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For the past six years, excluding 2015, Awful Announcing has ranked MLB announcers using grades from fans of all 30 teams. For the first time, the White Sox finished ahead of the Cubs in the 2019 local MLB announcer rankings.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how these rankings are calculated.
You’ll be giving each team (or, more likely, teams you actually have opinions about) a grade from A-F, with A being the highest and F being the lowest. At the end of the polling, I’ll be giving each team a composite grade like a GPA on a four point scale, with an A grade being valued as a 4.00 and an F grade being valued as a 0.00.
Every team received at least 1,300 grades from fans and there were more than 64,000 votes overall. Again, these rankings only include local broadcast announcers and not national crews.
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The team of Jason Benetti and Steve Stone finished this year’s rankings 11th, while Len Kasper and Jim Deshaies dropped to 13th.
Via Awful Announcing.
For the first time ever, the White Sox have finished above the Cubs in our rankings. Shocker! The Benetti and Stone duo debuted highly back in 2016, then took a step back over the last two years before surging ahead this year (probably because the White Sox aren’t completely awful this season). Benetti and Stone seem to have good chemistry, and Benetti himself is showing a passion for the team that can really resonate with viewers.
The White Sox announcers were ranked 10th, 17th and 16th in the past three seasons, respectively.
Meanwhile, Len and JD dropped out of the top-10 for the first time and Awful Announcing thinks it has to do with fans just being frustrated about the franchise overall.
This marks both a low ranking and grade for the Cubs, but continues a slide that started a year ago (when they initially fell four spots from five to nine). I think a decent chunk of this score is just the fanbase taking some overall frustrations with the organization out on the broadcasters, which you can see with the relatively low percentage of D and F votes. If the polls were getting flooded by anti-Cubs sentiment, you’d see a much higher share at that end of the spectrum.
The White Sox average “GPA” was 2.4975, compared to 2.479, for the Cubs.
The Padres were ranked #1. You can see the full results here.
