Effectively Wild Episode 30: Is There Racial Bias in Baseball Broadcasting?/What to Make of Brian McCann

Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2012

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben and Sam question the conclusions of an article in The Atlantic about racial bias in baseball broadcasting, then talk about whether Brian McCann’s best is behind him and whether his down year is the result of bad hitting hitting or bad luck.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening and good morning and welcome to effectively wild the daily podcast from Baseball
0:16.4	Perspectus. It is Tuesday August 28th and we are recording the 30th episode of our show. In Long Beach,
0:24.9	California, I am Sam Miller and in New York City, yawning into a $100 microphone. Ben Lindbergh has
0:32.1	interrupted his preparation of tomorrow's column to speak to me and to you all. Ben, how are you doing
0:38.6	today? Great. I'm going to try to sound as chipper today as I sounded yesterday. And you give me a lot
0:44.7	of credit thinking that I'm already working on my column. Thank you for that. Well, that's promising.
0:52.8	Do you have a topic you would like to speak about? Yeah, I would like to talk about the study or I
1:00.2	don't know that I would call it a study. Already the claws are out. The article in the Atlantic yesterday
1:10.4	about race or nationality and the way that broadcasters talk about players. And I'll be talking
1:19.1	about Brian McCann, but we can probably just tack that on to the end of what will surely be a
1:23.8	spirited discussion that gets us both into trouble. Why don't you tell everybody about the study
1:29.0	that is perhaps not a study? Okay, I don't know how spirited it will be because it seems based on
1:34.8	our brief pre-show conversation that maybe we both agree on this, but maybe we will find a way
1:39.7	to disagree and make it more interesting. The article that came out yesterday, it basically
1:49.7	studied the way that broadcasters describe players for a week worth of games and sort of tried to
2:01.9	identify the intangible terms or the terms that broadcasters use to describe players' intangible
2:09.3	talents. And it came to the conclusion that there was some bias or some preference towards
2:18.5	using certain terms for certain players. The takeaway was Latino players are almost 13%
2:26.4	less likely to be praised for intangibles than their white counterparts. Announcers are nearly
2:31.3	14% more likely to praise a US Canadian born player for intangibles than they are their international
2:37.4	counterparts. So this came out and it got picked up a bunch of different places,
2:45.8	linked more or less everywhere. And the conclusion seemed to be that this was maybe a
	...

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