Baseball Broadcast #1 Sunday, April 28

Minnesota Twins vs. Baltimore Orioles

This last weekend, I had the opportunity to listen to the Minnesota Twins radio broadcast for two parts of a couple games.  The first was Friday night April 26 and the other was Sunday, April 28.  The Twins were playing home at Target field against the Baltimore Orioles.  The Twins swept the three-game weekend series.

This is part one of a summer-long series where I will be sharing my experience and thoughts on different radio broadcasts of Major League teams.  So here are my supposedly interesting thoughts on the Minnesota Twins radio broadcast:

My first impression of the broadcast was that it has a professional delivery with a very soft tone.  There was nothing loud about this broadcast.  Cory Provus, the play-by-play announcer, delivers the description of the game in a conversational style that didn't have what I would consider significant highs or lows.  Any Cubs fan who has spent time listening to broadcasts on WGN radio, might recognize some a bit of this conversational tone from Pat Hughes the Cubs radio broadcaster.  Provus used to do the pre and post game shows for the Chicago Cubs on WGN and he also sat in for Hughes during the middle innings of many games.  While the dynamics of Pat Hughes are quite different from Provus, the description, respect for the game and professionalism on air are very similar.

Where Provus may have picked up his conversation and descriptive style from Hughes, he developed his own soft-spoken delivery.  At one point in the game Friday night, Nelson Cruz, Eddie Rosario and C.J. Cron jacked back-to-back-to-back home runs. This is an exciting and rare show of power from any team in the major league.  Provus gave a slightly elevated but overall level description of the event.  What surprised me even more was that broadcast analyst, Dan Gladden, who I remember to be a pretty energetic player on the field for the Twins from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, was as level in his analysis and description of the trio of home runs.  This is not a good or bad judgemental observation by me, because it is the style of the broadcast.  It is the environment they have created, and it works for the broadcast.  My enjoyment of the game was not hindered by any lack of dramatic description of the play.  Even the engineers of the game, choose the soft approach with a quiet crowd mic throughout the game.

That said, Provus does a nice play-by-play delivery with plenty of description for the listener to create the image of the game in his or her head, and Gladden adds good color commentary that compliments the description of the play on the field.

It seems from this weekend of listening, that Provus calls the game for innings 1-4, then Gladden goes solo to describe the events in innings 5 and 6, then Provus rejoins Gladden in inning 7 to do comment, finally, Provus retakes the captain's seat to finish the game with Gladded back on game analysis.  Gladded brings a contrasting play-by-play call to Provus with a short descriptive style of telling the listener just the facts.  While a vast difference from the conversational style of Provus, it is a nice contrast in the middle of the game.  I don't know that I would want an entire game called in the style Gladden uses, but it works for the middle inning as contrast.

This broadcast would be a perfect middle of the summer kind of broadcast where it is a nice Sunday afternoon settling into the hammock by one of the 10,000 Minnesota lakes.  The delivery style of this broadcast encourages that middle of the game nap where you might doze off in the third or fourth inning and wake up in the seventh or eighth inning to catch the end of the game.

Are you a Twins fan or do you listen to the Twins broadcast with Cory Provus and Dan Gladden?  What do you think?  Did I catch the feel of the broadcast or did I commit an error.  Leave a comment, keep it clean and constructive, and let me know.  Stay tuned for my next installment where I will listen to another MLB broadcast and give my supposedly interesting thoughts.