Guardians broadcast booth takes a dip in this year’s Awful Announcing rankings

Every year, the team at Awful Announcing puts together its rankings of the top broadcasting teams in baseball based on reader feedback. On Tuesday, they released this year’s version of the rankings, which featured a small dip in the rankings for the Guardians’ broadcast crew. 

After coming in 13th last year, the team of Matt Underwood, Rick Manning, Al Pawlowski, Chris Gimenez and Pat Tabler came in 20th this year. The rankings were determined by reader voting.

Guardians broadcast team takes a dip in newest Awful Announcing rankings

As pointed out by writer Andrew Bucholtz, this ranking is much more in line with the 19th-place rating they had in 2023. 

“A repeated theme in the comments was criticism of the main broadcast booth’s banter,” Buckholtz wrote. “That included lines such as “Underwood and Manning talk so much about everything but the play-by-play that they often make errors in what is actually going on,” “spend too much time talking to themselves,” and “just funny guys who think they’re funny.” But some others had praise for Underwood and Manning’s chemistry, including with increased conversations with sideline reporter Andre Knott in recent years (although one fan didn’t like those), and the main booth drew one “best in baseball” line.”

The varying level of feedback is emblematic of how up-and-down baseball announcing can be. Like the players, the announcers are available for 162 games, so no one’s ever going to be perfect, which can lead to some letting the occasional misplay (misannounce?) overshadow the daily consistency. 

But it’s worth pointing out that Matt, Rick and Co. seem to have a bit more fans than haters, as they finished with more ‘A’ votes (83) than ‘F’ votes (58). 

And, at the end of the day, how a broadcast booth is viewed can mostly come down to how the team is doing on the field (which is part of the reason why the A’s, Rockies and White Sox ranked so far down on this list). Last year the Guardians cruised to the postseason on the back of a surprisingly dominant season, while they’ve had their fair share of struggles so far this year. 

This is also their first year as the digital-only Guardians TV, which could also impact how fans view the booth. While that switch has made it easier for fans to watch Guardians games (and there are no more blackouts), the digital-only switch may not have been a welcome change for everyone.

That switch has also made it easier to watch the games with the radio broadcast synced up, which could also lead to more people deciding to listen to Tom Hamilton instead. 

It’s also worth noting that Bucholtz said that the duo of Pawlowski and Gimenez received a fair amount of praise. Gimenez has gotten a lot of work next to Pawlowski on the pre-game show, while they’ve both filled in a fair amount on the broadcasts this year. Gimenez is currently serving as the color commentator for the team’s road trip to Arizona and Texas. 

The Guardians’ broadcast booth was ranked as the third-best in the American League Central ahead of the Royals (21) and White Sox (27). The Twins came in 15th and the Tigers finished in eighth.