Watching sports on TV is great — as long as you don't have to listen

I was reminded last weekend why I rarely watch any kind of sporting event on television.

One reason is that I can get just a little too involved with it. You should've seen the look I got from the dog as I squealed when the Ravens got their touchdown. And again when Lamar caught his own pass.

The other is "color commentators."

Now if I were a regular consumer of TV sports, I suppose I would be accustomed to the nonstop narration coming from these mostly disembodied voices.

But as I am not, I kept wishing they wouldn't feel the need to fill any silence by stating and re-stating the obvious and just let us watch the action as it unfolded.

Sometimes, silence really is golden.

I realize, however, they are not paid to be quiet and therefore feel the need to keep talking, no matter how inane the comments inevitably become.

Merriam-Webster actually has an official definition for "color commentator," to wit: "a person whose job is to make interesting comments on a radio or television broadcast about the things that are happening in a sports contest."

One assumes "interesting" is the operative term here.

I won't name the commentator who was most annoying to me, as I apparently wasn't alone in my disdain — he's already been pretty badly burned by lots of other writers.

But when you utter nuggets like "in games like this, the ball matters more than any game" and declare that every other play is the greatest play you've ever seen, well, you leave a lot of people scratching their heads and wondering how it's possible you get paid nearly $1 million a game for that.

You seriously don't want me calling your football games, but even I can exclaim "oh my gosh, that is … amazing!" every 10 minutes.

Although in his defense, that Lamar Jackson catch was pretty amazing.

But if you saw it, you probably don't need to be told.

There is an obvious alternative to listening to this babble, and I did exercise my control over the volume. But there were too many diagrams and graphics I didn't understand without some explanation, so I reluctantly turned it back up.

So in that sense, I suppose, the commentators earned at least a portion of their gargantuan salaries.

But I put their prognostications that the game was virtually over at some point in the third quarter (although that actually turned out to be true) in the same category as declaring the presidential primary season over after New Hampshire. Would it really hurt to let people hang onto hope for a little bit longer? Just sayin'.

I remember listening dejectedly to the radio as my high school football team was losing a state championship game while the broadcaster — whose voice we all knew from the local station but who rarely called a game in any sport — repeatedly told us that if that last play had gone differently, "it would've been Katie-bar-the-door for the Blue Eagles!"

Well, that helped.

There's a long history of commentary over sports commentary; a native Marylander actually started a website called "Awful Announcing" in 2006 for just that purpose. But mostly I heard it from my late father, who found Dennis Miller's short-lived gig with the NFL to be particularly offensive.

Come on, Dad — who doesn't want to hear a discussion of epicurean philosophy during Monday Night Football?

And we won't even get into the statement by a Fox sportscaster that she "made up" stories when working as a sideline reporter. (Short and sweet: No, that's not OK.)

Will it change? Not likely. Sportscasts without sportscasters would never work, and frankly it's hard to say what might tumble out of our mouths if any of the rest of us were put in that live action situation. It's unavoidable, I suppose, that senseless statements would spew out at some point.

But when it gets to be a pattern, it gets tiresome pretty quickly.

And so I rarely watch until the playoffs. I didn't even catch the Ravens/Steelers backyard brawls this year — which wasn't a bad thing, as it turned out.

Even when I'm watching, I have my limits. I watched last week's game to the bitter end. But if there's one thing I find more difficult to endure than agonizing commentators, it's agonizing interviews with athletes (who, in their defense, are there to play ball, not talk to the nation).

So when the immediate post-game interviews began, I switched over to my mainstay.

PBS.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Color commentators can spoil the fun of watching football