Giants announcers take top spot in MLB broadcaster rankings

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.