Whither the Causal Arrow?

Fangraphs has produced, based on "crowdsourcing" a.k.a. a survey of their readers, a ranking of all 30 Major League Baseball teams' television announcing crews. Notably, the Mets team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez, and Ron Darling, plus Ralph Kiner and Kevin Burkhardt, finished second. One would be tempted to mind that they're not first, except that the #1 spot was reserved for Vin Scully. No complaints there. But here's the interesting thing, aside from the fact that the Mets are awesome and the Yankees, ranked #22, suck: the rankings are decomposed into "charisma" and "analysis" factors, but these two scores were extremely well correlated. Extremely well as in R-squared value of 0.88. The scales were out of five points, and the biggest gap between the two sides of the ranking was 0.6 points, despite the gap of well over 2 points between the best rankings and the worst rankings. So clearly people aren't really separately evaluating charisma and analysis, or if they are, then those two factors must not really be two separate factors.

Their explanation is that, the more charismatic a broadcast crew is, the more forgiving we're willing to be about their analysis. Or perhaps we just don't care about good analysis so long as we've got charisma to enjoy. But I think it's much more likely that the link runs the other way, at least in large part. The number one thing that makes me find a certain announcer or broadcast team unpleasant to watch is poor analysis. An enormous part of the reason why Gary, Keith, and Ron are so brilliant an announcing crew is that they are such insightful baseball analysts. Now, sure, they're also a colorful bunch of characters, and that's part of the fun, too. But if they were just as colorful but complete idiots when it came to talking about the substance of the game, I don't think I could stand them. Poor analysis, in other words, places a very low ceiling on how charismatic you can find a broadcast team to be.

Also, Gary, Keith, and Ron are awesome.