Bob Costas of TBS joined The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima on Sports Radio 92.3 The Fan to discuss Guardians-Yankees ALDS Game 5, and his thoughts on his call of the series.
The veteran announcer, who in 2017 was the recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame's Ford C. Frick Award for excellence in broadcasting, has come under criticism during the ALDS from some fans who think he has been biased toward the big-market Yankees.
Asked about it on Tuesday morning, Costas didn't mince words while rejecting the notion.
"I don't want to be harsh -- I understand where it comes from -- but to be concise, it's idiocy. There are people in New York who think we're somehow being unfair to the Yankees.
"It only comes from people who are themselves partisans -- whose idea of objectivity is Tom Hamilton's call. Tom Hamilton is great. He's a wonderful guy. He should someday be in the broadcaster's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He's the radio announcer for the Guardians. He can call a game the way he calls a game, and it's the way he should call the game."
Costas then went on to explain that network broadcasters have a different approach to calling a game from their counterparts in a local market.
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"When you're doing a game nationally, first of all one of the things you have to do early in a series, is to familiarize the casual fan of people outside -- in this case Cleveland and New York -- with the basic story lines of the series, and in this case the contrasts.
"Here's a newsflash for most fans. There may be a handful of exceptions somewhere, but by and large here's what network announcers root for: good games and good events. If the series is for five, you'd like it to go five because that's more dramatic. And you'd like the last game to go to the last pitch somehow, to the bottom of the ninth or extra innings, because that sets the stage for more memorable games and therefore should be a better broadcast. That's what network broadcasters root for. ... It's very, very unusual for network broadcasters to have a true rooting interest.
"The other things fans have to keep in mind -- no matter what the sport is -- the home team, when they do something great, there's going to be a crowd reaction. So the announcer -- without even thinking about it, it's just instinctive -- has to raise his voice to get above that crowd sound. When the road team does something, that response is a little bit muted. It's still about professionalism, you should be able to always be appreciative and always give credit to both sides, and people who think that's not the case in this series are seeing it through the prism of their own non-objectivity and then casting that on the broadcasters. It's simply a bogus argument. It has no validity whatsoever."
Costas blamed social media for the amplification of a small but vocal minority. But he also said it's nothing new, citing the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and Mets as just one prime example from his career. According to Costas, NBC Sports received roughly 1,000 complaints from Mets fans and 800 from Red Sox fans, all claiming that legendary announcer Vin Scully and analyst Joe Garagiola were biased against their teams.
But, Costas said he doesn't let it get to him.
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"I don't pay a whole lot of attention to it, because of the dynamics that we've been talking about, so I understand what it is. There was one comment in line with what you're talking about where, 'you don't have to say these things about the Yankees - everybody is a Yankees fan, everybody knows this.' Does that person understand the nature of a national broadcast? Yes, everybody from Sacramento to Bangor, Maine knows who Aaron Judge is this year. But what about other factors within it? I think if you don't set the stage and frame it a little bit, then the casual fan isn't drawn in as much and they don't understand the dynamics of the series. Once you move along past the first couple of games, then the series takes on its own narrative, and you do less of that. ..."
Costas, Ron Darling and Lauren Shehadi are on the call of TBS’s exclusive coverage of the Guardians-Yankees ALDS, with Game 5 set for Tuesday at 4 pm ET.
TBS is the exclusive home of the ALDS and ALCS.
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