Roman Mars writes as an introduction to his show:

If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. It sometimes means they fake it.

I highly recommend you listen to the episode and. It’s only over five minutes and it is incredibly interesting.

Prior to that, I always assumed that sound was recorded directly from the field. It is not and it is in fact a bit more tricky than that.

Trust me. You want to know.

(via @leeunkrich)