by qksilver69 » Tue Apr 18, 2006 11:02 am
Good discussion. I hadn't paid that much attention to Morgan's inaccuracies, and agree he takes a long route to the ball, so to speak.
That said, I'm going to be a bit of a homer myself & say 1) not sure it's really Jon Miller's job to correct him on the air (I am sure he would do it off the air rather than on) and 2) regardless of who he's paired with, I would say Miller is the best play-by-play guy of our generation, if not all time.
Before you start on that, yes, I've heard some of the all-time greats like Scully & Jack Buck, and I put Miller in that class if not better.
I grew up on Miller listening to Orioles games in the 80s - he started with them in their last title year in '83, and '79-89 were my prime years listening to the O's. Then when I moved to the West Coast in '97, Miller happened to get hired by the Giants to do their games, so yeah, I've got a bias.
But I like Miller because he's a throwback in the sense that he'll let the game speak for itself when it needs to, and when he does say something that goes beyond just reporting factually what is happening, it almost always adds entertainment value. I like the fact that he's the only announcer I've ever heard who consistently gets Latino names right, but he's self-deprecating enough to over-pronounce them at times, so that you know he's making fun of his own accuracy - you can almost hear him winking at you in those moments, when he goes tongue-in-cheek with his listeners. Doing stuff like that, he creates (ok, let the jokes fly here) a kind of intimacy with the audience that I just don't see anywhere else. And he knows baseball inside & out, period. Huge fan of the game. I am just glad he's got national exposure over the last 15 yrs with ESPN, no one more deserving of the job.