SF Giants announcers capture the top spot in local MLB broadcaster ratings. The San Francisco Giants’ television broadcast crew won Awful Announcing’s reader poll for the fourth time. San Francisco Giants supporters believe they have the best broadcasters in baseball.Awful Announcing’s survey supports this claim.
For the fourth time in six polls, the Giants’ TV crew of Dave Flemming, Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Shawn Estes, javier Lopez, and Hunter Pence finished #1 out of 30 teamThe Giants also led the poll in 2014, 2017, and 2018, and they have never finished lower than second.The poll’s methodology is straightforward: each broadcast team is assigned a letter grade between A and F. One reason the Giants’ broadcasters finished first with a 3.41 (is that legally a grade point average?) was that they received only nine D’s and nine F’s, accounting for less than 5% of all votes. Here is what Awful Announcing wrote: To no one’s surprise, the Giants won their fourth championship in six polls. This year, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow did it with their third-highest score ever, extending their amazing run as baseball’s most popular local broadcast duo. Despite another season behind them, they’ll be favorites to repeat as champions next year.The duo of “Kruk and Kuip” has been doing Giants games together for 30 years, since Kuiper returned to the Giants in 1994, after a one-year hiatus with the Colorado Rockies. That’s longer than most marriages!
They’ve been announcing games informally since joining the Giants in 1983. When Krukow wasn’t starting, the two made their own “profanity-laced broadcasts” in the dugout, without the luxury of a production team selecting intriguing spectators to riff about. The Giants have had amazing consistency with their broadcasters. Jon Miller’s been there since 1997. Flemming still feels like the new man, despite being in his 21st season with the organization. With such a rich history and camaraderie among the broadcasters, charismatic former Giants like Lopez and Pence may flourish as color commentators.
The New York Mets’ team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez finished second, while the San Diego Padres, the 2019 winners, finished third. Of course, we know that’s mainly due to having analyst Mark Grant, who was a Kruk and Kuip teammate in 1984 with the Giants.
It’s no surprise that the Oakland Athletics fell from ninth place in 2019 to 29th this season. When a play-by-play announcer uses a racist slur on air, and the team owner deliberately alienates the whole fan base, the club is on track for the poorest record in six decades. Grab some pine, Glen Kuiper! Kuiper deserves to win the Ford C. Frick Award, but it’s not necessary to acknowledge the Giants’ broadcasters’ exceptional work. But it’s still wonderful when an unquestionable authority, such as an internet survey, affirms what Giants fans already know: their telecasts are the best in the industry.
