If the goal of calling a baseball game is to be as objective as possible, the Red Sox announcers are doing a pretty good job.
A recent study by the Wall Street Journal showed that Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo are tied with five other broadcast teams for least biased in baseball.
The study took one game per team and tracked how many "homer" comments were made by the broadcasters. Those words or phrases included 'we,' 'us,' 'our,' player nicknames and plainly rooting for the local team. Remy and Orsillo went the whole game they studied without reverting to homer-ism once. The Blue Jays, Yankees, Dodgers and Mets announcers also called their entire games straight down the middle.
It came as no surprise that former-Red Sox Ken Harrelson and his White Sox partner Steve Stone rated the most biased. They had 104 instances of rooting for "their" team, or referring to themselves as part of the team. Harrelson and Stone were far ahead of their next competition. The second-place Indians-pair — Matt Underwood and Rick Manning — were tracked with 23 homer-instances.
This leads to an important question, how would infamous Celtics-homer Tommy Heinsohn rate in a similar study? The Wall Street Journal can handle that one, it seems like too much counting.
