Science! Proves That Hawk Harrelson Is More Biased Than Every Other AL Broadcaster Combined

Today is probably a good day for the other sports to drop bad news. Maybe announce some NCAA sanctions, or failed steroid tests. Everything non-scabby is completely under the radar, so it would have been lucky timing for the White Sox broadcasting team to be selected as far and away the biggest homers in all of baseball. I say "would have been," because duh, we knew that already.

The Wall Street Journal watched one game for each MLB broadcasting crew—a home win, in each case—and totaled up the number of "biased comments" made. That included referring to the team as "we," "us," or "our," as well homey nicknames for players, and any unrestrained celebrations. The full results are over at WSJ.com. What did we learn?

• It should surprise no one that the White Sox crew logged 104 instances of bias, blowing away the second place Indians, who had but 23. (Even that Cleveland number is inflated, since Rick Manning played nine seasons for the Indians, and should probably get a pass on the "we" stuff.)

• Beyond that, the senior circuit appears the more partisan, with 10 of the 15 most biased crews coming from the National League.

• The Midwest is more tolerant of homer announcers. The top four teams, and eight out of the top 15, hail from either the AL and NL central. Meanwhile, the AL East has the least biased crews, with only the Orioles (with former O Mike Bordick) as an outlier.

• Only five teams—the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Dodgers, and Mets—recorded zero examples of bias. If you wanted more evidence that the best booths in baseball are Gary, Keith and Ron, and Vin Scully by his lonesome, there you go.

This is obviously not the most rigorous metric, nor a sufficient sample size. But the results fit well with what we expected, and confirmation bias totally isn't real bias, so...science!

How Biased Is Your Announcer? [Wall Street Journal]