Worst sports announcers

First, I'm talking about guys who mainly do actual games. So leave out Chris Berman for now...or include him for all I care if you have a really good rant.

Here's a list to start:

Joe Morgan (not announcing anymore, but I couldn't leave him off)
Pam Ward (NOT just because she's a woman)
Tim McCarver
Tony Siragusa
Dick Stockton
Dan Dierdorf

Who you got?

 

I think Len Elmore stinks and find Bob Wenzel's delivery very annoying.

 

Elmore just sounds old. I feel sorry for Dierdorf because his mushy delivery likely stems from his football days. Isn't he the one who claims to be at least an inch shorter because of contact?

McCarver is getting worse every season, although I watched some classic baseball games recently, and he was not great in the 1990s.

Ward, Siragusa, and Stockton don't bother me, but there are better announcers.

Morgan is out of the action -- won't miss him.

 

Michael Reghi
Tim Brando (mic unkind)
Bob Wentzel

 

quick little swerve, but what exactly makes a bad sports announcer? I get the feeling that these things start snowballing when someone says "so-and-so on the Mets broadcasts sucks ass." then someone replies, yea, i fricken hate the guy, he sucks. Then when you get enough support, well, the guy is bad at what he does. Gus Johnson is a prime example. He has gone, on this board for example, from the worst announcer in history, to someone SportsJournalists.com loves. I guess I ask because styles are different from one guy to the next. Johnson is as lively as they come, a guy like Joe buck is as stoic as they come. Listening to both, I may have a personal preference, but I don't think either is bad or good, it's all a matter of taste.

Oh, and for my vote . . . Joe Buck sucks ass.

 

It's all a matter of opinion, I suppose. But it seems many people share a lot of the same opinions.

Using Joe Morgan as an example, it could be the bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded and Morgan will still be telling a story about the left fielder's glove he started two innings ago. That may be a little bit exaggerated, but you get the point.

Either way, he's doing his job terribly if that's what he's talking about in that situation.

Dick Stockton is near the top of my list because it seems he puts in no time researching teams, no effort and his delivery is stiff. It's like he just might as well keep announcing games simply because he's been doing it for 30 years.

It's all subjective, though.

 

Gus Johnson. He's annoying and sounds like on the verge of hypervenilating.

 

Gary Bender. Worst of all time. I can't count the number of times I ever heard the man say after a team came back from a bad start, something about being wowed that they didn't just "give up." Oh, you mean, like "We're down 10-2 guys. We're cooked. Let's throw in the towel."

Women don't seem to be willing to throw emotion into their voice as a man does on a shot. They go deep voice on any reaction and it seems stiff and restrained.

 

Any former-player-turned-color-guy who turns every minor detail of a game into an epic try-hard morality play that both sides are, unlike the color guy himself, completely losing.

I remember watching Rick Sutcliffe blast the Freaky Franchise in some mid-September game this past season for not quite having the heart to make it in baseball just yet, or some nonsense. Because he walked a couple guys in a row was all.

 

Joe Buck.
He's the polar opposite of Gus Johnson, in that he always sounds like he'd rather be somewhere else -- especially if he's stuck on an NFL game with two mediocre, non-marquee teams. If there seems to be a storyline he's rooting for, like Favre in the 2009 NFC championship game, he's even worse.

He's the same with baseball. Give him Red Sox-Yankees part 1,000,000 and he sounds happy to be there. Give him a mid-summer Saturday game between the Rockies and Braves and he sounds like he's checking e-mail on his Blackberry between pitches.

 

Agreed, threads like these are subjective, but for all the Tostitos ... Brent Mussburger! Dude's been mailing it in since he left CBS.

Mike Breen doesn't do much for me either. Too monotone, especially for a quick-paced game like the NBA.

Buck and McCarver. Just awful. You could tell from the last World Series they didn't go beyond the basics in their homework. And sometimes I get the impression that Buck just doesn't like baseball.

 

John Sterling