Baseball Announcers Phrases example essay topic

When I first started studying Homeric poetry, I was quickly introduced to the work of Milman Perry, who finally unlocked the key to the "Homeric Greek" which was not like any spoken Greek. The oral storytelling of the Homeric bard consisted of telling a story that had specific plot elements, points that had to be worked into the story, and episodes of a certain length. But the bard was able, in his presentation, to orally improvise as he told the story, by combining certain stock phrases together with original material. These stock phrases helped the oral bard stay within the (strict) confines of the poetic meter of Home rian poetry by giving a set of building blocks to help construct the tale in real time as it was being told.

I found this concept to be unusually familiar, because I had been listening to baseball broadcasts on the radio for years before I ever studied Homer in any detail. Baseball announcers have almost the same job to do: tell specific action on the field, and improvise a running commentary the entire time, within episodes of fixed length (innings). They are both constrained to tell what is happening in the game and free to improvise. Like the Homeric bards, baseball announcers have a set of stock phrases which they use, on an instinctive level, to weave their improvised web of the game's events. While not constrained by meter, as were the bards, baseball announcers' phrases have an English rhythm. This is likely true of all sports, although because I am most familiar with baseball I stick to that sport.

Basketball is similar, although since the game moves so fast the announcer must use a smaller vocabulary of short, specific phrases to describe the action, and has less room to improvise. While the action is never the same, the vocabulary of stock phrases is concise, short, and limited and must quickly and closely follow action on the court. In football, there is too much going on during a play for the announcer to even begin announcing it all, and his job is mostly to filter the action down into a real-time stream of description. Football, perhaps, is a game which does not translate well to the non-visual medium of radio, just because it is difficult to imagine 22 men in their formations and their movements during a play. Baseball's stock phrases come in several varieties. One aspect of the game is filling "dead" time, when nothing is happening, and this "dead" time is sometimes the most interesting as announcers get to talk about various things related (sometimes marginally) to baseball.

They fill this time with different things, but the process is highly structured. In all cases, announcers generally prepare a lot of "filler" information for a given series (2-4 games) between two teams, and use as much or as little of it as time permits. They work it in in an ad hoc fashion as the action permits. While this material is fixed in its amount, it is inserted into the storytelling, or announcing of the game, as time and circumstances permit.