Todd Kalas joins TV booth, Blum full-time color man

He had his moments, though. I'll never forget on the radio one time while giving the scoreboard: "And with that, the Braves drop into last place in the NL East. Let's say that again! And with that, the Braves drop into LAST PLACE in the NL East!"

 

I was just glad to see the tigers, red Sox, and rangers were ranked as low as they were. I thought seattles could've been higher. I don't mind them iirc.

 

Glad Rangers are low, I cannot stand their broadcast.

 

C.J. Nitkowski, IMO, is the worst announcer in baseball by a wide margin. I don’t mind his bias (I think every announcer has to be somewhat biased in their presentation), but his aversion to basic advanced statistics is really bad. He’s slimy and frames everything poorly. Facts do not matter to him. I don’t know how he still has a job. I can’t believe the Astros employed him for any amount of time. Just an idiot with a microphone.

 

Damn bro, did he steal your girl or something?

 

Nah man, it was even worse than that..... He said the Astros were "laughable". Unforgivable.

 

CJ and that other idiot Dave Raymond were salty as hell in early 2017 when the Astros started slaying. They basically laughed at Astros fans for getting excited about our team and the prospect of championship contendership. It always pisses me off when people that cover or follow other teams try to police the enthusiasm of another team's fanbase. I was so happy we went on to win the title that year. They can both suck it.

 

Without You, BLUM is BLM.

 

Dennis Eckersley alone puts Boston at 22. Honestly one of the absolute worst I've ever listened to.

 

Straight garbage juice.

 

https://www.mlb.com/press-release/astros-television-broadcaster-todd-kalas-to-miss-start-2020-season

Astros television broadcaster Todd Kalas to miss start of 2020 season
Kalas is asymptomatic after testing positive for COVID-19

 

Noooooooo!!!

Hoping he gets back soon.

 

Unacceptable by Kalas, this is a championship season and a short season, missing the first week, absolutely unacceptable.

 

Blum is better than Deshaies. They both made the broadcast fun and I admit this could be recency bias.

 

The last time Todd Kalas and Geoff Blum called a baseball game together off a monitor, they already knew its outcome. It was during the offseason that preceded the 2017 baseball season, and Kalas was auditioning in studio to succeed longtime play-by-play man Bill Brown and become Blum’s partner on the Astros’ television broadcasts. They did a mock broadcast of an old game, the sports announcer equivalent of a chemistry read in Hollywood. Their job — and life as we know it — was much simpler.

The long-ago experience is the only remotely comparable one they have to fall back on, however, as they prepare to call road games this season from AT&T SportsNet Southwest’s studio in downtown Houston. Like most everything else about baseball in 2020, the Astros’ broadcasts will be very different this year, especially when the team is away from Minute Maid Park.

Neither the Astros’ TV nor radio broadcast crews will travel in 2020, but both broadcasts will still operate remotely. On the TV side, Kalas, Blum and field reporter Julia Morales will call road games from their network’s studio. For the radio broadcasts, Robert Ford and Steve Sparks, as well as Francisco Romero and Alex Treviño of the Astros Spanish radio network, will broadcast from their usual booths on the press level of an otherwise-empty Minute Maid Park.

Home games will present a sliver of normalcy, as the TV broadcast, like the radio broadcast, will function out of its booth at Minute Maid Park for those. But it will be just that: a sliver. There will be no fans in the stands, at least to begin the season, and the games will be played amid a backdrop of piped-in crowd noise and music.

“I think that’s probably going to be the biggest adjustment at first at Minute Maid Park when we get started doing the game is going ‘Welcome in to Minute Maid Park’ and there’s not going to be anybody in the stands,” Blum said. “You’re not going to have that opening pitch roar.”

Blum spoke to The Athletic for this story last week, before he learned of yet another challenge facing the Astros’ Opening Day broadcast on Friday night and in an unknown number of subsequent days: Kalas won’t be able to join him on the call. While asymptotic and feeling well, Kalas decided to get a COVID-19 test last week. It came back positive. He’s quarantined at his home in Houston.

Kevin Eschenfelder, AT&T SportsNet Southwest’s studio host of the pre- and post-game shows, will fill in on play-by-play duties until Kalas is cleared to return. For all of the broadcasters, adjusting on the fly will be required throughout this wacky season. The productions might be a work in progress early in the regular season schedule while everyone adjusts to the new, crowd-less normal.

“Just in my personal style, I’ve a lot of times let a pitch or two go without saying anything in the past and kind of let the ambient sound of the broadcast carry the telecast. Because it’s a game that breathes, and I like to let the game breathe,” Kalas said. “But this year, if I let the game breathe and there’s no real crowd to fall back on it might not sound quite as good. So I’ve got to kind of adjust my style a little bit. And also on big calls, big moments, a lot of times I’ll just lay out after whatever I say at the beginning and then let the crowd carry the guy around the bases on a home run or a walk-off hit, and then this year that’s going to be muted, as well.”

The role of Morales will be another significant difference on this year’s TV broadcasts. Generally, during home games she is stationed in the camera well on the far end of the home dugout down the first-base line. But under MLB’s health and safety protocols, broadcasters and members of the media don’t have access to the field level this year. So, at least to begin the season, Morales will be in the otherwise empty visiting TV booth on the press level, which is next-door to where Kalas and Blum sit.

For this season, MLB has adopted what it has referred to as a “World Feed” model. Basically, because the home cameras are shooting for both the home and the road teams’ broadcasts, they must try to be neutral in their shots, like how frequently they’re showing the home and away dugouts. It’s expected to lead to fewer shots of the broadcasters directly addressing the camera, too, as those don’t necessarily fit the road broadcasts.

This dynamic plus the lack of field access for broadcasters in Morales’ position will likely lead to less on-camera time for Morales this season. But she will still very much be a part of the in-game conversations with Kalas or Eschenfelder and Blum, maybe even more so.

“I’m not really worried about that part, either. It’s more of just being a part of it and you being able to hear me,” she said. “Plus, I’m eight months pregnant when the season starts, so I’m not that mad about not much camera time, either. There’s that whole dynamic I decided to throw into 2020.”

Morales is due to give birth to her first child, a girl, on Sept. 28, the day after the regular season is scheduled to end. Back in the spring, she planned to work for as long as he could with the idea she would cut back on travel in favor of more studio appearances as her due date neared. She said she never really thought about opting out of working this season in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and expressed confidence in the safety protocols in place at both Minute Maid Park and at the AT&T SportsNet Southwest studio.

“I feel really safe,” Morales said. “I feel like from both sides of this I’m in a good spot to be safe and do my job and then deliver a healthy girl at the end of it.”

After Astros wins, Morales typically interviews a star of the game on the field. That won’t be possible this season, but there’s a chance Morales will still interview a player after victories from the booth, with the player wearing a sterilized headset or maybe with a boom microphone picking up his answers. Before spring training shut down, she sat down with 23 of the Astros players for 1-on-1 on-camera interviews that have yet to air. Those will be incorporated into the broadcasts, as well, along with clips from Zoom interviews.

The more daunting challenge for the TV broadcast will be calling the road games off monitors. They didn’t call Monday and Tuesday’s exhibition games in Kansas City, so the July 31 game in Anaheim will be their first attempt. All three broadcasters will sit at least six feet apart — as Kalas and Blum will in the booth during home games — and follow the action via the various camera angles provided to them by the opposing team’s regional sports network.

In addition to the program feed or the raw feed (which is the program feed without the graphics), the expectation is that the broadcasters will be privy to camera shots of each bullpen and an overhead view of the field, which will help with tracking defensive alignments and baserunners. “All of the above are very important parts of a broadcast,” Kalas said. “Who’s warming up? Who’s on deck? Who’s being shifted? If a guy hits a line drive, you kind of want to know beforehand if he’s hitting it at somebody or if it’s heading to the gap.”

Kalas said they’re calling it the All-9 view, a play on the All-22 coaches film used in football. It’s particularly important in an era when teams can shift their infielders on a pitch-by-pitch basis.

“That was actually my first question because in this day and age with everybody shifting a lot of what I do is watch where everybody sets up pre-pitch,” Blum said. “That was one of my biggest concerns, if we were going to be able to see where everybody was. I think the hardest thing is going to be if there’s a defensive substitution or if there’s a guy who comes out on deck to pinch hit, are we going to be able to visually see that or is somebody in the stadium on site going to be able to relay that information to us?”

On the radio side, Ford and Sparks got their first taste of remote broadcasting on Monday and Tuesday when they called the exhibition games being played in Kansas City from their booth at Minute Maid Park. They had a 55-inch monitor stationed between them and had two much smaller monitors in front of each of them. Any of the three monitors can be set to the program feed or to a screen split into quadrants with views of each bullpen and the “high home” overhead view. “The trickiest part for me is just going to be knowing when to look at certain monitors,” Ford said.

In many ways, the road broadcasts are at the mercy of the opposing team’s regional sports network, and the views the road broadcasters get could vary from opponent to opponent. There might be a play in question of which they aren’t privy to the camera angle that provides clarity. Or there might be instances of a long replay review during which it’s difficult to discern exactly what’s happening.

“My philosophy coming into this was just to be honest,” Ford said. “These two exhibition games, we made it clear that we were at Minute Maid Park and not in Kansas City. We even talked about (on Tuesday), (Zack) Greinke was throwing his sim game (at Minute Maid Park) while we were broadcasting. We didn’t do play by play of Greinke’s sim game, but we mentioned how it was going on while we were watching the Astros-Royals game on the monitors.

“I think it would be disingenuous and unfair to listeners to pretend that we are on location when we’re not, so I don’t plan on doing that. But obviously you want it to feel and sound as much like a regular broadcast usually does. I think we’ll be able to do that, after doing these first two games. It will take some getting used to. I’m glad we did these two games in Kansas City just to kind of get acclimated a little bit.”

 

Really liked listening to DeShaies back in the day, was bummed when he left. Would really be bummed if Blum left.

 

Yea losing him to a team like the dodgers would definitely be a Blummer

fk the Dodgers

 

**** I thought this bump was about one of them leaving. These two are awesome.

 

same.