ANNOUNCERS

Jay Caruso goes after Tim McCarver for his bad habits while calling baseball games, here. The only conditions under which I like to watch baseball on Fox are the following: I can turn on the radio announcers (who are almost always better), or I'm in a bar and can't hear the commentary. But that still leaves the stupid, Terminator-esque graphics, the occasional switches to the weather map, the lame use of the highlight pen, and "flashbacks" to earlier games or earlier parts of the game or whatever some lame, super-charged producer thinks of off the top of his or her head.

Sports announcing is actually one of the reasons I'm a europhile. I watched the German coverage of Wimbledon a few years back; while the U.S. station had John McEnroe in a tweed suit or something and an imagined British lawn party -- complete with white wicker furniture -- for the set, the German announcer was simply invisible and only announced her presence by calling the score, in hushed tones, between points. The picture was the generic feed with no mind-numbing commentary -- in fact, hardly any commentary at all. I felt like I was sitting in the stadium watching the game, rather than being at a silly costume party where everyone was trying to act "British."

German soccer coverage is also very sparse on the commentary and rich with the pictures.

I wish an American TV network would at least try to broadcast a game by setting up a few cameras in the stadium -- or just using the major networks' feed -- ditching the announcers and just having some guy who is scoring the game by hand tell you what he's writing down and what strikes him about what's going on. I'll bet that serious fans would flock to such a show.

Hmmmm.