When you're a diehard fan of a professional sports team, whichever team you identify with becomes a part of you. You tattoo their logos on your skin, you fly their flag from your car, you seemingly live and die with every win and loss.
Conversely, it's easy to refer to your favorite team as "us" or "we" as if you're a part of them. As a fan, that's okay (depending on who you ask). As an announcer covering a team, however, things get a little dicier.
With that being said, The Wall Street Journal unveiled their "Announcer-Bias Index," a recent study that looked to prove which MLB team had the most homerific broadcasters. According to the data, the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles -- both of which broadcast on MASN -- are tied for the seventh-most biased commentary teams in baseball.
Here's how WSJ came up with the list:
By the rules of our study, anyone with a microphone who used a pronoun like "we," "us" or "our" to describe the home team was given a citation. Obscure pet names for players were also flagged. Additional penalties were given for things like excessive moping after miscues or unrestrained glee after big moments.
Those involved in the study watched one full-length broadcast of every MLB team. After watching a full Nats and O's broadcast, each MASN broadcast team (Bob Carpenter and F.P. Santangelo in Washington, Gary Thorne and former Oriole Mike Bordick in Baltimore) made nine biased comments.
Of course, one game is an incredibly small sample size and when you watch your team's games almost every night from April to September, things start to blur together and such pronouns probably go unnoticed. Yet, with Washington already clinching a playoff berth and Baltimore not too far from doing the same, national broadcast teams will be covering their respective games in a few weeks, so get your fill of local color while you still can.
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For those wondering, the Chicago White Sox were the far-and-away "winners" of the most biased commentary team with 104 comments in one game; it was Ken Harrelson's blatant homerism that actually prompted WSJ to do the study in the first place.
(H/T Dan Steinberg)
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