Why?
You’re at Wrigley Field on Tuesday night for the Rockies-Cubs wild-card game. It’s 1-0 Colorado in the third, one out, one on, a 2-2 count. What would you be watching at such a moment?
That was the moment ESPN left the field to again show us say-anything Matt Vasgersian, stink-proof Alex Rodriguez and pitching professor Jessica Mendoza chatting away in the booth.
Why is it that all-sports ESPN has no applicable sense of what it spends billions to televise? Why does ESPN wreck everything it touches with inane, expensive excess? ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” and Late Sunday Night Baseball are, by design, insufferable. The games are impediments to the telecasts; the telecasts are impediments to the games.
ESPN’s MLB coverage this week was an impenetrable, impassable obstacle loaded with inapplicable math, colorful stat images that looked like sonograms or smeared Doppler radar, endless dubious discourse and, as a matter of course, equally suspect analysis of every pitch and imagined “situational” strategy.
But what couldn’t be missed went unspoken: There was no strategy, none that made strategic sense. This was another MLB stickball game: Hit a home run or strike out trying. Over 13 innings, 15 pitchers totaled 29 strikeouts in the Rockies’ five-hour, 2-1 win.
Tuesday, Cubs manager Joe Maddon, previously seen on such a national stage trying to blow the 2016 World Series by removing effective pitchers, was at it again.
It was the same Monday, when he used seven pitchers — removing four after pitching well — to lose the division playoff game to Milwaukee, 3-1. Brewers manager Craig Counsell used five pitchers, thus there were 12 in a nine-inning, 3-1 game. But this, too, is what The Game has become. Only one side can survive illogical risk.
Sunday, when Dustin Johnson “found the water” at the Ryder Cup, NBC’s Gary Koch said, “You hear the cheers of the European fans.” He followed that with a chuckle. Why?
Koch, 66, recalls when the Ryder Cup was neither played nor promoted as a drunken holy war, not here or there. He knows that outside of a saloon, cheering a player’s failure was unfathomable — boorish, loutish conduct. Thus its current diminished status as a sporting event is funny? Or was he just pandering so as not to seem out of step with the march backwards?
And so another who can make a difference — those on TV can make the biggest differences — took a dive.
For all his media-bestowed entitlements, Tiger Woods is entitled to play losing golf. Yet Sunday, as he was about to fall to 0-4 in his Cup matches, NBC’s Dan Hicks suggested Woods had a good excuse: His Tour Championship win the previous Sunday was “extremely energy-consuming.”
Why insult us like that? Most of the Ryder Cup field had played in that big-dough event, including Francesco Molinari, who went 5-0 in Cup matches.
Sunday, after the Giants took a 7-0 lead against the Saints on a Sterling Shepard TD catch, CBS made sure to capture the rehearsed “natural enthusiasm” (according to Roger Goodell) end-zone skit as performed by Shepard and, surprise, surprise, attention-hog Odell Beckham Jr.
Soon, CBS presented video of Beckham and Shepard practicing that act before the game. These are important things for adults — professionals — to focus on prior to kickoff.
Next, CBS showed Beckham and Shepard still dancing, but on the sideline.
Why didn’t even one of those videos appear later, say, when the Giants were down, 33-18?
Why are those who can make a difference, TV people, so eager to treat us as fools in order to protect the fools? Why?
Is there an app for all Francesa’s mistaken decrees?
Who needs to buy Mike Francesa’s app when His Majesty, King of Megalomania, bestows his best stuff on the serfs for free?
It was another big week for Sitting Bull. Samples:
When caller “Eric in Short Hills” said Tiger Woods had been in drug rehab, Fransayso stopped him cold to twice say, “He never went to drug rehab,” dismissing the caller as a know-nothing.
Soon, Know-It-All must’ve been told from the inside what he was the last to know: Woods, last year, was in rehab after his DUI arrest while loaded with opioids. Did Francesa apologize? Fat chance. The heel just flatly said Woods was in drug rehab as if he’d never said anything to the contrary.
He’s also back to making his NFL picks against “special” lines that favor only him. Last Friday he touted the Cowboys laying 2½, when the opening line was 3½ then closed at 3 — a big difference from 2½.
But Francesa is special. He’s a pretend-we-don’t-know career victim of his own reverse kismet. The Cowboys won but, even at -2½, didn’t cover. They beat the Lions by two. Mr. “My Picks Have Value” is 4-8 for the NFL season.
And he’d be 3-9 had that “get it right” replay reversal in Sunday’s Browns-Raiders not gotten it dead wrong. But he knew that was going to happen.
Even if the Capitals beat the Bruins, 7-0, in the NHL opener, Wednesday on NBCSN, Doc Emrick was in the/my house.
After his deadpan crack that advertising is apparently designed “to increase revenue,” he seamlessly added, “It was 40 years ago, this season, when [side] board advertising began.” Only Emrick.
Also Wednesday, Ron Darling, top of the fifth of A’s-Yankees on TBS, man on first, none out, before a 1-2 pitch to Nick Martini: “There’s a big hole between first and second [with Luke Voit holding on Jonathan Lucroy].” Next pitch, a single through that hole.
Twisting statistics into damned lies
Stats Amore!
Wednesday, with the Athletics’ Blake Treinen in to pitch to right-handed hitter Giancarlo Stanton, Dennis Eckersley and a TBS graphic stressed that Treinen “has allowed just one home run to a right-handed hitter this year.” Given that Treinen had allowed only two homers — as shown moments before in another TBS graphic — the other, we suspect, must’ve been to a left-handed hitter.
Are third-down conversion stats important? Only when they are. The Seahawks were 0-for-10 Sunday, yet won 20-17 over the Cardinals, who were 5-for-12. Seattle made 19 first downs.
“Expert” media will never understand that games make stats; stats don’t make games!
The Yankees this week declared a new-Stadium record of 23 sellouts this season. Must be like John Sterling home run calls. So thousands of the most expensive tickets for conspicuously empty seats were purchased but never used, never sold and couldn’t be given away.
TBS play-by-player Brian Anderson, Wednesday on Luis Severino: “He’s 24 years of age. He was 23 when he was on this mound last year.”
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