How does sports announcing work?
August 23, 2010 11:37 AM   Subscribe

What are the mechanics of live sports commentary?

How do sports announcers and color commentators keep track of all the data they use to talk about the game and players? Using baseball as an example, when a player comes up to bat, they obviously are reading off something telling them "Jones is batting .345 this season, but .234 against left handed pitchers" etc. In the olden days, I assume this was all in a big binder -- is it all digital now? Do they search for it, or does the data just pop up on a screen in front of them?

Similarly, the announcers are usually very quick to explain what happened. Do they know it was a curve ball based on their eyes, or does someone closer to the action send them a signal? And when there's a play, the analysts very quickly will explain the whole thing, but it seems so fast that its hard to believe they just witnessed and analyzed it so fast. Maybe they have ultra-fast replay or something?

I'd be grateful for any information on how this stuff works. This question was very insightful but not exactly on my point.
posted by gabrielsamoza to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (10 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Most of them use a combination of paper notes prepared prior to the game, along with producers feeding them lines into their earpieces. The producers today have every book and stat sheet online.

But they each have their own set-up, some of them very old-school. Chick Hearn prepared an intricate, hand-prepared, one-of-a-kind cheat sheet before every game with salient facts. You can see an example here. I wish I could have gotten one when I covered the Lakers, because I would have had it framed. He wrote every name phonetically in his own style -- VLAH-DAY DEE-VOTZ for Vlade Divac was one example I remember.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:04 PM on August 23, 2010


I call both baseball and football games for a local radio station.

Generally the big outfits have a dedicated statistician(s) who communicate either by passed notes or electronically. They'll highlight trends and other interesting information for the announcers who simply read it off. They also do a lot of pre-game "homework" identifying trends or interesting numbers so that it's immediately available. The smaller outfits still work from binders and/or hand-kept scorebooks.

When it comes to recounting pitches those become routine after a while. When you've seen 1,000 pitches from the same angle the differences between off-speed (curves, change-ups, etc.) and fastballs become pretty obvious.

Also there are rarely plays that are 'original', 99% are probably variations on a simple theme. When you've seen one 6-4-3 double play, you can almost call it without looking. In these cases, it's more interesting to focus on individual elements of the same - bobbles, good transitions, etc.

In summary it's a combination of the routine and lots of back end help.
posted by unixrat at 12:07 PM on August 23, 2010


Also we get things wrong all the time, you just adjust to new information as it comes. People don't really notice.
posted by unixrat at 12:18 PM on August 23, 2010


Generally the big outfits have a dedicated statistician(s) who communicate either by passed notes or electronically. They'll highlight trends and other interesting information for the announcers who simply read it off. They also do a lot of pre-game "homework" identifying trends or interesting numbers so that it's immediately available.

I've heard the phrase "the guys in the truck" used to refer to these statisticians/researchers a lot.

When it comes to recounting pitches those become routine after a while. When you've seen 1,000 pitches from the same angle the differences between off-speed (curves, change-ups, etc.) and fastballs become pretty obvious.

Also for TV baseball games, you can pretty easily tell what pitch the pitcher is going to throw just by paying attention to (and knowing) the signs that the catcher uses to signal pitches to the pitcher (this doesn't work when a runner is on second because they obfuscate the signs to prevent him from signaling to the batter). One of the announcers I watch regularly calls the pitches before they are thrown by doing that.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:44 PM on August 23, 2010


Response by poster: Good answers, all. Thanks!
posted by gabrielsamoza at 1:53 PM on August 23, 2010


I enjoyed reading the answers to this question, which was sparked by the performance of the announcer for the men's gold medal ice hockey game in the Olympics earlier this year.
posted by sigmagalator at 4:10 PM on August 23, 2010


For some pieces of information, such as when a player is close to a milestone or something rare happened, (in baseball at least) the team's media relations person will give some information about it to the broadcasters.
posted by drezdn at 5:35 PM on August 23, 2010


I highly, highly recommend this detailed and insightful piece that ran in The Atlantic last year about the massive effort that goes into producing NFL games.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:02 PM on August 23, 2010


I worked a few jobs as a spotter for football games when I was in college. Basically, I stood in the booth with the announcers and after each play wrote down on a note card how many yards that play had gone and what the new down/yardage was. So after a run I would write "4 yds / 2d & 6" and stick my arm out between the two announcers. It was my best guess of how many yards the play had covered. Most of the time the announcers could have figured this out themselves but it let them look more broadly at the field and not have to concentrate on that basic fact. After the play, they could just look down at the card and say "Jones picks up 4 yards on that run; that brings up 2d and six."

As for other stats, before each game, we always had production meetings where the producer and director would set out the likely "themes" for the game. It could be things like "Bob Smith is close to having 2,000 combined yards rushing and receiving, and would tie the mark of Jimmy Sampson for the shortest games to achieve that," or "Sam White is going against his former team and he left on bad terms," or "last time around, Jack Fishburn threw a terrible interception against these guys late in the 4th to lose the game; this is his shot at redemption" or whatever else there may be. Then there would be some prepackaged stuff related to those stories that they could drop in between plays or during timeouts. So the cameramen and graphics guys and announcers were already looking for many of the same things before the game even started, and the announcers were fed a lot of stats that they could reel off to go along with the storylines.
posted by AgentRocket at 11:13 AM on August 24, 2010


There's a LOT of time spent compiling and analyzing sports statistics, and the announcers must have a constant stream of useful or interesting tidbits popping up on their screens. For example, the Green Bay Packers press office releases a "Dope Sheet" before each game with a mountain of info on the current players' stats, coaches, series between the 2 teams, etc. Example from last Saturday's game here.
posted by Fin Azvandi at 1:01 PM on August 24, 2010 [1 favorite]


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