion on Locked On Cubs this week :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdefI0GdZ2g

not clicking

as I've said before, if you are a fat guy who uses the nickname Boog professionally, you should be unconventional and fun. Boog is as bland as plain yogurt. Some people crave that out of their broadcast. I think he is annoyingly plain

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

I think some of that is dictated by his bosses.

I think he does a quality broadcast when he doesn't get too much into analytics. My pet peeve is when he says a ball had an exit velocity of 101.3 mph. First off, 101 is fine, you don't need the extra two syllables for .3 because nobody listening has a fucking clue if 101.3 and 101.7 are really any different for a fielder. Second, why not just say "it was hit hard, most of the time that falls in for a hit." We believe you, we don't need an advanced statistics class.

But that's why I think he's better on the radio call. He doesn't have time for that, he has to say all the stuff that is on the screen on a TV call, like the count and the guys on base and how many pitches the pitcher has thrown.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

You make a really good point here that I've never thought about. The cluttering of the screen in recent years has taken a lot of traditional talking points away from the broadcasters, which has freed them up to go into the more esoteric stuff like launch angle and exit velocity.

I saw a video a while ago about how while the move to HDTV hasn't hurt baseball telecasts, it has done them by far the least good, because the book on how to broadcast a baseball game has more or less been written and can't really be added to. Without even taking resolution into account, which was downright revelatory for hockey, going from 4:3 to 16:9 changes the entire way you televise a game on a long rectangular playing field: there's just so much more screen and so many more opportunities to watch plays develop. What do those technological upgrades do for baseball, which is still primarily a hard camera 400+ feet away from guys standing still? Not a lot. Arne Harris could come back from the dead tomorrow and pretty much pick up where he left off, though at first he'd probably smell pretty bad.

So absent all these other improvements, the only way you can really innovate is to put more and more stats on the screen. And, of course, gambling.

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