In terms of TV, baseball and the 60-year history of Major League Baseball’s exclusive national deals, it would be difficult to overstate the significance of what occurred this past Thursday, and what lies ahead.
This season, for the first time in over a dozen years, America will be able to tune to a big-league Sunday night baseball telecast on ESPN without an overwhelming sense of dread.
It wasn’t so much that ESPN’s new “Sunday Night Baseball” crew — Dan Shulman, Orel Hershiser and Bobby Valentine — debuted on Thursday, calling a Tigers-Braves game in Florida. And it’s not that this threesome is certainly promising. That’s largely irrelevant.
It’s far more a case of this season, starting this past Thursday, being free, at last, of Joe Morgan, who every Sunday did more to wreck baseball telecasts than what could reasonably be asked of a mortal.
Morgan truly was uncanny, extraordinary, a modern marvel. No one working any sport ever provided more convoluted, protracted, strained and nonsensical analysis. His ability to provide full, detailed, eyewitness accounts of events that never happened was another specialty.
And no one was more accomplished at ignoring live pictures and slow-mo replays to have us instead believe what he told us just happened.
Moreover, he could read every player’s and manager’s mind; he knew exactly what they were thinking. Morgan was the only man with the ability to note a team’s infielders had shifted to double-play depth — with two out.
Thursday on ESPN, a remarkable era officially ended. No one could destroy a baseball telecast — trample it to an early death — the way Joe Morgan could, and did. And he did it for years, every Sunday night on ESPN. He never disappointed. Never. In the annals of bad TV, nobody did it better.
Frazier’s calming ‘energy’ always comedic
Just the way Walt Frazier
says things makes me laugh. Friday, moments after the Knicks lost a close one at home to the lowly Cavaliers, Frazier calmly captured it with: “And all the energy has gone out of The World’s Most Famous Arena.”
Speaking of the Cavaliers, have you noticed the media reflexively attach certain words and expressions to last place teams, thus the Cavaliers aren’t merely in last place, they’re “mired
in last place.”
And, as West Coast reader David Distefano
correctly asserts, baseball broadcasters are no longer allowed to refer to big innings — when three, four, five or more runs are scored — as “big innings.” They now must say that a team “put up a crooked number.” That one has spread like a rash, a walk-off rash.
Oh, and networks continue to tell us that their halftime shows are coming up — at halftime.
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On ESPN, Saturday, Louisville had a three-point lead with 11 seconds left, but Rick Pitino
chose to not foul the dribbler. West Virginia hits a 3 to tie, and Louisville eventually loses the game. We’ve seen it dozens of times, yet coaches, high school through the pros, with three-point leads, continue to allow opponents 3-point shots.
Much the same at the close of Long Island University’s NECÂ tournament win against Central Connecticut. LIU, with a three-point lead, gave CCSU a clean shot at a 3 with 3 seconds left instead of pursuing and committing a pre-shot foul. Crazy, no?
But there’s a lot I don’t understand about basketball. The Heat, for example, have three superstars, yet over and over wind up taking the same 3-point shot with two seconds left on the shot clock that they could have taken with 18, 12 or 6 seconds left on the shot clock.
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Reader Henry Blaukopf
wonders if the NFL-NFLPA negotiations would accelerate “if both sides had to buy a PSL to sit at the negotiating table.”
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Isn’t that nice? The St. John’s Red Storm wore its Nike-issue, street-cred black uniforms for Senior Night.
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John Sterling
, Saturday, after mocking the media’s “billion” takes on what Joba Chamberlain
‘s must do to succeed, offered his
take on what Chamberlain must do to succeed.
No live Broadcast Coverage
Golf, the Game of Honor: One could have watched an hour straight of NBC’s Honda Classic PGA coverage yesterday and not known that it was on tape, that it was long over, that Rory Sabbatini
was the winner.
By the time “recorded earlier” finally and briefly appeared, Sabbatini could’ve been home asleep. NBC figures its “plausibly live” (intentionally deceptive) Olympics coverage should be applied to everything.
And the latest “Say this/Cash checks” endorser is Davis Love III
. For years, Love was synonymous with Titleist; he played and sold Titleist clubs and balls and was well-paid for it.
That he has switched to endorsing Bridgestone is noteworthy. But that he appears in Bridgestone ads taking some implied shots at Titleist, as if he endorsed products that hurt his game, all these years, is pathetic.
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Checkout Counter: MLB Network, tonight at 8, presents No. 11 in its series, “MLB’s 20 Greatest Games” — the 1978 “Bucky Dent
Game” at Fenway. Dent is in studio and gives a fascinating account of the at-bat, which became a long one after Dent fouled a pitch off his leg, was treated by the trainer, then switched bats.
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Reader Richard Monahan
makes a good point: As long as MSG Network wants to promote its simulcast of “Boomer & Carton” as a show filled with fun and hilarity, why present promos made of clips from the show that, “not only aren’t funny, but you can’t even tell what the attempt at humor is?”
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Who puts the Me in Megalomania? The nerve of the NBA to schedule a Nets game from London that preempts Mike Francesa
‘s show on a Friday afternoon! His Highness continues to rack up power points for having the gall to speak self-aggrandizements into a microphone that few would dare whisper to themselves.