We’ve gotten to the point where we talk about sports announcers almost as much as the games themselves.

How many times has a buddy told you they muted a game or even shut it off because Tim McCarver was calling it? When was the last time you and your friends let out a collective groan when Dick Vitale’s dome has been shining under the hot TV lights (or started panting when it was Erin Andrews)?

Ask a football fan about John Madden and you’ll get just as strong of an opinion as if you asked them about Matt Cassel or Ed Hochuli. There are Web sites devoted to announcers, their gaffes, hyperbole and biases. The larger newspapers in the country have columnists whose only job is to critique them.

Give a guy a microphone and a loud blazer and you’ll regret it almost immediately. They talk too much. They’re redundant. They spend too much time kissing Derek Jeter’s or Brett Favre’s or Kobe Bryant’s rear end. They focus on meaningless and/or manufactured storylines instead of what is actually happening on the field.

Announcers have always been annoying, but if it seems like it’s getting worse, it is. Part of the reason is the sheer volume of sports on television these days. We’ve got more networks covering more games and hiring more announcers to cover those games than any of us could have imagined 20 years ago. When you’ve got sports on the air 24 hours a day, you’re going to have more mistakes and more unqualified people behind a microphone.

But we’re not standing around the water cooler talking about the guy calling the Northwest Arkansas A&M vs. South Carolina Valley State game on ESPN 12. We’re talking about the big-name guys, the so-called personalities who get the big network contracts and the endorsement deals on the side.

So many of these announcers have become bigger celebrities than a lot of the athletes they cover, with quirks and trademarks that are as identifiable as Manny Ramirez’s dreads or Tiger Woods’ fist pump. This isn’t anything new. Harry Caray, Howard Cosell and Johnny Most were all personalities who were bigger than the games they covered. Lindsey Nelson was known for his technicolor sports jackets. Don Meredith sang country and western songs during Monday Night Football.

Yet these personalities, Chris Berman being the most blatant example, come across as more manufactured and forced these days. That’s because the networks believe, mistakenly, that they need to cultivate these personalities to get viewers to tune in.

And this is why all I can ask for now in a game broadcast is to have announcers who don’t try to make the game about them. I can accept mediocrity so long as I don’t have to listen to shtick for three hours.

NESN’s Don Orsillo is a perfect example of this. Five or six years ago, the Red Sox had one of the best play-by-play men in the business in Sean McDonough. They squeezed him out, probably because he wanted too much money, and replaced him with McDonough-Lite in Orsillo. It ticked me off at first, but all thing’s considered (and having watched other baseball broadcasts through my MLB.tv subscription), it’s clear we could have done a lot worse.

If you watch and listen closely to Orsillo, it seems as if he’s calling the game off the monitor 90 percent of the time. He leans on statistics and media notes far too often and engages Jerry Remy in actual baseball discussion far too infrequently. But he has a good set of pipes and he doesn’t try to impose an Announcer Boy routine over the broadcast. Now that Remy has cut back on the promotion of his Web site and other RemDawg-related tangents, NESN’s Red Sox broadcasts are at least tolerable, and certainly preferable to the usual alternative, which usually either includes McCarver or the mind-numbing Joe Morgan.

It’s those national nitwits (add Tony Kornheiser to the list) that make me appreciate the relative quality we have to listen to among the Boston area teams. The Red Sox radio team is sharp when it’s Joe Castiglione and Dave O’Brien, although native Mainer Dale Arnold leaves a little to be desired when he fills in.

The Celtics have solid voices on both the radio and television sides, although Tommy Heinsohn’s homerism and Cedric Maxwell’s quacking can get a bit grating on the ears. Jack Edwards is OK and Andy Brickley is terrific on NESN’s Bruins telecasts (Confession: I haven’t listened to a B’s game on the radio since Bob Wilson left).

Gil Santos and Gino Cappelletti are the weak link. It didn’t used to be that way. At the top of their game they were about as good as you could ask for on the radio. A lot of Pats fans I know used to tune out the network announcers and turn up Gil and Gino, but now they make far too many mistakes, to the point of distraction.

They’re not the first announcers who have stuck around too far past their prime (Dick Enberg and Pat Summerall, who used to be two of the best ever, are the saddest examples). It’s kind of funny that announcers are the first ones to point out when an athlete has hung on too long but the last to know when it’s time to step away from the microphone.

Not that the old guys can’t still get the job done. Vin Scully is 112 now and still the best baseball announcer around. He’s one of the few household-name announcers who didn’t let being synonymous with his sport make him lazy. Isn’t that right, John Madden?

So it’s probably no coincidence that most of the top-knotch announcers today are the ones your mother-in-law has never heard of, such as ESPN’s Dan Shulman, hockey legend Mike Emrick and Bob Papa, who, proving there is a God, is replacing Bryant Gumbel on the NFL Network.

The more games they do, the less I’ll be pushing the mute button.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]