Why does every sports fan have to listen to the same television broadcasters? In an age when options are said to abound and the long tail is supposed to offer more opportunities than ever before for companies to attract broad audiences, televised sports seem intent on constraining the average fan's ability to enjoy the broadcast of their favorite team's games.

For every much ballyhooed "wild" move in the broadcast booth (ESPN's hiring of Tony Kornheiser), turn on virtually any major sports telecast in the country and the variety of voices occupies a truly limited range. It has gotten to the point where the youngest announcers are so bland you hardly even know they're there. That's fine, I guess, but their very blandness threatens to run them out of the broadcast booth itself. If ClayNation can listen to you for three hours and afterward not remember a single word you were saying, were you really talking at all?

Why do you think my generation records so many games on DVR? I'll tell you, because we don't miss anything at all by fast-forwarding through all the talking. If we can simulcast games in Spanish, Tagalog and Cantonese, why can't we have a feed that's directed toward people in our own age groups?

If you want announcers with postures so stiff and anecdotes so strained that you remember nothing of what you hear, choose that option. But if you want entertaining, clever and fun announcers, then give me an opportunity to make that choice as well. Networks spend a ton of time wringing their hands about the decline of young male viewers. Yet they do absolutely nothing to appeal to young male viewers when it comes to sports.

For example, I don't know a single person my age who wouldn't tune in to hear Sacha Baron Cohen call the World Series as Borat from Kazakhstan, especially if you paired him with Tim McCarver without letting McCarver in on the joke. But will we ever hear anything other than a bland call of the World Series? Nope.

Sports are entertainment, yet most announcers today are completely devoid of any traits at all that are entertaining. Listening to the serious broadcasts of sports today is like having Walter Cronkite broadcast the Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament. Plus, these announcers treat each moment of the game as if it's two minutes to D-Day. For most people, sports is an escape from regular life, not an additional stress.

Yet listen to most broadcasts, and you'd think whether a team makes a stop on fourth-and-1 will end up saving humanity from the Apocalypse. And don't even get me started on the former players who treat football as if it is the most complicated invention in the history of mankind. "E=mc2, forget it, we're talking about a defensive coordinator having to decide whether to bring in five or six defensive backs," they'll say. Complication redefined. By the end of the game, you'd think football coaches have some of the most complicated jobs on the face of the earth instead of some of the least. Guys, it's football, and while the nuances of the sport may have strained your intellectual capacity, I'm pretty sure most of your viewers can handle it.

The ultimate result of having such bland announcers is that young sports viewers such as myself simply aren't going to listen. We're going to start a game an hour late and watch it in less than an hour on our DVR because you can watch every play and not miss a single interesting or entertaining sentence.

Worst of all, national announcers like Steve Lyons are now getting fired for saying things that are not the least bit politically incorrect. At a time when we need to allow people the freedom to speak freely, we're constraining them even more. Have we finally reached the point where we don't even know what politically incorrect speech sounds like anymore?

Here is a transcript of what Lyons said: "Lou's habla'ing some Español there, and I'm still looking for my wallet. I don't understand him and I don't want to sit close to him now." The wallet line by Lyons was an odd reference to Piniella's equally odd analogy of getting offensive production from A's shortstop Marcu Scutaro on consecutive days being like finding a lost wallet on consecutive days.

Wow, I have never heard such incendiary, insensitive and over-the-edge commentary. Give me a break. Lyons could have stood on a street corner in East Los Angeles screaming these comments and no one would have even broken stride, much less taken offense. Everyone would have just thought he was another crazy white dude (which he is). Yet now he's been replaced for being politically incorrect? Once more we'll dive into the circle of announcing blandness and banal mediocrity. Hooray, hooray. It makes me long for the days of my youth when Harry Caray was soused by the seventh inning.

________________________

Discuss this and any other column deadlyhippos.com column at our message board.