review of Fox baseball announcers

Being so used to Jerry Remy and Don Orsillo, local Red Sox 'homers', or announcers that unabashedly have a slant leaning towards the good ole' home team, it was hard, really really hard, for me to listen to the dreaded Fox announcers for the Red Sox - Angels game on Saturday.
I must admit though, Thom Brennaman and Eric Karros did a fine job of the play by play. I really wanted to hate them, I really tried. When they mentioned Chone Figgins' steal in the third inning and said "That's Angels baseball right there," I wanted to believe that they were just another pair of Red Sox-haters. Another Chone Figgins moment came during the fifth inning, when he made a fielding error, and they said that it wasn't really a bad error, he was just "out of sorts." I think they were a little too easy on him, and had a Red Sox player made the error, the comment might have been a little more critical.
They had good banter during the lulls in play- they brought up timely issues such as Manny Ramirez's contract, and Jason Varitek's slump during their respective at-bats.What I did miss was precisely the excitement that a 'homer' brings to a game. During Kevin Youkilis' at bat, he hit a complete bomb, and instead of "Way back! Way back!" or a reference to "Yooouk," it was just "a home run for Kevin Youkilis.
They brought up J.D. Drew's excellence so far this season, lamenting the sore Boston fans who hate to admit it. They also brought up Manny's antics, and didn't refer to them as kindly as a 'homer' would. Though, one of my favorite quotes by the Fox announcers came during a Manny at bat, in which they referred to him as "one of the most cerebral hitters," which struck me as funny because Sox fans, and even Remy and Orsillo, often kind of brush Manny off as a spaceshot.
One thing I really didn't like was the fact that they brought up Eric Karros' stats, and compared them to Babe Ruth's stats. I thought that was a little ostentatious, and not really necessary or very funny.
In the fourth inning, they brought up the fact that Joe Saunders recently had a baby girl, then started reflecting a lot on the overall themes of parenting, and athletes in general, saying "baseball players are human beings first." I found their chit-chat pretty
interesting, and actually their insights were very smart. But, I realized after listening for a good 5 minutes, that I had no idea who was at bat, who got out, or if anybody was on base, because they did little to no interjections of on-field action. Good thing that they were broadcasting on television, and I could just look at the field to see what was going on. At the end of the fourth, they had to cut off their banter, and brought the audience up to speed by a quick "Beckett has shut them out 2-0 through 4."
Their on field correspondent, Ken Rosenthal, did a great job as well. He interviewed the Red Sox pitching coach, John Farrell, in the third inning, and he asked good questions, nothing too fluffy.