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May 18, 2021 By: Mark Knudson

When will sports broadcasters return to calling games in person?

Drew Goodman has never met Daniel Bard.

Bard is the closer for the Colorado Rockies, and the reigning National League Comeback Player of the Year from 2020. Most people who follow the team have never met him.

But Goodman isn’t just a follower. He’s the TV play-by-play voice of the Rockies. This is Bard’s second season with the team, and Goodman’s been the voice of the Rockies since 2002. Yet, not once in the past two years has Goodman actually met Bard in person.

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If you think about it, that’s astonishing, given the typical relationship between players and broadcasters.

What’s more, Goodman – and the rest of the Rockies broadcasting crew – have no idea when they might actually meet the guy whose name they call and discuss several times a week.

Welcome to the world of remote game broadcasting, where announcers don’t travel or even interact with the players at home. Instead, they call every game home and road from the glassed in broadcast booth of their home stadium or arena. To their eminence credit – and this goes across the board in all sports – announcers have almost perfected the art of broadcasting games they’re not at, but are actually watching on big TV screens from hundreds of miles away.

This is all a result of the pandemic of course, and sports teams’ efforts to limit – or eliminate – as much contact as they can between those who don’t absolutely have to interact to do their jobs. Yet even with mask mandates being lifted and most of the people in question having been vaccinated by now, sports teams – and even national media outlets like ESPN – have yet to return to the old way of broadcasting games, where the announcers all traveled with the teams and called games they were watching in person.

It’s fair to wonder why and when (or IF) all sports will return to broadcasting games the old way — the way all announcers are eagerly wanting it to be.

“Believe me, I inquire on a fairly regular basis,” Goodman said before leaving for his well worn spot in the Coors Field broadcast booth for a Sunday home game. “I know it has to emanate from New York first, and then it will be up to the individual broadcasts entities. I’m thankful we’re all working, and that the baseball industry is playing a full season, so I’m not taking that for granted at all, and I certainly understand why we are where we are, that’s obvious.

“But I ask the question all the time because I think from every announcer’s standpoint in order to do our job properly, you need to be there – first from a sight line standpoint, and also from an information standpoint – you need to be around the guys on a daily basis in order to be able to pass along information, anecdotes and stories about what’s going on with your club.”

Goodman and his brethren could actually be victims of their own ability to make game broadcasts still sound good, even when they’re doing the games from hundreds of miles away. Oddly, the motivation for teams and networks to go back to the old (and better) way – a way that cost them real dollars in terms of travel expenses and the like – isn’t necessarily there. If the teams and networks can save money and still do a broadcast they’re happy with, then why wouldn’t they keep it doing it this way? It’s not like the viewers are clamoring for their announcers to get back on the road.

The broadcasters, however, are far from okay with what’s happening and certainly aren’t eager to make the new way the permanent way.

“I think to the average viewer, by and large…it’s okay,” Goodman noted. “There’s a ground ball to short…’ which you can see, and, ‘up comes so and so, he went to Stanford University.’ That information you have. But I’ll give you an example: There are times on the television I have no idea, say there’s a hard shot to the third basemen…did he field it? You don’t know until they cut to it that it got down the third base line. Or a ball is hit up in the air and you’re not completely aware of where guys are positioned or seeing if it was a foul ball…and the next thing you know a guy’s catching it.

“You get caught two or three times a game at least, especially with trail runners on a ball in the gap…did the third base coach send him? You’re kind of playing catch up. Sometimes off the bat it seems like a guy hit it really well, but because you’re not there you can’t tell that he kind of got it off the end of the bat and it’s a routine fly ball.”

Even watching national broadcasts, you see the play-by-play tandem in a studio surrounded by TV’s that attempt to give them every angle. But it’s still not the same. Even if they do have a “sideline reporter” on site, the lack of interaction – even before home games – hurts the announcer’s ability to do the job the best way he or she can.

“I go back to not being able to pass along information to the viewers,” Goodman said. “Someone like (Rockies first baseman) Connor Joe. Great story, right? The guy’s overcome testicular cancer, he’s giving you a good at bat every time, and I’ve heard he’s just a wonderful kid…but I’ve never met him.”

Even if they should be proud of the work they’ve done during these pandemic restricted broadcasts, Goodman – and dozens of other broadcasters across all sports – aren’t quite ready for a pat on the back just yet.

“From a broadcast team standpoint, yes. I’m really proud of all the people behind the scenes who’ve done yeoman’s work to set up a proper studio and make this a seamless as possible. So from that standpoint, it’s great what we’re able to do,” he acknowledged. “But it’s not the same; it’s not as it should be, and I just hope that we can return to doing it the right way at some point.”

That point will likely not come until all the states and municipalities can agree on exactly what the new safety protocols will be. There remains a variance from state to state and city to city, and sometimes those variances are substantial. With all the uncertainty that remains, sports officials have offered no clues to Goodman or anyone else about when the broadcasters can get back to calling games the way they did pre-COVID.

And if they keep doing games remotely as well as they are at the moment, it might be a while.