The best and worst TV broadcasts in MLB: Your guide to watching other baseball

As hard as MLB tries, baseball remains pretty parochial. That’s mostly due to the daily nature of it. If you’re a fan of a team, you basically spend every day from the beginning of April to the end of September watching your team and then going to bed, or maybe cramming in some sort of worthless social activity at night if it’s a day game (probably involving meeting your friends’ kids in the backyard and having to pretend you care that their son didn’t run into the lighted grill). Only the truly sick can watch most if not all of their fave’s 162 and then find time for another game. Or vice versa if you live on the West Coast.

But there are some like me who either had to fire their favorite team and now drift aimlessly through the baseball landscape, trying to admire the roses wherever we end up, or maybe never had a team in the first place and just enjoy the game (freaks). Maybe you’re new to this, or just want to branch out. Well folks, Ol’ Shmuely is here to help you find the most pleasurable baseball-watching experience. These are the best and worst broadcast teams around the dial who’ll dot your summer nights or mar them. Let’s kick this pig!

Honestly, fuck Padres fans. They have one of the few teams around going all out to win. The lineup is rife with players everyone wants to tune in to see most nights. They play in a gorgeous park. The weather is always perfect and doesn’t come with a majority of the bullshit that L.A. has in return for that weather. Throw a rock and you’ll hit a decent place to eat or a more than drinkable brewery. And on top of that one of the best broadcast teams to make being a Padres fan even better. How much do you assholes need?

Orsillo was unceremoniously dumped from NESN in Boston in favor of Sean McDonough, on his decades-long journey to locate a personality. With the Red Sox, Orsillo and Jerry Remy were about the most entertaining duo you could find in baseball, and he’s found that same chemistry with Grant.

Both of these guys make it sound like covering and watching baseball in San Diego is just about the best way to spend time, which it probably is. But Grant isn’t some empty vessel, giving you nuances and analysis of the game that you can’t pick up on first viewing. A pretty great broadcast team to fly you down into the easy chair late on a summer night.

If the Padres broadcast is about hitting the landing gear late at night, then the Mets trio is about amping yourself up with some New York urgency at the beginning of one. While it’s unpleasant to be in most of the time, I can’t explain why there’s something romantic about the foul-smelling, loud, and sticky New York summer, which these guys cater to perfectly.

Darling is one of baseball’s best analysts, though he always seems burdened with having to share a booth with a third either with the Mets or on his national duties with TBS. Hernandez is something of a goof but has such good chemistry with Darling and Cohen that it kind of doesn’t matter, and he at least knows his place, i.e. picking fights with the city of Philadelphia. Cohen is an expert play-by-play guy who punctuates the big moments perfectly and not without a sense of humor, but one that he doesn’t need to force either.

They also gave us this, which remains one of my favorite TV moments in recent baseball history:

“It’s where he belongs, right in the dirt!”

I like this hat!

It’s a pretty miserable experience being a White Sox fan, which is how they like it, and the broadcast used to be no different when Hawk Harrelson spent three hours grumbling about umpires, sabermetrics, the Twins, his golf game, or his unifying theory of baseball until it was time to fall silent whenever the opposition team scored ( he did provide this though, the greatest moment in baseball broadcasting history). In his last few years, the only entertainment was to be found in seeing whether or not Steve Stone would club him over the head with his monitor, such was their camaraderie.

But that’s all changed since Benetti took over. While occasionally a little homer-ific, Benetti is quickly becoming ubiquitous in all sports with his national assignments, and he is that good. Stone might be more up his own ass than anyone currently on the planet, but he’s also a damn good analyst, especially when it comes to pitching. He also has a sharp sense of humor, matched by Benetti, and the two get along gracefully. It’s a beacon in the wasteland that usually is whatever’s going on at Comiskey.

The goddamn gold standard— the San Francisc. These two have been at it forever, but that doesn’t mean they sound bored or jaded, but genuinely appreciative of what they get to do and who they get to do it with. Kuiper is the rare case of a player moving to a play-by-play role and he’s excelled at it, never trying too hard to fill in blank moments but punching the big ones up. Krukow is the best kind of dork, and it always sounds like you caught him having a beer outside after finishing a shitty round of golf but just happy that he got to play at all while not afraid to mock himself or anything around him in the jolliest way. Another kicker is that when Kuiper can’t make it — and his health took a turn the past couple years — Jon Miller fills in most of the time and the broadcast doesn’t miss a beat. Another excellent way to close out a summer night.

I’m well aware that part of the Yankees lore is that they themselves treat everything they do like it’s the most important fucking thing in the world, and that has certainly spread to the booth. Michael Kay sounds like he’s been holding in a shit for about 12 years, and if you told him a joke he might actually unclench and die. YES has never settled on one analyst, because Yankees baseball is too important I guess, and whoever does one or two games in a row apparently has to go lie down for a few days with a cold compress to get past presiding over such a historical event. You can hear Paul O’Neill resisting the urge to go out and punch a stray cat under the train tracks as he did every time he made an out during his playing career. David Cone sounds like a broken lawnmower. It’s just about the most humorless broadcast of any kind. No wonder Yankees fans are ready to hang themselves over a July loss, seeing as how their own network treats everything like it was the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles.

If you have trouble sleeping, or just need some white noise to fill in the background while you meditate or do some yoga or contemplate the emptiness of life, here are your guys. Oneil Cruz could throw a ball so hard that it snaps a support column behind first base and brings down the whole upper deck and this team would treat it like they just discovered a hangnail. When Axl Rose wrote “Coma,” he was probably listening to a Pirates game on TV.

Does it have Chip Caray (pictured) on it? Then it fucking blows.

I’m not sure who watches the empty glossiness and personality black hole that is ESPN and decides they have to get whatever plastic doll is on Sportscenter into their fans’ lives every goddamn day, but that’s apparently who does the hiring for D-Backs TV. Berthiaume could be one of 20 play-by-play guys and no one would know the difference if you rotated them nightly. When AI replaces all the broadcasters he’ll be first out the door. He looks and sounds like he’s been practicing his sports arguments and calls in a mirror since he was 16. Brenly went from a guy who casually dropped Zeppelin references into his analysis to sounding like he’s going to leave in the 7th inning to go complete the border wall.

This one pains me because the A’s used to have one of the best broadcast teams in the league along with a genuinely interesting team to watch. They were phasing out Ray Fosse before he got sick a few years ago to replace him with Dallas Braden for god knows why, and Fosse’s terribly sad passing only hastened that process.

Kuiper remains a pro but Braden is doing some mash-up of Matthew McConaughey and Guy Fieri every night, trying to sound like he wants to be the old guy who still gets invited to frat parties. He’s a Hawaiian shirt come to life, and no matter how many “cool” terms he throws out that he either imported from his playing days or simply made up, it all makes the broadcast sound like one of the animatronic musicians at Chuck-E-Cheese trying to be hip. I’d rather listen to my brakes being realigned than Braden for nine innings. Thankfully, the A’s have provided a team no one on Earth has any interest in watching for nine innings.