Broadcast Review: Rangers Radio

Note: this post features a poll at the bottom. Rate the Rangers’ radio broadcast for yourself.

Eric Nadel’s alma mater (a) is picturesque and (b) allows students to take every class pass/fail.

Continuing what I started over the weekend with a review of the Atlanta Braves television broadcast, what follows is a review of the Texas Rangers radio broadcast.

For the purposes of the present review, I listened to selections from a pair of games on KESN-FM — the May 11th game against Oakland that was delayed by rain and (ultimately) postponed, and then this past Saturday’s game against the Los Angeles Angels.

The broadcast team is composed of Eric Nadel and Dave Barnett. As seems to be the case with other radio teams, the pair seems to call a game in shifts, with Nadel taking the first couple innings, Barnett taking the next couple, and so on.

Analysis
As I’m likely to reiterate elsewhere in this review, Nadel and Barnett provide analysis that, as a listener, I wish were a 3 out of 5, but, given the present level of discourse in America’s broadcast booths, probably rates as a 4 out of 5. There are no citations of FanGraphs, no attempts to integrate advanced metrics, and yet there’s generally a respect for sample size and separating, for example, pitcher performance from team performance.

In the second game, both announcers referenced strikeout-to-walk ratios — Nadel for Dan Haren, Barnett for Derek Holland — as a meaningful indication of a pitcher’s ability. Both commentators also noted that Haren’s performance this season wasn’t necessarily reflected by his win-loss record, as he’d received some poor run support.

Nadel had one moment that I particularly cared for, saying at one point, with a runner on first and Torii Hunter batting, “[Derek Holland’s] been an extreme ground-ball pitcher this year… Hunter’s grounded into the most double-plays.” In actuality, Holland’s ground-ball rate is 48.0% — probably something less than “extreme” — but it was still a nice instance of matching meaningful numbers to a relevant situation.

Both commentators — and perhaps Barnett more often — did occasionally invoke stats that we might regard as more trivial than anything. Barnett (I think it was) cited both Elvis Andrus’s batting average against the Angels and Mitch Moreland’s batting average with runners in scoring position this season. This doesn’t represent a totally grievous offense, as those things have happened and it didn’t seem as though Barnett was suggesing entirely that these numbers were predicitive. Still, they’re not particularly illuminating, either.

One theme to Holland’s start was avoiding the big inning, which it seems has been a problem for him. I’m not sure if that’s something a pitcher can control, but it served as a pretense for discussing an interesting conversation that (I guess) Derek Holland and John Smoltz had. Smoltz, it seems, told Derek Holland — in those instances when a big inning seemed afoot — to imagine himself on video. The broadcast team integrated that information well.

Charm
My research on Eric Nadel (i.e. looking him up on Wikipedia) reveals at least five things of note:

• He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
• He went to Brown University.
• He’s been broadcasting Ranger games, in some form or another, since 1979.
• The arrival of Ruben Sierra in Texas motivated Nadel to learn Spanish. Nadel is now a fluent Spanish speaker.
• He has a “lifetime contract” with the Rangers, allowing him to continue on their broadcast team until he chooses to retire.

While, as noted above, Nadel isn’t necessarily a font of sabermetric analysis, he does have a precision of language that’s easy to appreciate. Quoting Adrian Beltre he used the phrase “With all humility.” When he’d mis-cited a number once, he made note of his mistake, beginning, “Let me correct myself.” Regarding an error by Erick Aybar, he said, “I couldn’t tell from the replay if it was a bad hop.”

Those last two quotations reveal an important quality in Nadel as a broadcaster — namely, a healthy understanding of his own fallibility. It happens too often that a broadcaster will state unequivocally that a pitch was a slider, say, when it’s pretty clear that it was a changeup — or that a baserunner was safe when replays show he was out. It’s possible that announcers refuse to make note of their mistakes, thinking that to do so might signify weakness. In reality, the exact opposite is true. As a listener, I understand that a human will be wrong at least once over the course of three hours. Admission of same is refreshing.

Barnett is less precise in his language, and probably a bit more conventional as a broadcaster, with a deeper and more resonant man voice. I don’t know. He’s fine.

While the Nadel-Barnett broadcast is notable for it’s cleanliness*, I saw nothing of Scully- or Uecker-level creativity that would compel me to listen to it for it’s own sake. That’s what sets those figures apart, I suppose — that one might seek them out — whereas, in the case of the present broadcast, it’s one with which I’d be content if I’d already decided to listen to the Rangers.

*By which I mean, it’s not muddled or aggressively annoying.

Regional Flavor
By their nature, the radio broadcasts (as opposed to the TV ones) on MLB.com are more interesting, as they include local commercials. The best of these for the Rangers is the one for Gaylord Texan Resort — because, duh, Gaylord. (Although, now that I look at it, this appears to be a chain with locations in Nashville and Kissimmee and National Harbor, MD. That’s less interesting.)

In another ad, Ranger president and part-owner Nolan Ryan really sells the team’s Thirsty Tuesday promotion. I could probably stand to listen to this a couple more times.

Final Thoughts
If you’re going to listen to a game involving the Rangers, this one should do fine — and maybe slightly better than that. While you shouldn’t expect many references to FIP or wOBA, broadcasters Nadel and Barnett are generally respectful of broader sabermetric concepts like sample size. Nadel’s easy intelligence and willingness to be wrong make him likeable, if not to the extent of a Scully or Uecker.

Grade: 4 (out of a possible 5)