Since I know you have experience with this — what does a PBP guy who isn’t physically at the game add to the viewer’s experience? (PBP announcers in the booth spot things happening off-camera all the time, but they won’t be doing that from a remote studio, and I assume they won’t have the usual spotters assisting them either.)
In the context of a multi-person booth, the PBP guy is both a table setter and a link man in addition to a narrator and storyteller. I firmly believe that Eck and Remy would be lost without an O'Brien to steer them in certain directions - usually passively (by describing the scene in front of him and giving them words to follow and react to, but also by reading the out-of-town scores and telling stories of his own), but often actively (by asking them questions and bringing up new topics of conversation for them to pivot off of). Hopefully the PBP person is able to tell his or her own stories as well as introduce facts and statistics to the broadcast that fans at home might not know. Good PBPers will also be able to describe what they see in an artful manner that their audience will appreciate, and to convey excitement and enthusiasm to their listeners which enhance the experience of just watching the action without them. And if absolutely nothing else, all PBPers should at least be able to remind you who is pitching, who is at the plate, who is on base and who is making plays in the field, etc. - which you might take for granted, but which is still a skill which I promise you not every color commentator would be able to bring to the table, and which is absolutely necessary for the vast majority of fans who would otherwise forget who they're watching without those sorts of reminders. Very little of a PBPer's value comes from seeing stuff off-camera that the viewer at home can't see, in my experience; baseball is an exception to this general rule, but mainly because a commentator can track the flight of a ball and the positioning of runners and fielders simultaneously, and therefore has a better feel on how hard a ball is hit or how likely a runner is to score or advance than the viewer at home, not because he's seeing stuff off the edge of the screen in the normal course of action. (It's actually going to be weird to see how PBPers cope with being in a studio and not being able to track the flight of the ball...and I say that having pondered doing exactly this myself at the Tokyo Olympics, where I'm going to be doing all of the baseball and softball commentary out of a studio instead of at the ballparks in question. Particularly at first, as PBPers come to terms with not being at the games in person, you're going to hear quite a few home runs mistaken for medium-depth fly balls, and vice versa.)
I do 95%+ of my PBP work off-tube - i.e., off of a monitor rather being at the arena in person - and 95%+ of that work on my own, without a color commentator or other partner to keep me company. Lazy PBPers may not add any value, and can indeed add negative value if they don't have certain basic competencies, but I certainly think I add value to my broadcasts through the research I do, the statistical knowledge I bring, the "game awareness" I possess (which across various sports includes stuff like knowing the rules well and being able to interpret them, what it means for a team to have X timeouts remaining, understanding what different results in a game taking place concurrently will mean to fans of the game I'm watching, etc.), and hopefully the way I can convey drama and excitement to the viewer with my calls of dramatic and exciting moments. Because how good does a home run actually feel without a good home run call to accompany it? Probably less than you might imagine.
By the by, in this context you might be interested in briefly checking out my own set of baseball and softball commentary demo reels:
https://darrenkilfara.jimdofree.com/broadcasting/baseball-softball/Not that I think I'm the best baseball/softball PBPer in the world, but watch at least the beginning of the first few clips on that page:
1) At start of the solo demo reel at the top, watch the great defensive play by the Japanese second baseman - first on mute, then again with my commentary. Does my commentary (both during and after the play) add anything to the way you experience it, or the appreciation you have for it?
2) At the start of the second clip - featuring the only game I called at the Asian Games in Jakarta two years ago with a commentary partner - listen to my repartee with Hong Kong manager (and former Montreal Expos color man) Tom Valcke. I came armed with what I hope are a few facts, and I elicited an anecdote out of Valcke which I can't imagine he would have mentioned himself without me teeing him up.
3) Read the description above the third clip and then watch it (it's only 47 seconds long) - did my little jokes make you chuckle at all? Did I segue out of the joke and back into describing the next play seamlessly?
I was there in person for all of this commentary, but I think these points are universal, both for in-person and off-tube commentary. O'Brien may not be the best PBPer in the business - I'm not passing judgment on him - but I certainly think you'd miss him greatly if he wasn't there and you were to just have Eck and Remy to listen to.
