Chip Caray’s awful announcing caused me to watch much of TBS’ postseason coverage with the television muted and Richard Deitsch of SI.com recently asked Turner Sports president David Levy about the oft-criticized play-by-play man:
Certainly, Chip made some on-the-air errors that we are well aware of, and like we do with all our sports, we will sit down in the next two to three weeks and evaluate everything. including our production and our talent. We always want to make our telecasts better. We add people. We subtract people. We add cameras. We take cameras off. I can’t make any decisions or comments today, but we will look at it the next few weeks.
But I do think it almost snowballed to the point where some of the sportswriters and columnists were actually missing an incredible postseason. Instead of writing about the game and the storyline and what was happening, it became about Chip. And I think they missed a lot. I’m not saying he didn’t make errors. Don’t get me wrong. But was it that big? Was it that big of a story? That was always my question. I’ll never know the answer to that, but obviously the writers and columnists do.
Is an announcer doing a horrible job really a huge story? Perhaps not in the grand scheme of things, but it’s tough to ignore when TBS put Caray in position to be the lead play-by-play man for the early portion of the playoffs and he failed miserably. That’s going to get a ton of attention, right or wrong. Levy and Turner Sports probably don’t mind the positive attention that Charles Barkley, Ernie Johnson, and Kenny Smith get for doing a great job on TNT’s coverage of the NBA.
Levy’s comment that “the sportswriters and columnists were actually missing an incredible postseason” sums up why Caray was such a disaster. He caused huge baseball fans like me to actually turn off the sound accompanying the events TBS was covering and thus took away from the games being played. You can blame that on sportswriters and columnists, but ultimately TBS picked Caray for the job and Caray performed horribly. Luckily it sounds like we won’t have to suffer through him again next October.
