MASN Offers an All Star Talent list O's and Nat's Baseball

By: Jim Williams
The Examiner

The Mid Atlantic Sports Network has put together an impressive roster of talent that will be covering Nationals and Orioles baseball starting March 3rd at 1pm.

The Orioles TV crew will be Garry Thorne long time ESPN voice on NHL hockey, MLB Baseball and college football. He will join Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, Buck Martinez and field reporter Amber Theoharis on all Baltimore telecasts. Jim Hunter will be part of the TV and radio team, Thorne is the lead play by play man with Hunter taking the lead when Thorne has a conflict with an ESPN event.

Hunter will join former Oriole Rick Dempsey for O’s Xtra. Tom Davis will serve in a co host capacity and many O’s fans will recall that Davis was a part of the HTS coverage of Orioles baseball.

On the Nationals side we will see Bob Carpenter returning for his second season with the team and he will be joined in the booth by another Hall of Fame pitcher, former TBS broadcaster Don Sutton. They will welcome field reporter Debbi Taylor who joins the crew from Sun Sports in Florida.

Nationals pre and post game Xtra will be hosted by long time University of Maryland football and basketball voice and beloved broadcaster Johnny Holliday. Holliday will be joined in studio by former major league player and manager Ray Knight the 1986 World Series MVP. He also is a former ESPN broadcaster now part of the MASN team.

This is an impressive roster of broadcast talent that MASN has put together and using both local and nationally known talent. Also the addition of in game reporters will add to the storylines that can be developed and is a very ambitious move by the young network.

Baseball fans throughout the mid Atlantic should be very pleased with the talent choices and it is clearly a major league staff at both ends of I-95.

One interesting sidebar to this is that Johnny Holliday was the Washington Senators pre and post game radio host back in the last two years of their existence. So it is nice to have him back in the rotation.

Finally MASN will not be doing any of the over 300 games in HD. This is due in large part to the lack of cable channel HD capacity at this point and there is hope that they can do all Orioles and Nationals games in HD for the 2008 season.

--