New Sunday Night Baseball Crew Kind of Terrible?

I wonder if Mets fans realize how spoiled we are to listen to Gary, Keith and Ron (LOVE the new 'do!) on a nightly basis. Many (most?) of the announcing crews out there just aren't any good. Think of any Braves game you've ever watched, or hell, any game on YES.

For years, one of the most maligned broadcasting teams was ESPN's Jon Miller-Joe Morgan tandem. As far as I could tell, the "problem" mostly revolved around Morgan and his dogged insistence that sabermetrical analysis was basically a waste of time, but Miller, silken-voiced as he is, was never a superlative play-by-play announcer.

With Miller and Morgan's contracts up this offseason, ESPN broke up the long-running duo over the winter, and replaced them with Dan Shulman on play-by-play and the color tandem of Bobby Valentine and Orel Hershiser.

You'd think that if you were the Worldwide Leader in Sports with your pick of basically every broadcaster on the planet, you'd go for the best money could buy. Or at least people who kind of knew what they were doing.

Instead, Shulman sounded dull, Hershiser was kind of a non-factor, and as much as it pains me to say it, Bobby V sounded a bit like an amateur last night.

Obviously the baseball insight was never bad; in a nod to the post-Morgan era of free sabermetric love, Valentine even began a discussion of WAR last night. But the delivery was lousy; Valentine didn't get his point in because he said he would wait until after the next pitch, leading to a brief period of dead air before the batter popped out to end the inning.

I realize that may make the deficiencies of last night's broadcast seem a bit trite. But broadcasting is the kind of thing where you know when it's good and you know when it's not so good, and last night's debut of the new Sunday Night Baseball lineup definitely fell into the latter category.

But hey, it's early in the season yet. Maybe they, like so many Mike Pelfreys and Javy Vazquez's, are just working out the kinks.

- A.F.O.M.G.