Giants top local TV announcer rankings

The good folks at Awful Announcing have been searching for the best broadcasting crew in baseball, taking votes from fans of all 30 teams. Let's check in at #30 to make sure their efforts are legit.

30) Chicago White Sox – 1.37
-Hawk Harrelson (play by play)
-Steve Stone (analyst, play by play – select)
-Aaron Rowand (analyst -select)
-Mike Huff (analyst – select)
-Tom Paciorek (analyst – select)

Most popular grade: F (46% of voters)

Seems legit. Also, whoa, Aaron Rowand is doing some color commentary for the White Sox? Good for him. Though it must be pretty distracting when he stops mid-sentence to swing at a slider.

Let's focus on the part that interests us:

1) San Francisco Giants – 3.46
-Duane Kuiper (play by play)
-Jon Miller (play by play)
-Dave Flemming (play by play)
-Mike Krukow (analyst)

Most popular grade: A (74% of voters)

Analysis: The Giants had more A grades than any other team in the league, and that total surpassed the total amount of votes that seven teams had

Of course they're #1. It was like Daniel Day-Lewis winning the Oscar for Lincoln. The presenters could have smoked the envelope on stage and everyone still would have known who won. The only competition was Vin Scully, but he couldn't make up for the rest of the crew, which calls the games outside of California and Arizona.

Take a moment to reflect at just how blessed we are. I personally spend about 450 hours every year watching Giants baseball. That's almost 19 full days -- the equivalent of 56 eight-hour work days. And I'm exceptionally lucky to oh god my life what have I done my life what am I doing with my life oh no no that is too much get the best broadcasting crew in the world for those hours.

I watch a lot of non-Giants games, too, so I don't even feel like a big homer supporting this ranking. A medium homer, perhaps. But I have a tough time watching Reds games for more than five minutes before I'd rather listen to a warped Candlebox cassette. The Marlins announcers are ... an acquired taste. In the same way I imagine a handful of soiled pennies is an acquired taste. Remember when the Diamondbacks had Daron Sutton and Mark Grace? That's a thought experiment, not something that actually happened, right?

The Giants can go four deep with great announcers, when most teams are lucky to have one. The best part about that sentence is that it's actively making Dodgers fans and Padres fans retch right now. They mostly cross party lines, just like Scully, but there are still a lot of biased, silly folk who can't stand them. Now they have the official rankings of Awful Announcing to bug them some more.

Let me search through the archives to find a great call from one of them and hey look at that it was literally the most recent game they've called.

I love the gap between the call and his standard "We are going home." It's a neat twist on an established Kuiperism.

You did not need the results of an election to feel proud and lucky with regard to the Giants broadcast team. But it's nice to have. Carve out some time to feel proud and lucky. And keep this open in a tab all day.