The Good Old Days

Another bane of televised baseball is the announcers. Like engineers feeding data into a computing machine, they either tell us more than we want to know ("The last time the ball went through a hole in the scoreboard was back in 1933, when Grabby Folsom, a pinch hitter who had just been called up from Fort Worth ...") or they destroy the happy illusion that we are the experts we always claimed to be. This continual bombardment of information about team performance, batting averages, and players' idiosyncrasies is not only unfair to dedicated ball fans, but demoralizing to the novice.

David Dempsey, "Baseball Is Ruining Television", Harper's, June 1956