Baseball broadcasts are often long and somewhat boring. This is because each baseball game takes on average three hours to play. Three hours is a lot of time to fill in a game with only sporadic activity, and as a result, broadcasters have a lot of time to kill discussing topics tangentially related to in-game-activities. The fact that broadcast crews need to fill 500 hours of in-game coverage over the course of a season means that its almost unavoidable that you will hear vapid conversations about trivial matters. You will hear hot takes and you will hear poorly reasoned arguments for things like:
- Hitting batters on purpose
- Bunting
- Converting starting prospects into relievers
- Doing things, the “right way”
This probably can't be avoided given the difficult task set in front of mainly former players and not informed broadcast professionals (I see you Dan Shulman). I grant all of this because what bothers me most about baseball broadcasts is not the occasional dumb observation, but the remarkable lack of knowledge that some broadcasters have about the very game they are employed to cover.
