Report: Tigers’ Announcers Will Call Road Games From Studio
Another example of how the world we return to will be different from the one that ended in March with the coronavirus pandemic. Multiple reports say announcers for major league baseball games will not be traveling with their teams to road games, if there a season played in 2020.
While this news is neither earth-shattering nor particularly important in the grand scheme of things, it is another small example to expect pretty much everything to be different. Maybe the important one, a rumor floating around, is players will be prohibited from spitting.
Several thoughts come to mind when hearing about these travel rules about to be implemented. One is, this could benefit someone like Kirk Gibson, who has, publicly, been dealing with some health issues for several years. Less exposure to different environments and social distancing might be beneficial. Also, less travel would be less taxing on the body.
The other aspect to this, is it hearkens to the way baseball was broadcast in the early part of the last century. The most famous ex-baseball announcer of them all, former President Ronald Reagan, called baseball games this way before moving on to Hollywood for an acting career, and then politics. Tigers' Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell did the same.
And it's being done again now, this season. The ESPN telecasts of Korean Baseball early in the morning have announcers Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez calling games in Bristol, Connecticut.
The reality is, announcers rely on TV monitors already, (or else, how could someone sitting 100 feet above and behind home plate tell the difference between a fastball and a curveball, let alone what is in the strike zone and what isn't.
The guess here is, the optics will be different with no or few fans in the stands, and crowd noise will need to be artifically added, but otherwise, we'll be just fine.