| Description: | Few rational baseball-loving fans will disagree with me that the Fox Television network's vacuous announcing team of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, have done more to dissuade people from watching American Major League Baseball than all the revelations about player steroid use put together.
Thanks to a new $2.5 billion dollar contract that runs through 2013, the Fox Network has a serial killer stranglehold on Major League Baseball broadcasts that not only forces us to watch the Buck/McCarver nightmare during the playoffs and World Series for the next five years, it blacks out all major league games on Saturday afternoons. Except, of course, the Fox Saturday Game of the Week. So if you're looking to watch a ballgame game on Saturday afternoons, pretty much give up any hope of watching your favorite team unless you live in New York, Boston or LA. Instead, you can prepare for the Fox broadcast by drugging yourself with premium Walmart beer in cans, and hiring a large burly man to tie you down to your favorite chair. Now you're ready to truly enjoy the entire Fox broadcast offering as delivered by appropriately faux announcers.
That five year Saturday contractual death-grip has compelled almost every other team in baseball to play their scheduled Saturday games at night so as not to lose the local TV revenue they would otherwise receive for those games. Other than a couple of additional Fox back-up games, the net effect is to have all the rest of baseball tossed into the dumpster known as the Saturday dinner and prime time hour--the worst ratings period of the week.
Even in a business that has done virtually everything it possibly can to alienate every last American child who might still have some interest in watching Major League Baseball (like televising playoff and World Series games at night, with 11:30PM EST or later end times), the idea of not being able to watch your team on television Saturday afternoons is pretty special. A nod to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig in the immortal words of former President George W. Bush, "Heckofa job, Brownie..."
But that's not the worst aspect of Fox's National Pastime colonoscopy: the worst is the fingernails-scratching-a-blackboard announcing team of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck. Throughout their broadcasts, the Buck-McCarver monster is sure to have at hand a series of quirky and tedious baseball and, worse, non-baseball "personality" stories about every game day ballplayer; to be dutifully trotted out whenever a player gets a big hit or makes a good fielding play. These soul-killing, I'm-going-to-turn-to-the-QVC Channel moments are presented by Buck in his nasal, droning monotone delivery, or by McCarver, who often sounds like he recently wandered from an assisted care facility.
"You know, Tim, Chicago White Sox bopper Jim Thome, who just hit that homerun, not only hits balls out of the park, he spends his off season helping communities clean their local parks so kids can use them safely." Well sure, the poor little rug-muffins can't stay at home and watch their favorite baseball team on television Saturday afternoons, so they're running around urban parks littered with discarded condoms, unleashed pit bulls, and used needles. The little scamps pretty much need Jim Thome out there with a baseball bat just to protect them.
Oddly, there are occasions when I miss Joe Buck's insincere prattle--that would be anytime co-announcer Tim McCarver's mouth is moving. McCarver's favorite, and most embarrassing, gambit is to create an outlandishly different take on a common baseball situation. Apparently, McCarver's wants to make the typical Fox demographic viewer exclaim, "whoa.... dude, like I never thought of it that way.... I mean that is so rude it's, like, you know, way filthy rude".
An example of McCarver's inane "analysis in reverse" style would be something like, "Now, in this situation, it's actually better for B.J. Upton to get a walk rather than hit a three run homer..." Or Tim might pontificate, "Wow, that was a nice catch Dodger Matt Kemp made against the wall, but L.A. would be a lot better off if that ball had just left the park..."
To understand where this fluff falls on the silliness meter, simply apply McCarver's reverse-is-right philosophy to real life: "Florida resident Jack Simpson just picked the correct seven lottery numbers for a $47 million jackpot, but really folks, it would have actually been better for the Simpson family if Jack had only picked five correct numbers." Not surprisingly, there are hundreds of websites around the world solely dedicated to collecting McCarver's inane baseball quotes, one of my favorites being "Shut-up Tim McCarver.com".
So get used to Fox's forced enema approach to presenting Major League Baseball; until at least 2014, that's going to have to pass as a good time. |