Courtesy Ventura County Star

(March 27, 2009) The Dodgers have hired Eric Collins to do TV play-by-play for road games east of the (Colorado) Rockies that Vin Scully doesn’t travel to. The hire was expected after the team said Charley Steiner would do radio full time in 2009.

Collins, 39, was NBC’s lead baseball announcer during the Beijing Olympics and he has also called college baseball games for ESPN. His only major league work is occasional stints for the Chicago White Sox in 2004 and 2008.

Collins will work with Steve Lyons on KCAL (Channel 9) and FSN Prime Ticket while Steiner and Rick Monday will air on radio.

Quite frankly, if the Dodgers were going to hire another play-by-play man, they should have put him on radio and had Steiner do TV. At least this apparently means we’ll no longer hear Monday doing play-by-play.

Personally, putting Collins with Lyons on TV means I’ll be hearing someone I don’t know and someone I don’t like. On top of that, Collins lives in Chicago and it figures that’s where he’ll stay since all of his work for the Dodgers will be done in the Central and Eastern time zones. How will Dodgers fans take to an announcer who isn’t even based in Los Angeles?

But I shouldn’t totally trash Collins without giving him a chance. The Lakers, after all, hired Spero Dedes as a complete unknown to do radio a few years ago and he’s grown into the job and done very well.