Basseball and ESPN (Guest Appearance by Soccer and the Europeans)

Rating:  0

 

The rating is for ESPN's baseball coverage, which is the worst I have ever seen.  Yes, if you go back in the archives, you will see that the rating also applies to ESPN itself.  I only watch anything on ESPN when I can't see it anywhere else (like a football or baseball game only being carried on ESPN).

 

However, it is getting difficult.  I spent the first 12 years of my life in Arkansas.  That means I grew up with Harry Carey, Stan Musial and the St. Louis Cardinals.

 

Now it is just a GAME, and there is no real, logical reason to root for one team over another (especially in this era of player mobility,  but the principle really is independent of trashing modern, money oriented sports).  Is anyone's life really changed by their team losing a baseball game?  Now there is a certain existential satisfaction/pain in being a Chicago Cubs fan, without a championship since 1908.  But that has more to do with the experience of being a fan, than with the game or the team.  In the end, that is what it is really all about.  Being a fan is about the FAN, and not about the team.

 

Regardless of the lack of logic, I have remained at least a mild St. Louis Cardinal fan throughout my life.  Thus, I tend to watch a St,. Louis Cardinal game on TV, even though watching baseball on TV is just a few steps above watching golf or soccer (NOTHING is only one step above watching soccer, including watching grass grow).

 

I made the mistake of trying to watch the ESPN Monday game featuring the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Milwaukee Brewers.  I say "tried", because that coverage was NOT about the fan.  It was not about the game.  It was about the ESPN people in the booth (typical of ESPN).  For several innings, you got more pictures of the people in the booth than you did of the game.  You definitely did not get any COVERAGE of the GAME.

 

What you got (I could not make this up) was an interminable "interview" (while the game was going on) with the Brewers' GM, and the Cleveland Indians GM on the phone (after phone glitches, taking the place of coverage of the GAME as they were addressed ON AIR, were corrected).  I guess it was the GM they were talking to.  WHO CARES?  Each respective GM was not evenasked much about his TEAM.  What the ESPN people were obsessed with were the MECHANICS and psychology of the recent trade whereby the Brewers acquired a major pitcher from Cleveland.  Even after the "interviews" were over, the people in the ESPN booth spent another TWO INNINGS discussing the "ins and outs" of this trade.  Give me a break.  I definitely needed one.  Thank God for commercials.

 

Meantime, there was a GAME going on (even it if it is just a game, and not fundamentally important to any fan's life).  The ESPN announcers paid no attention.  They rarely even noted the count--occasionally looking up to note the RESULT of a player's at bat.

 

It was not that this was a 9 to 0 game where air time had to be filled--knowing most people had given up on the game.   This was an EXITING game, not decided until the 9th inning.  You would not know it from the coverage.  Note that all of this "filler" coverage, featuring the BOOTH, was NOT between innings.  Heaven forbid that they should miss a chance to do a commercial.  They went away for a (blessed) commercial every half inning, only to return to the SAME, interminable discussion.

 

Nope.  It is the WORST coverage of a baseball game I have ever seen.  I give it a "zero" rating only for lack of a lower rating to give.  The only competition comes from ESPN coverage of other games, by the way.

 

It boggles the mind that ESPN is still around.  No one would miss it, so long as the games themselves were covered elsewhere.

 

P.S.  That stuff above about it being merely a game does NOT apply to FOOTBALL.  That would be heresy.  As all real men know, football is not a game.  It is a RELIGION (certainly more important than that sham religion of "global warming").  One of the many virtues of American FOOTBALL is that Europeans, and other effete snobs, insist that the "real" "football" in the WORLD is "soccer", and that it shows something deficient about the American Character that we have adopted this violent, fake "football" over the real "international" game.  My take is that this PROVES that we don't need approval from Europeans, and the rest of the world, for what we do.  That they prefer soccer over American football shows how INFERIOR and BENIGHTED they are--their opinions not worth considering on any subject.  That is why American leftists fell such an affinity with Europeans, even though real LIBERTY came from, and was defended by, teh Unted States of America (not by Europe or the rest of the world--albeit our former parent, Britain, lent a hand).  (I am aware that soccer is probably even beigger in South America than in Europe, but it came from Europe.)