“Kill the ump!” they once shouted at baseball stadiums everywhere. “Kill the announcer!” they now shout in baseball living rooms everywhere.
When it comes to broadcasting the national pastime’s postseason, there’s a lot of anger out there.
Just ask Al Michaels, who begins another journey through the turbulent airwaves Saturday as ABC’s World Series coverage begins.
Just ask Vin Scully, who’s had fans of each team accuse him of bias during a World Series.
Just ask Bob Costas, who arrived at Toronto’s SkyDome for Game 3 of the American League Championship Series last week to find 50,000 Bob Costas cardboard masks— with the eyes cut out— handed to fans. On the back of the mask was a Costas quote: “Elvis has a better chance of coming back than the Jays.”
The Costas incident is just another in a long line of broadcaster bashing in the 1980s. Like no other sport, baseball brings out the beast in fans with a rooting interest. Folks in each city inevitably detect a bias and turn their hostilities toward the booth.
“When a team goes bad, they blame the announcer,” said Jack Buck, who will broadcast the World Series again for CBS Radio. “When the game’s 9-1 and your team is losing and the announcer says they’re out of it, then they want to kill the messenger.”
A lynch-party mentality usually ensues. “And when the wave gets started,” Buck said, “it’s tough to swim,”
Trying to stay afloat last week was NBC’s Costas. His Elvis line came in Game 1, specifically referring to the fact that Toronto trailed Oakland by four runs in the ninth inning with A’s relief ace Dennis Eckersley on the mound. But frustrated Blue Jays fans turned the statement into a larger vendetta against their team. One SkyDome banner read: “NBC: No Bob Costas;” another said: “Nuke Bob Costas. Go Jays.” Costas was buried by the Toronto newspapers.
“It was predictable that Toronto fans would feel that we were biased,” Costas said. “… But while that was predictable, it was accentuated… because not only did the Jays lose the first two games, they lost them on the road. So the few things that they did well happened in total silence and the things that Oakland did well happened amid tumultous cheering. In order to react to that, we naturally sounded more excited about Oakland’s success than Toronto’s…
“My job isn’t to humor Toronto fans or Oakland fans, it’s to make some guy watching it in Arkansas feel the excitement of what’s happening in the game.”
Scully, a Dodgers broadcaster since 1950, sometimes has been criticized by his hometown fans that he is too impartial. Yet in the 1986 Red Sox-Mets World Series on NBC, he was chastised by both sides for favoring the other.
Then came Game 1 of the 1987 National League Championship Series, in which Scully mistakenly thought a Busch Stadium fan interfered with a ball hit by San Francisco’s Candy Maldonado. It was ruled a ground-rule double and Jeffrey Leonard, who had scored, was ordered back to third base. Scully commented that the Giants were robbed of a run.
St. Louis fans were livid, besieging NBC with calls and complaints. Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft called a news conference the next day to voice his disapproval. Scully said, “I’ll never forget what a great politician… once told me: ‘To err is human, to forgive divine and to exploit political.’”
When Michaels reenters this arena Saturday, he too will walk in with war wounds.
There was the time, during Game 3 of the 1980 American League Championship Series, in which he let the crowd speak for itself. “One of the most stunning sounds I ever heard in my life in sports were the sounds of silence I heard at Yankee Stadium when [the Royals’] George Brett homered in the seventh inning against Goose Gossage,” Michaels recalled. “The crowd was raucous, but in two seconds, Brett turned it off. I was silent because I thought much of the audience sensed what I sensed about the scene. But in Kansas City, we were castigated. They interpreted it as a bias on our part toward the Yankees.”
And during Michaels’ last World Series assignment, in 1987, he was jolted by criticisms in Minnesota and got involved in a dispute with a Minneapolis columnist that ended with Michaels blasting the writer during commercial breaks— comments that could be heard only by satellite-dish viewers. Michaels had been upset that earlier comments he had made jokingly during commercial breaks were written about, “the most juvenile reporting I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Of course, much of this civic broadcast bickering might be solved this year with the first Bay Area World Series. Oakland and San Francisco, after all, share the same bridge. But then again, Oakland often feels the ugly sister to San Francisco, and isn’t Michaels a former Giants announcer?
Geez, the broadcasts sound biased already.
Around The Dial
Buck is Back: Jack Buck will be announcing his seventh World Series for CBS Radio (carried locally on WTOP-1500) beginning Saturday. “I’m flattered, sincerely,” he said. “The fact that they still want you means you haven’t lost your marbles. And everyone loses their marbles sooner or later.” Buck will be working with Johnny Bench and probably will do at least seven innings of play-by-play each game. “I heard [Bench] with Brent [Musburger during the American League Championship Series] and I thought he didn’t come off real well” doing play-by-play, Buck said. “I’d like to take advantage of him analytically. I always pride myself in making my partner a star.”
Foreign Exchange: Last night WUSA-TV-9’s Glenn Brenner conducted a live interview, using a translator, with the Calgary Flames’ Sergei Makarov, one of eight Soviets playing in the NHL. The interview was mercilessly boring, and after the first two questions produced deadly answers, Brenner quipped, “I think we could have a producer defecting any time.”
Bum Ticker: NBC’s “10-Minute Ticker” for NFL scores is a wonderful idea when done consistently at 10-minute intervals, but increasingly the updates are haphazard and erratic. (Perhaps NBC Sports would rather we call its new “Scores… Plus” 900 number at 95 cents a minute.)
No Tom Terrific: Continuing a tradition of bad jock analysts on Maryland football— Jack Scarbath, Pete Wysocki and Brig Owens are recent examples— WMAL radio this season is using ex-Colt Tom Matte.
Gretzky Watch: On Sunday night HTS will televise the first hour of the Calgary-Philadelphia NHL game at 7, then switch to the Los Angeles-Edmonton game at 8 as the Kings’ Wayne Gretzky pursues Gordie Howe’s all-time scoring record.
The (Cable) Switch Is On: According to a study conducted by Bozell Inc., network affiliates between 1985 and 1988 lost about 1.6 million viewing households on weekend afternoons— when sports programming is prevalent— while basic cable outlets were gaining about 1.5 million households.
Baseball In D.C.?: Between 11 and 11:30 p.m. last Sunday, WJLA-TV-7’s sports-driven, Redskins-dominated newscast averaged an 11 rating and the Cubs-Giants National League Championship Series game got an 8 (numbers represent percentage of TV homes tuning in).
— Norman Chad
