Good evening and welcome to another exciting edition of the sporadically-updated blog at Un/Necessary Sports Research.
Sometime last weekend, Lucas from Prince Edward Island wrote in to 32 Thoughts, a podcast hosted by Sportsnet’s Kyle Bukauskas and Elliotte Friedman. (Many of you likely recognize Bukauskas as the rinkside reporter for Hockey Night in Canada’s A-team. Some of you likely also remember that Friedman has done similar work, although he’s now billed as an NHL Insider rather than a rinkside reporter per se.) He inquired if the hosts knew who had appeared on the most Hockey Night telecasts.
On Monday’s edition of the podcast, a six-minute discussion ensued about various facets of that conversation. (Here’s the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and the Sportsnet website. Scroll about nine minutes past the hour mark.)
Lucas wrote: “In recent memory, Ron MacLean seems like the easy answer, but with a long history, it may be someone else.” The short answer is that both parts of that statement are probably right. But we’re kind of into keeping receipts around here, so wait, there’s more.
Right before the 72-minute mark on the podcast, Bukauskas asks if Friedman has ever run across Un/Necessary Sports Research. Friedman responds “No, I haven’t, but I love the idea, even without knowing what it is.” This is the sort of reaction we endorse, both because it plays into our whole paradigm that sports are important because they are just (as my first boss like to call them) the toy department of life and because it sure beats people saying “I can’t believe someone wastes their time keeping track of this stuff.”
At any rate, Bukauskas went on to introduce actual numbers into the conversation and more discussion ensued. The longer answer to Lucas’ actual question is that MacLean is the easy answer, but if you’re counting him, it’s hard to use our data to tell, because we don’t keep track of studio personnel if they’re not covering an individual game. If you are just looking at game coverage, any answer involving Canadian announcer longevity starts with Bob Cole (1,723 telecasts from 1973-2019).
Chris Cuthbert is getting closer and closer to the conversation, sitting at 1,376 appearances in Canada as of Wednesday night, but then you have to start accounting for the fact that Cuthbert also worked for TSN and NBC, neither of which were part of Hockey Night, but some of those NBC telecasts also ended up on Sportsnet while he was still at TSN, and the whole enterprise gets a little muddy.
Beyond answering Lucas’ question, however, that podcast appearance brought a number of new followers into the fold, and it made me realize that I don’t think there’s a wonderful entry point for who we are and what we do around here. So let’s make one.
Welcome to Un/Necessary Sports Research. There are an awful lot of things that I wish this site could be, but given the practical realities of there only being so many hours in a day and the fact that I have to make a living somehow, most of what happens here involves recording the announcers of national sports telecasts in as objective a manner as possible. We try to stick to sports, because people from all walks of life find refuge in them, and we try to do so without favor or disfavor to any team or announcer, because everyone has parent/mentor sorts of figures that really like them and other people that … don’t. I do make exceptions to tell cancer what it can do with itself, because I have yet to meet anyone who likes cancer.
This is not to say that I don’t have opinions about these things. I’m as human as anyone else. But for what goes on here, the idea is to be as neutral as possible because it’s about the commentators doing the work, not what I think about them.
One of the functions of this announcer record-keeping is the daily schedule. This gets posted on our social media channels (which currently include Twitter/X, Instagram and Bluesky on a regular basis — I think we also have accounts on Facebook, Threads and Mastodon somewhere) on as many days as I remember to do it. The announcer schedule exists partially because it’s the first draft of the historical announcer database and partially because one of the things I miss about dead-tree newspaper sports sections is the agate page that, in some papers, pretty well passed along every sporting event known to humankind from the day before. Part of that usually included the listing of what sports were on TV the next day.
But the historical announcer counts are what got me into this business, and I don’t think I’ve ever really explained how or why that happened. Many of you are likely familiar with the 506 Sports website that is most famous for its weekly maps of which NFL game is airing in your area. Some of you likely also know about the message board, which is now a Discord server, connected to that site that serves as a hangout for people who care about this stuff a little too much.
I found the 506 sometime around 2008 or 2009, because I grew up in an area where sometimes we got the Bears, sometimes we got the Colts and sometimes we got neither even though they were playing. By early 2010, I was registered on their board and have since passed a few hours there that could probably have been spent doing something more financially lucrative.
One of the things I found on the board, in addition to all the contemporaneous commentary, was a Sports Broadcasting History section that included a chronological listing of telecasts and commentators in several sports. A lot of that listing predates me – John Moynahan, known as the Godfather of Sports Broadcasting History, at one point had as many as 10 satellite dishes in his yard and attended thousands of games while crisscrossing the nation and visiting libraries before he passed in 2014.
Moynahan wasn’t the only person who kept track of these things. Tim Brulia, who is also the lead historian at the Gridiron Uniform Database, and Jeff Haggar, the author of the Classic TV Sports blog that appears to have gone offline at some point, were two of the several others involved. But nevertheless, despite all the information, there still wasn’t a good way to answer quantitative questions like the one in the podcast that started this post.
So that’s where I showed up, parsing dozens of these forum posts into spreadsheets that now track every known national telecast of the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL (the latter in both the U.S. and Canada). Since those spreadsheets started coming together in 2013 and 2014, thousands of new games have been broadcast, and I’ve added those too, but the core of the historical data now lives at the 506 Sports Archive.
As with any statistic, some decisions had to be made about what counted and what didn’t. The national broadcast listings omitted telecasts like the Chicago Cubs on WGN and the Atlanta Braves on (W)TBS, because they were the teams’ local telecasts that happened to air on nationally-available stations. In the same vein, today we don’t count local telecasts that are simulcast on league-owned networks (this is why there’s often an “MLB Network” or “NBA TV” footer on the daily schedule), but the network-produced games like MLB Network’s Showcase do show up.
The NHL has presented a couple of interesting challenges, because at a couple of points in league history, national broadcast rights were held by the same company that produced teams’ local feeds. In the United States, this happened with SportsChannel (1989-92), and in Canada, it’s happened since 2014 with Rogers Communications holding local rights to the Canucks, Oilers, Flames and Maple Leafs to some degree. In these cases, we do end up with some situations where the same announcers that call local games are also working the national telecasts.
Not everything in the daily schedules ends up in a database – for example, right now I don’t do any historical tracking for college sports, even though some of that is on the 506 archive – and there are some sports with databases in various states of construction or conception. Like the internet as a whole, my brainstorming sessions are dangerously chaotic places.
In addition to the five sport databases I mentioned earlier, there are some leaderboards that are constructed through addition of the single-sport totals. These include a total NHL listing (combining U.S. and Canadian totals while removing double-counting of telecasts that aired in both countries), a total listing for the four major U.S. sports, and a total listing for the four major pro sports including Canada. All of these can be found on our TV Databases page.
That’s what’s here. It’s certainly not perfect – several times a year I go in and add corrections and additions to the listings – and it’s hard to be all things to all people. But it’s what we have and I try to leave things in a better place than I found them.
If you have questions about the site, hit me up on your favorite social network or send an email: tony at unnecessary sports research dot com. Corrections to the historical listings can go on the 506 Sports Discord server if you have an account there; if you don’t want to go that far, send me an email and I’ll send it in. (Substantiating evidence is always a good idea.) There’s probably more that could be said, but this post is already reaching ZZ Top beard length territory as it is.
Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice, your mouths in your headsets, or your eyes locked on the screen – whatever else you do to make the sports broadcast world happen.
