The homicide detectives on “The First 48” frequently remind suspects that “There’s no such thing as coincidences.”
I tend to concur. Consider that since the summer day in 2022 when Vin Scully died at 94, he now must look down from his ethereal, misty broadcast booth to ask, “What the heck happened?” Has common sense and good faith toward listeners and viewers been eradicated or simply degraded?
Televised live sports events have now been flooded with hand-picked, overpaid and relentlessly annoying voices that either believe or have been coached to believe that the louder they holler — at anything, anytime — the more audiences will enjoy both their presence and the view.
And hurry back for more.
It’s a matter of sustained and escalating bad faith: Don’t believe what you saw, believe what you’re told you just saw. And swallow the hype. Executive producers now rely on audiences arriving and spending three hours with their Moron Modes set to high.
TBS’s lead baseball voice, Brian Anderson, has never been special. He has leaned toward tolerable, which these days is fine.
But this postseason, as if on orders or coincidence, he has chosen to holler at every batted ball, strikeout and grounder to second. Anderson’s sugar-high, occasionally hysterical guesswork-infused play-by-play simply hasn’t matched what we’ve seen, thus we’re eventually provoked to ask, “Who does he think he’s fooling?”
Among many others, Anderson brings to mind what was said about Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. After learning to play the violin, Holmes would perform drawing room recitals. A friend’s review noted “surprising industry and a satisfaction out of all proportion to his achievement.”
In Game 2 of Guardians-Yankees, Anthony Volpe advanced to third from first on an Anthony Rizzo single to deep right-center. Anderson credited Volpe for “kinda dekeing” the outfielder into thinking he’d stop at second.
But there was no deke. Volpe just ran first to third. The outfielder made a bad, low bouncing throw back to the infield.
Fox’s lead MLB play-by-player, Joe Davis, twinned with dreary pitch-spin pathologist John Smoltz, has seen and dished the spectacular in every pitch. In the final game of the Padres-Dodgers series, won, 2-0 by Los Angeles, Pads pitcher Yu Darvish had just struck out Shohei Ohtani. Davis: “First inning but could be one of the game’s biggest pitches!”
It was the bottom of the first, Ohtani was leading off. It was Darvish’s sixth pitch of a 0-0 game. Yet the absurd hype had already begun to an audience that knew it was in for a long night of Fox’s Davis-Smoltz A-Team at the faulty hands of network execs who long ago proved that they don’t know very bad from far worse.
Of course, there’s no network more reliably and clinically out of touch with sports than all-sports ESPN.
Saturday’s SEC Network/ESPN South Carolina at Alabama game was the kind of telecast that wins national TV Sports Emmys — even ESPN’s crookedly self-bestowed Emmys — because it was a close game, ’Bama won by two, despite an insufferably bad production.
Play-by-player Joe Tessitore, another ESPN discard from “Monday Night Football,” showed up in full Gus Johnson mode, eager to growl and shout after every play. He, too, apparently figured it was time, as a matter of modern self-survival, to play the transparent hype game.
His analyst, Jesse Palmer, stayed in his ESPN character as a relentless blabbermouth, eager to speak scrolls of post-play genuine pigskin gibberish until his standard excesses were lost as background noise, like the leaf-blower next door.
Vin Scully gave us the best 67 of his 94 years. Almost everyone in the business saluted, admired and eulogized him as the best in the TV and radio business because he knew and practiced the difference between the two and that it was a fool’s mission to try to fool an intelligent audience.
They admired his greatness, yet chose to become everything he wasn’t and refused to be.
Two and a half years later, Scully’s not only gone, his immaculate, less-is-much-more, we’re-not-stupid style has been deemed by network bosses to be unacceptable.
Finally: Would Vin Scully, the elegant Voice Emeritus of Baseball we came to cherish, be hired today? My guess: Not a chance.
Four pressing questions for fall
Question 1) Who adopts more phony regional or cultural accents to play to their audiences? Kamala Harris or Stephen A. Smith?
Q 2: As seen in TV ads during the MLB playoffs, who is less funny, Will Ferrell or Kevin Hart?
Q 3: Why did Carlos Mendoza start Kodai Senga in Game 1 vs. the Dodgers when Senga was so clearly unprepared to pitch in any game, let alone a big one?
Q 4: Why has it taken 10 years of dubious analytics for baseball media to begin questioning why managers have become so reliant on half-inning-each relievers as opposed to sticking with the one who just made 1-2-3?
Reader Charles Legoff: Fox should rename its MLB studio show, with David Ortiz, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, “The Jeter and the Cheaters Show.”
Meantime, Ortiz, “Big Greedy,” has joined the legions who have sold his name, image and presence to TV ads suckering young male adults into losing their money gambling on sports.
As for Rodriguez’s presence on ESPN and Fox baseball, he keeps hitting the exacta: Expensive and worthless.
And while we’re at it, ESPN and ESPN Radio’s Disney/ESPN shopping catalog regular, Mike Greenberg, is now pitching ESPN Bet parlays, the biggest sucker bet among them all, which is why, due to their bad odds and bad payouts, are sold so hard.
Go get ’em, Mike! I’ll be happy to book your parlay bets!
A real MLB leader would suspend dirty-mouthed Dodger
Dodger Kiké Hernandez’s proudly profane response on Fox was not exactly spontaneous. In fact, before saying that the secret to this team’s success is based on “not giving a f–k,” he asked Q&A man Ken Rosenthal, “Are we live?” After Rosenthal said they are live, Hernandez, the jerk, went as low as you can.
But not so low that it met with commissioner Rob Manfred’s silent approval. Despite countless opportunities to sanction and/or suspend players for their public incivilities — sending a firm and lasting message — Manfred, who claims “kids are MLB’s top priority,” did nothing we know about to try to restore some class to The Game.
Imagine the across-the-bow warning shot Manfred could have fired at all if he had courageously represented the best interests of The Game by suspending Hernandez for the next game.
Or at least sent him to bed without his supper for acting like a childish, foul-mouthed reprobate on national TV.
But Manfred’s active sense of stewardship and legacy is adding Nike “City Connect” uniforms — tradition-stomping, street-cred clown costumes — for fools to purchase. He just keeps kicking the trash can down the road as continuing evidence of his leadership.
