Baseball Broadcasters Impressions: Atlanta

I continue today with my Baseball Broadcasters Impressions project by taking a look at the Atlanta Braves announcers.

TV Announcers; Chip Caray, Joe Simpson, occasionally Tom Glavine

After his disastrous reign as the lead TBS announcer for the playoffs, I was really hoping Chip Caray would be a little bit better in a more comfortable position of just calling a local team*. Nope. He's just as bad calling local games as he is on national broadcasts.




*I'll get to this in the review of Brian Anderson and the Brewers announcers, but not everyone is meant to call national games, but they're just fine or even excellent at being local announcers.

Caray is just a trainwreck of an announcer. Now his father and grandfather were never the greatest announcers, but they were both lovable enough that you ignored their bad side. The same can't be said about Chip Caray. Chip in fact is the complete opposite of his famous family members. Chip is robotic in calling games.



And I haven't even gotten into the fact that Caray loves him some word clutches (Fisted!) factual errors, exaggerations**, and just plain old bad play calling***. Why the Braves feel like he belongs on their TV broadcasts is beyond me. I'm just going to pretend they're trying to remember the late Skip Caray.

**Let's just say it wouldn't surprise me if Caray started out a broadcast crying wolf. He's almost like a child that way with his exaggerations. 
*** Example: "A base-fly ball, I should say -out to centerfield."



How bad Chip Caray is how good Joe Simpson is. Simpson is a solid analyst who unforgivably has to put up the Caray crap on a daily basis. Simpson deserves better than Caray.


As for Tom Glavine, well as far as I can tell he's really there just to talk about his own playing days and what he would do. I'm glad he only occasionally calls Braves games with Simpson in the middle. 162 games of Glavine and Caray would drive the normal person crazy.

Radio Announcers; Jim Powell and Don Sutton

For Braves fans sake, they better pray the Braves fire Caray and promote Powell to the TV broadcasts. Powell might be one of the funniest announcers I've heard. Don Sutton has always had this dry wit to him that is very endearing.

I find it hard that I enjoy both broadcasters for either TV or radio. I usually like one but not the other. That isn't the case at all with both Powell and Sutton. They are both very enjoyable to listen to and I'll actually go out of my way to hear the both of them call a game.

Amazing the Braves can have someone as bad as Chip Caray on their TV broadcasts and someone as enjoyable as both Powell and Sutton on their radio broadcasts.