SF Giants announcers take top spot in local MLB broadcaster rankings

The SF Giants' television broadcast crew led Awful Announcing's reader poll for the fourth time.

SF Giants fans believe that they have the best broadcasters in baseball. A poll from Awful Announcing agrees.

For the fourth time in six editions of the poll, the Giants TV team of Dave Flemming, Duane Kuiper, Mike Krukow, Shawn Estes, Javier Lopez, and Hunter Pence finished first among all 30 teams. The Giants also topped the poll in 2014, 2017, and 2018, and have never finished worse than second.

The poll's methodology is simple: Each broadcast team gets a letter grade between A and F. One reason the Giants' broadcasters ended up first with a score of 3.41 (is that technically a Grade Point Average?) is that they received just nine D's and nine F's, less than five percent of their total votes.

Here's what Awful Announcing wrote:

To the surprise of no one, the Giants claimed their fourth crown in six polls. This year, Duane Kuiper and Mike Krukow did it with their third-highest score ever, continuing an incredible run as baseball’s most loved local broadcast team. Next year, they’ll be favorites to finish at the top once again, despite another season in the books.

The duo of "Kruk and Kuip" has been doing Giants games together for 30 years, since Kuiper returned to the Giants in 1994, after a one-year hiatus with the Colorado Rockies. That's longer than most marriages!

Informally, they've been announcing games since they became Giants teammates in 1983. When Krukow wasn't starting, the two did their own "profanity-laced broadcasts" in the dugout, without the benefit of a production team picking out interesting fans for them to riff about.

A fan got picked up on the hot mic voicing his... GREAT displeasure for a pitch called a strike at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

Duane Kuiper: "I kind of agree with them."
Mike Krukow: "I can't argue with them." pic.twitter.com/nWgJiGddoZ

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 24, 2023

The Giants have had remarkable continuity with their broadcasters. Jon Miller has been there since 1997. Flemming still feels like the new guy, despite being in his 21st season with the team. That kind of history and chemistry among the broadcasters makes it easier for charismatic former Giants like Lopez and Pence to shine as color commentators.

The New York Mets' team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez finished second, while the San Diego Padres, the 2019 winners, finished third. Of course, we know that's mainly due to having analyst Mark Grant, who was a Kruk and Kuip teammate in 1984 with the Giants.

It's no surprise that that Oakland A's dropped from 9th place in 2019 to 29th this year. That'll happen when the play-by-play guy uses a racial slur on the air, and the team owner aggressively alienates the entire fan base of a club on pace for baseball's worst record in six decades. Grab some pine, Glen Kuiper!

No one needs to validate the Giants broadcasters' excellence, though it would be nice if Kuiper finally won the Ford C. Frick Award. But it's still nice that an unimpeachable authority like an internet poll confirms what Giants fans already know: Their telecasts are the best in the business.