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Originally Posted by Inner Dirt
Only watched one card, Saratoga has never been kind to my wallet, also with my cell internet during peak hours videos take forever to load, it seemed lowering the resolution didn't work as they stayed at HD. I just watched to get an opinion on John Imbriale 2022, I figured since I believe he is no longer a spring chicken his skills could have declined, I think he is still fine.
I do think what track announcers a person likes is just sometimes a personal preference. I always liked Alan Buchdahl, yet he never seemed to get any long term work, I first heard him as the back up at Santa Anita in the late 70's early 80's.
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As I recall, Buchdahl was the announcer at Oak Tree and started very, very young in the mid-1970's. He also backed up Harry Henson at Hollywood Park. At the time, SA and Hollywood very much saw themselves as competitors, and around Fall 1982, Hollywood Park fired Henson and offered the job to Buchdahl, who then worked the 1982 Oak Tree season while Oak Tree looked for a new announcer. They found what they were looking for in a young announcer from South Africa named Trevor Denman, who came in to work the 1983 Oak Tree meeting and the rest was history.
But Marje Everett (the owner of Hollywood Park at the time), I guess, decided she didn't like Buchdahl so well and replaced him with Jim Byers. After that, Buchdahl has worked on and off as a racecaller but never on as big a stage as he had at Oak Tree and Hollywood Park (he called several of John Henry's races, for instance, and Landaluce's last two starts).
FWIW, I remember Santa Anita featured Buchdahl on the interview program it used to run on KDOC-56 locally sometime in the late 1980's, and he said he actually found day-to-day race calling something of a grind, though he missed calling the really big races. So maybe that has something to do with him not having a long-term gig as a racecaller- you really have to love the day to day grind.
