If I’m in the grocery or getting a cup of coffee at the local convenient shop, 99% of those I bump into, I’ll hear, ‘We wish you were back, we miss you!’

Moving on, Black representation among play-by-play broadcasters is alarmingly small. Only one of the 15 weekly NFL play-by-players is black. That’s a terrible under-representation. Whose fault is it?

There’s no defending the word I used in any form or fashion. I’ve owned up to it every second since.

“I’ve become a board member for a children’s home here in the Cincinnati area that’s utilized primarily for kids thrown out of their homes because they’re gay,” Brennaman told me. “I’ve come to understand their predicaments. Let me make it clear. I’m not doing this to check off any boxes. For over a year, my interaction with the LGBTQ community has made me a better and more understanding person. If there’s a way to right my wrong, I’m doing it and will continue to.”

...

I actually thought that Fox would be first. I explained to sports head Eric Shanks what I did, how I’ve cultivated relationships, how I’ve grown and more. But when my contract was up, Fox didn’t come through.

So it does beg the question of whether he should be kept from employment due to his racist comments until the end of his life

So it does beg the question of whether he should be kept from employment due to his racist comments until the end of his life

It's largely been forgotten that Keith Hernandez made a comment about women not belonging in the dugout 15 years ago,

But there is so much supply of talented younger announcers - including women and non-white broadcast journalists and announcers - relative to available slots, that the idea that Thom Brennaman should get a similarly high-profile broadcast job now because he "deserves a chance" is a non-starter.

I'm not sure exactly what Hernandez said; that said, people really should keep in mind that these are extraordinarily finite jobs and that people that do hiring tend to be extremely risk-averse -- and rightly so, given the fact that there are typically dozens of qualified people for each job. If there's any sense in which you fear that your players won't respond to a woman manager (*), there's simply no reason empirically to take on that risk. I make no comment on the "fairness" of all that, but it is very much an empirical description of what very likely is happening. The reality is that a woman manager/coach would have to be clearly number 1 on the list, clearly ahead of the number 2 to actually get hired. It's hard to envision a situation in which that happens; there are essentially zero MLB managerial searches in which there's a clear 1, way ahead of 2. This is essentially where Becky Hammon is in basketball.

He has always been...fine, as a play-by-play announcer

Fact check:
2. There's no sense in which Thom Brennaman is a bad announcer.

The Reds hired a guy named John Sadak to replace Brennaman. He's in his early 40s and was previously a minor league announcer (Wilmington Blue Rocks) and did a variety of other sports.

Nobody is going to confuse him for Vin Scully but he's been perfectly fine. Shows enthusiasm, comes prepared, and is generally pleasant to listen to. There have to be hundreds of guys like that, and almost none of them have been caught on a hot mic saying something as repulsive as what Thom B said.

If players revolt about their roles, typically the manager goes -- and that's stupid. But it's reality.

That stream sent him crashing over the rhetorical falls when he ad-libbed what he says was intended as a compliment to the Heat’s John Crotty, a journeyman guard from the University of Virginia.

Halberstam went adrift when he said the university’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, would have “been proud” of Crotty’s play and if basketball had existed then, “those slaves working at Thomas Jefferson’s farm I’m sure would have made good basketball players.”

Halberstam said he meant to convey that blacks would have succeeded in basketball or any chosen profession if they had been allowed into mainstream society in Jefferson’s day.

Semi non-sequiturly: I am always amazed by some of these Olympic announcers. I stumbled across some random joe, covering something like women's team handball -- I'm assuming a sport that he didn't regularly broadcast -- and eh was keeping up with the action, doing a bit of analysis (which might have been nonense given what I know about whatever sport it was) and rattling off all these Eatern European names with no worries. I don't know how anybody could be that good at something like that, even if they do have a producer in their ear feeding them stuff.

I'm always impressed by football announcers -- the back takes the ball, runs up the middle into a pile of bodies, the announcer says 'tackled by Elijah Rhodes'. I can't even tell what jersey actually brought him down, let alone know the name of the player belonging to that number off the top of my head.

I have only one experience with Thom Brennaman as a broadcaster, a Reds-Royals game some years ago. The entire game he referred to the Royals as the Brewers, called Alex Gordon "Eric Gordon" and Billy Butler was "Brett Butler," so "bad broadcaster" may apply.

There are, I'm going to guess, over 10,000 people who could serve capably in a MLB play-by-play role.

If you want to argue that nepotism/name recognition plays too great a role in these gigs, fine. However, you're delusional if you think there are 10,000 Marv Alberts, Gary Cohens, Doc Emricks (IMO, the best in the last 30 years even though I rarely watch hockey), Bob Costas or Verne Lundquists out there.

recount boring stories from the 80s.

I say this not to diminish their undeniable skills. it's more that having dozens of well-paid hours over many weeks to learn about, well, anything kind of helps.

Never really understood the Harry appeal, but I caught him later in his career when he was struggling to pronounce 'Klesko.'

And of course he totally nailed it, he was Bob Costas, even at 23.

(Y)ou're delusional if you think there are 10,000 Marv Alberts, Gary Cohens, Doc Emricks (...) Bob Costas(es) or Verne Lundquists out there.

Like many other endeavors, the really good ones make it look easy, but few things that pay that well are that easy.

If you want to argue that nepotism/name recognition plays too great a role in these gigs, fine. However, you're delusional if you think there are 10,000 Marv Alberts, Gary Cohens, Doc Emricks (IMO, the best in the last 30 years even though I rarely watch hockey), Bob Costas or Verne Lundquists out there.

Try speaking spontaneously for 3 hours and see how well you do.

I called HS football games for 30 years, and plenty of people told me that I was just as good as the guys doing NFL games. I just shook my head.

There are probably more people who could be a US Senator as well as the current 100. Make of that what you will.

Like many other endeavors, the really good ones make it look easy, but few things that pay that well are that easy.

But the idea that only a handful of people could do what is, really, a fairly ordinary job, pervades all of Western society and it's BS. Maybe only a handful could be transcendent at that job, sure. But just be cromulent? Loads of folks can do that.

There are lots of things that are not 'easy'. Comforting a dying cancer patient at 2 am when they are in pain isn't easy, and it doesn't pay well at all. Saying there are people (even 10,000 people) who could do that job isn't saying the job is easy. As the saying goes, the graveyards are full of indispensible people.

This is my long-winded way of saying the 10,000 number is probably on the low end

I mean, *Howard Cosell* was capable of calling MLB games, with basically no training. And that's just staying in the "old white American men" category.

I mean, *Howard Cosell* was capable of calling MLB games, with basically no training. And that's just staying in the "old white American men" category.


No, Cosell was actually dreadful at MLB (and NFL for that matter) and he didn't call games, he usually just interrupted the PBP man whenever he felt the need to opine. He did, however, draw eyeballs to the set.

As for no training, you clearly know nothing of Cosell......but he was a white man, so you get points for that.

That hasn't been tried since ESPN ended the Tony Kornheiser experiment on Monday Night Football in 2009.

Whether 10,000 or 1,000 or 100,000 people could do what they did is, IMO, basically semantics. It’s a number much larger than the available jobs, and that’s all that matters. But that doesn’t mean the job isn’t incredibly demanding and difficult, if you care about doing it well.

The only time I ever heard him doing play-by-play for team sports was during a skit on one of Jonathan Winters's comedy specials.

i listened to about 15 minutes of some old broadcast with howard cosell and all i can say is that i can't possibly be the only person who heard that voice who wanted to punch him in the mouth. i'm surprised he knew a basketball from a baseball.

A job/position can be something that is difficult/requires skill/work/etc. to do well, and also be something that you got a leg up on. Brennaman has talent, but he also has connections. Other people have talent but no connections. Saying that Brennaman got where he is because of connections is not to deny the presence of talent, great or small we can debate later.

Which is the entire point. Brennaman isn't to blame for rising quickly on his name. But he isn't to be lauded for it, either. Now that he's made an ass of himself, his name carries less weight and his talent is enough greater than his competitors to make him a worthwhile hire. Like I say, he had a long run, making a lot of money, in a highly competitive field. Time to enjoy retirement.

He could never rise from the lower ranks on talent alone. He's too well known, for good and bad. And he's not any better than dozens of MiLB talent. If he was promoted, it would be marketing.

Joe Buck is the example here. He's obviously not loved by all, but he can clearly handle the job across two sports. He also got the job because of his last name.

After reading the article, I do think Brennaman deserves a second chance, but I wonder how many words the author has ever devoted to the case of Colin Kaepernick.

i listened to about 15 minutes of some old broadcast with howard cosell and all i can say is that i can't possibly be the only person who heard that voice who wanted to punch him in the mouth.

Joe Buck is the example here. He's obviously not loved by all, but he can clearly handle the job across two sports. He also got the job because of his last name.

That was EXACTLY the reaction most people had to Cosell, which oddly enough, was part of what made him so successful, especially teamed with Don Meredith on MNF.

People keep talking about the "last name", but at the same time, would it be all that unusual for someone who grew up listening to his father do a certain job and being immersed in that life, being somewhat better at it than other people?

Or, he can go back down into the lower levels of the sports media world, where his name would carry more weight and the position is less visible, and try to earn his way back up the big leagues. But it doesn't seem like that path interests him.