The Week That Was: July 14, 2019

Welcome back to The Week That Was, where we'd like to remind you that you aren't supposed to eat the little packets of silica gel that come in your shoes.

Milestones:

A pair of ESPN commentators hit milestones this week on the same games as Matt Vasgersian and Buster Olney double-dipped (Thursday and Sunday) for ESPN. Thursday night, the Astros visited the Rangers, and Sunday night, the Dodgers met the Red Sox. Jessica Mendoza and Alex Rodriguez were the analysts in both cases.

Vasgersian called his 275th and 276th national MLB telecasts, passing Josh Lewin (274) for 15th place and Vin Scully (275) for 14th among known play-by-play men. (Please note that Matty V did not pass Vin Scully on the Being Vin Scully scale, just ... numerically.)

Olney handled field-reporter duties for his 240th and 241st MLB games, tying and then passing Bob Harwood of OLN and Versus for the 12th-most field reporter credits among the four major U.S. sports.

In between those appearances, Eric Karros pulled into a tie for 13th among MLB color commentators on Saturday. The White Sox-Athletics game he called with Justin Kutcher was his 223rd, matching Bob Brenly and Jeff Torborg on that list.

From the Department of Round Numbers: the Thursday game was the Rangers' 600th national TV appearance and the Saturday game was the Athletics' 700th.

Database Updates:

The Padres-Phillies game on May 21, 1983, was rained out. Bob Costas and Tony Kubek are no longer credited with this appearance.

The Royals-Yankees game on July 21, 1983, was also rained out. We have removed that from the database, but it does not affect any top-16 lists.

This Date In History:

Tuesday, July 16 is the 25th anniversary of Joe Buck's network telecast debut. He called a Cardinals-Rockies game on this date in 1994, pairing with Dave Campbell on an ABC regional game. His first NFL game was that fall.

This Week in the Tennis Section:

The Hall of Fame Classic at Newport, Rhode Island. (For the next two weeks, we're claiming home-court advantage and tracking U.S.-based tournaments that don't fit our usual criteria.)

This Week on the Playoff of Dreams:

The 1910 League Championship Series get underway with the Giants meeting the Cubs and the Athletics facing the Tigers. (This is last week's summary as well. We got sort of tied up watching tennis.)

The Week That Will Be:

Monday, July 15
7:00 -- ESPN -- Dodgers at Phillies

Tuesday, July 16
7:00 -- MLB Network -- Dodgers at Phillies

Wednesday, July 17
7:00 -- ESPN -- Rays at Yankees

Thursday, July 18
12:30 -- YouTube -- Dodgers at Phillies
7:00 -- MLB Network -- Rays at Yankees
8:00 -- ESPN -- FC Cincinnati vs. DC United
10:00 -- ESPN -- Timbers vs. Orlando City

Friday, July 19
10:00 -- ESPN -- Galaxy vs. LAFC

Saturday, July 20
4:00 -- FS1 -- Mets at Giants
7:15 -- FS1 -- Nationals at Braves

Sunday, July 21
1:00 -- TBS -- Rockies at Yankees
4:00 -- ESPN -- Atlanta United vs. DC United
7:00 -- ESPN -- Nationals at Braves
7:30 -- FS1 -- Orlando City vs. Red Bulls
9:30 -- FS1 -- Timbers vs. Galaxy

Wimbledon Schedule: July 1, 2019

32 men's singles first-round matches (88 hours)
32 women's singles first-round matches (53.3 hours)64 matches (141.3 hours) of tennis

17 initial warmups (2.8 hours)
47 changes between matches (15.7 hours)

159.8 hours of court activity
(Wimbledon does its post-match interviews off court.)

Men's singles: 16 seeds, 4 Americans
Women's singles: 16 seeds, 12 Americans

Weather: Sunny changing to cloudy by lunchtime. High of 70.

Sunset: 4:21 p.m. EDT

TV: ESPN, 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

My guesses as to ESPN's featured matches:

6 a.m. - Keys/Kumkhum

8 a.m. - Djokovic/Kohlschreiber

10 a.m. - Zverev/Vesely

(Osaka/Putintseva if needed to fill a gap here)

1 p.m. - V.Williams/Gauff

Announcer Milestones From The Fourth Quarter Of 2017

(Not actually me, but it could be.)
Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5.

Cycling through another round of biweekly database updates, I note that we haven't given some milestones their due recently, either on the blog or on Twitter. So without further ado, here are a couple of handfuls of updates on the vital statistics of several announcers, teams and networks. They're presented in chronological order.

(Standard disclaimer: Announcer totals contained herein come from the lists maintained at The 506 Forums (free registration required to view). As always, you can see the top 16 in each category on our TV databases page.)

October 4 - When the puck drops on the NHL's centennial season, Mike Emrick becomes the first American announcer to handle 900 play-by-play broadcasts for that league on national television. The broadcast pulled him within 71 games of former partner Bill Clement for the most in (American) NHL history.

As of this post (December 17), you could combine the totals of the next five active play-by-play announcers and you'd still be short of Emrick's 910 games; that math also counts Sam Rosen as "active" based strictly on their local work, as his last national gig outside of simulcasts was on the network then called VS. in 2011.

October 17 - The NBA's season opener gets right to work rewriting the record books, as Kevin Harlan's 671st national telecasts pushes him past the number we have confirmed for Doug Collins. By that measure, Harlan is fifth all-time; in truth, he's probably not there quite yet. 

(Collins worked for TNT in the early 1990s, which is one of the eras where the listings I'm working off of are not quite complete. Based on the confirmations posted to The506 Forums and the interpolations of the late John Moynihan, his final total is somewhere in the 690s, which puts Harlan on track to get there around the All-Star break.)

October 21 - Scott Oake becomes the seventh documented announcer to call 1,000 NHL games in Canada, and the first to do so as a host and/or rinkside reporter, with the Wild-Flames matchup from Calgary.

The figures for Ron MacLean merit, at the least, an honorable mention here because of the way records were kept as the role of the Hockey Night In Canada host evolved. 

From 1957 until the mid-1990s, each game had its own host that handled player interviews and between-periods segments; this person is credited on each game broadcast. In about 1996, CBC shifted to having a singular central studio for all of its games: even though the studio is in Toronto, which often hosts one of the games, that led to the introduction of a second person to do interviews, which is the one credited for those games.

After racking up more than 500 games in the older role, MacLean shifted into the studio in the mid-90s. If you count his time as host, often on the order of 50 or 60 games a year, he'd be well beyond Oake and into Bob Cole territory (see Dec. 5 below).

In each of our other databases, studio hosts aren't recorded; however, the three-act structure of a hockey game means that the intermission host gets more face time than the halftime host in basketball or football -- and that's especially true if a game goes beyond regulation, which can happen ad infinitum in the league's most visible games. So I'm not sure how to weigh those factors against one another.

(At a far more practical level, I don't have record of who the studio hosts were on a night-by-night basis beginning in 1996-97, so I can't properly credit them even if that route makes sense.)

November 1 - Mike Breen's call of the Rockets-Knicks game makes him the second person in NBA history to do play-by-play of 750 nationally-televised games, trailing only Marv Albert. 

Breen's average is in the neighborhood of 50 games a year, which would put him on pace to catch Albert's current mark (1,014 games) in the 2022-23 season. Of course, that's subject to the small matter that Albert is still an active NBA broadcaster doing about 40 games a year, but that in turn is subject to the fact that Albert turned 76½ last Tuesday. (Happy half-birthday, Marv.) Breen is 56.

Aside from Breen and Albert, Hubie Brown is the only person confirmed to have called 750 NBA games on national TV. Brown has 964 games under his belt. Craig Sager probably joins them: I have 746 sideline appearances for the man they called "America's sideline reporter," but that doesn't include courtside data for much of the 2006-07 or 2007-08 seasons, which means his total is more likely in the 800 range.

December 5 - The Rangers-Penguins affair from Pittsburgh marked the 800th time that the Broadway Blueshirts showed up on American national television. Only the Red Wings (870) and Flyers (829) have more such games.

(The Canadiens got their 500th American appearance on December 16, but I'm not giving that a full entry here because Canadian NHL telecasts have their own listings.)

December 8 - A Celtics-Spurs telecast from San Antonio is the 1,500th NBA game on record for ESPN. That figure includes 102 games from the cable network's first NBA contract (1982-84), but not the 60 games that have gotten shunted to other ESPN networks since 2002.

(For purposes of comparison, TNT's 2,500th game was Game 5 of the 2017 Eastern Conference Final; ABC's Christmas slate will start with game number 692 overall for them and game number 489 under the modern set of contracts.)

December 9 - Bob Cole, Canada's dean of hockey broadcasters, works his 1,700th NHL telecast as the Jets face the Lightning in Tampa. No other announcer in our five databases can boast even three-fourths of Cole's total, and the one that comes closest—Dick Irvin—retired in 1999.

December 11 - Lisa Salters becomes the 10th person to handle the sidelines for 100 NFL games when she works the Patriots-Dolphins Monday Night game for ESPN. (She also makes a lot of us wish we were in Miami in December, but that's beside the point.)

December 17 - The Vancouver Canucks become the first NHL expansion team to reach the national airwaves 1,000 times in Canada. They would likely prefer not to discuss the result of that game.

...and with that, we've caught back up.

In addition to the Kevin Harlan eclipse of Doug Collins mentioned earlier, the next several weeks figure to bring milestones for Ian Eagle, Dan Fouts, Greg Gumbel, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Reggie Miller, Mark Jackson, Hubie Brown; Mike Emrick, Pierre McGuire and Ed Olczyk; and Jim Hughson, Oake, Greg Millen, John Garrett and Paul Romanuk, should be on tap in the new year as well. 

Albert/Breen/Harlan/Stockton Sports Theater 3000

Having covered the NHL database already, tonight we'll take a look at updates to the database of every known regular-season and postseason NBA telecast.

(Standard disclaimer: These announcer totals come from the lists maintained at The 506 Forums (free registration required to view); in this post, we're working with data posted by John Moynihan and Tim Brulia. And as always, you can see the top 16 in each category on our TV databases page.)

While I'm not convinced we have every NBA game ever in the list and there are still a sizable number of gaps (some 2.4 percent of the announcer data is uncertain), the data we have is ... what we have. Moreover, while I'm not convinced all of the guesses we have are correct, I do think it's fair to estimate off them -- for example, if a hypothetical network has a dozen doubleheaders over the course of a season, their lead and no. 2 crews probably worked about 12 games each that year.

Because of that uncertainty, however, I maintain two separate NBA lists: one that counts only the confirmed games and one that includes the hypotheses of Moynihan's original notes.

Regardless of your counting method, Monday night's Wizards-Pistons game on TNT is the 7,500th in the NBA database. Among those 7,500 games, 2,457 have come on TNT and another 1,456 on ESPN. NBC, the top-ranked broadcast network, has shown 967 tilts -- and I feel really old when I realize that "Roundball Rock" hasn't been on TV in almost five-eighths of my lifetime.

It probably won't surprise most of you to learn that the three most-televised teams are the Lakers, Celtics and Knicks, nor that Marv Albert checks in as the dean of NBA broadcasters with 995 appearances (994 on play-by-play, plus a color appearance alongside Chris Schenkel on ABC for a Knicks-Rockets game in 1973).

The top three PBP voices of all-time are currently active in the people of Albert, Mike Breen and Kevin Harlan; Dick Stockton, who may not have officially retired but hasn't appeared since 2015, is fourth. As of the end of the regular season tonight, those four announcers have handled a total of exactly 3,000 games.

Albert enters the playoffs five games and six PBP appearances shy of 1,000, a mark that only Bill Clement has reached on a single sport in the United States. Breen needs 21 games to reach 750.

On the analyst side, all-time leader Hubie Brown is two confirmed games shy of 950 and 25 total appearances, including guesses, away from 1000. Doug Collins follows him at 666 and 690 respectively. Jeff Van Gundy, the leader among those analysts whose careers started since the uncertain announcer data ends in 1993, is third overall with 545.

Reggie Miller needs eight more games to reach 400, all on color commentary, and 10 more to tie his sister Cheryl for the 13th-most appearances in league history. Mark Jackson enters the playoffs with 387 broadcasts, five behind Miller.

Following the passing of Craig Sager in December, David Aldridge's 262 confirmed broadcasts make him the longest-tenured sideline reporter in the playoffs, although he trails Doris Burke by 22 games if you include Burke's color work. Since we're missing a lot of sideline reporters from the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons, both individuals may well be shorted 40 games or so, but again ... we have what we have.

The regular season concludes tonight, leaving anywhere from 60 to 105 national telecasts in the playoffs that begin Saturday on ESPN, ABC, TNT and NBA TV.