Fans always complain about blabbermouth announcers. But who's the chattiest of them all? The WSJ took a sabermetrical approach, and assembled some statistics.
If it seems like your baseball team's play-by-play man jabbers endlessly at 1,000 words a minute, well, he doesn't. But the St. Louis Cardinals' Dan McLaughlin comes closer than most of his peers, talking at an estimated 109.9 words every 60 seconds.
In a quest to figure out how much play-by-play men actually talk, we listened to the first scoreless inning of every team's home broadcast last Friday—tally counter in hand—and calculated how many words they uttered per minute. The Yankees' Michael Kay and the White Sox's Ken "Hawk" Harrelson may be considered by some to be prolific talkers, but to be scientific about it, they're no worse than Houston's Bill Brown or Seattle's Dave Niehaus.
...Apparently, announcers for bad teams feel an urge to fill dead air. Trailing Mr. McLaughlin was the Nationals' Bob Carpenter at 102.3 words per minute, the Reds' George Grande (102.1) and the Diamondbacks' Daron Sutton (100.4).
I'm not a big fan of Michael Kay, but I have to say that I always appreciate him more after watching a Yankees game broadcast by ESPN or Fox. (Note that those national broadcasters weren't included in this study. Would be interesting to find out if they talk more, or it just seems that way.)
