A step in the right direction for TV baseball

John Smoltz will join Joe Buck as Fox's primary
baseball broadcast team in 2016.

Fox is revamping its primary baseball broadcast team, and there are two pluses for the fans.

• Harold Reynolds is out, replaced by John Smoltz;
• It will be a two-man booth.

Joe Buck will remain the play-by-play guy, and other than the fact that he's on record as preferring to call football games, that's OK. There are better play-by-play announcers, but Buck's a pro.

I'm a little sorry to see Tom Verducci bounced, but my regrets there are mainly theoretical. He might do well in a two-man booth, but he was stuck splitting time with Reynolds, and nobody was going to shine under those circumstances. Reynolds will drag anyone down to his inane level. And Fox simply isn't creative enough to break out of the the "we gotta have somebody who played the game in the booth" mold.

The big thing, really, is just two voices. Two is better than three. Heck, one is better than two, as illustrated by the career of Vin Scully. I'm sure no broadcaster wants to call all nine innings as a solo voice, but there are few broadcasts that wouldn't be better with less babble about the evils of the pitch count. (This is particularly true of Fox Sports North's crew.)