Play Ball!

It's baseball playoff time. This is my time of year. It's a good year to be a Yankee fan, even though we lost today. Sometimes sports officials become in dire need of shock therapy, especially baseball umpires, and even though the strike zone changed like the integrity of a soap bubble on a windy day, it's no excuse for today's loss. A-Rod had a tremendous opportunity to earn his keep, but failed... AGAIN. I had a feeling we were going to lose after the game got rained out last night. Just one of those feelings, I guess. We never play well in unscheduled day games. It just throws off the whole rhythm. It happens. No biggie. We're not getting knocked out by Detroit. Never the less, when you're the highest paid player in the history of organized sports, you come through in the clutch when the bases are loaded... PERIOD... No excuses.

I'm glad we got Johnny Damon. He's the best addition we've made since Gary Sheffield. Thankfully Hideki Matsui is back to playing regularly. He really broke his wrist badly back in May. You could see on the footage how abrupt it was. They had pins in his wrist and all. He broke it in May but didn't come back till the last week in September and he's a professional athlete. I broke my wrist when I was a kid and I was throwing baseballs in under 6 weeks, and I was the fat kid. Still, it didn't look as bad as when Jeter dislocated his shoulder back in 2003. That was just flat out ugly. He turned purple...

Which brings me to the subject most pressing in my mind. I really hate the Fox network. Between their blatant news bias, their irresponsible local news coverage, and their hiring of ignorant baseball announcers, it really makes me sick. Their national news channel is nothing but republican propaganda, and their local news in the NYC metropolitan area is a tabloid show at best. They've taken every last shred of journalistic integrity and completely wiped their asses with it. But that doesn't bother me as much as it probably should. I just find my news elsewhere.

What really rubs my rhubarb is their baseball coverage. If I were grand emperor of planet earth, I would make it so that Joe Buck would be incessantly tortured 21 hours a day for the next 40 years. He announces both baseball and football, and they need to keep his ass at the football games. Football and baseball are two completely different sports (thank you George Carlin). It's non-stop action. As an announcer, all you have to do is turn your brain off and regurgitate what you see, and he's barely capable of even that. But when he covers baseball games, I wanna set my own hair on fire. He has absolutely NO insight on the game, and even less personality. That fake smile makes me want to knock his fucking teeth in. He's barely capable of regurgitating whatever irrelevant statistic the dipshits in the Fox booth can get their hands on. Which, by the way, are statistics no one gives a good god damn about. No one cares what highschool the rookie went to, outside of the 50 or so hometown "friends" who are watching. And not one single solitary soul gives a fiddler's fuck about what kind of pie is his favorite. It's fake sentiment masked quite poorly as an attempt to care about the average person. It's a marketing ploy used to generate revenue. It's fake, it's transparent, and it's fucking obscene. The network executives have absolutely no interest in the good of the game. Their only concern is how to market other people's passion for our nation's pastime in order to turn a quick and tidy profit. The fact that they chose Joe Buck to spearhead their baseball coverage is more than enough evidence of this. His lack of basic baseball knowledge, common sense, and his ignorance of which plays are important to the future of the ongoing game is sickening. And this plan of attack to market playoff sports is just flat out retarded, anyway. It's playoff sports, for crying out loud! People are going to watch no matter what you do. You couldn't piss away more time and money if you were hyping the second coming of Jesus Christ. In order to profit on sports, all you need to do is hire competent people. That's it...

A few years ago, before Fox had (in their own little moment of fucktardery) decided Buck was the best they could come up with, I used to dislike Tim McCarver's coverage because of his bias against the Yankees. You can't help which teams you like or don't like. You are who you are, and that's great. We need more individuality in society. But I believe, if you're a national baseball announcer, it's your job to look at both sides of the game equally. Obviously if you're employed to cover local teams, you're going to slide a bit more to whoever is paying you. You'd hardly employ a Mets fan to cover Braves games. It's just the way the world works. But these games, and the regular season Saturday games are covered coast to coast. It's your job to be magnanimous.

Tim McCarver just needs to grow a pair. He should fire whoever is in charge of his career and hire someone who can market his potential. I've had mixed feelings about his coverage of baseball throughout my life. I appreciate his playing career, and his knowledge of the game and its strategy, although I do find myself disagreeing with him often, but that's fine. He's a National League player, and I'm an American League fan. This the way it's supposed to be.

When I was a kid, Tim McCarver was covering the Mets, and even though I'm a Yankees fan, I'm also a fan of the sport of baseball. Don Mattingly will always be my favorite player, but it was great to watch players like Mike Schmidt, Gary Carter, and Ozzie Smith. So as I'd watch the Mets, I liked the way McCarver called the games. I learned about the game, and although he's no Mel Alan, or Phil Rizzuto, I appreciated hearing the point of view from a former player. He seemed to genuinely enjoy what he did. Well years go by and times change, and he resurfaced on the Fox network where he appeared reluctant to be there, almost as if he was screwed somewhere down the line by some other network or something. It's just the impression he gave me. He seemed unhappy when covering American League games, almost jealous when the Yankees won their 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 World Series championships, and to be perfectly honest, that really doesn't bother me. You can't help the way you feel. And as a lifelong Yankee fan, all you ever hear from the rest of the free world is how much the Yankees "suck". They "sucked" in the 80's when then didn't win ANYTHING, and they "sucked" in the late 90's when they won EVERYTHING. Now they "suck" because they have A-Rod, or Johnny Damon, or Jason Giambi, or whoever. Who cares? I'd just rather listen to someone who at least acts like he wants to be there, but what do I know?

Mr. McCarver needs someone who's willing to work with him, not some retard who's more impressed with the fact that he's announcing an important game than is actually motivated to do it. Not to mention Joe Buck has one of those hour-glass shaped midget heads, as if someone tied a belt around his head at the temples so the top of his skull would take on a mushroom effect.

Just give me a competent announcer when I have no other choice but to watch whatever horse's ass in a shirt and tie you can teach to hold a microphone. Where are the great announcers of today? Jon Miller, Bob Costas Jim Kaat, Vin Scully... These are great announcers. They have a command of the game, and the English language, I might add. Bob Uecker, who was a pretty bad catcher and an even worse hitter that played for the Braves, Phillies, and Cardinals, is a great announcer. He has knowledge of the game, and a personality that makes you want to hear what he has to say. Jack Buck (Joe's father), who announced for The Cardinals since before my parents were born, was one of the greatest announcers of all time. I realize the greats (Jack Buck, Howard Cosell, Mel Allen, etc.) are not only gone forever, but irreplaceable. We need someone who loves the sport they're announcing for. In my opinion, not as a Yankee fan, but as a fan of the sport of baseball, Bob Costas is the best man for the job. He's the only baseball fan in broadcasting who's not covering a game, and that's a crying shame. Someone hire him!

So there you have it. That's the problem with baseball. Joe Buck... lol... but not just Joe Buck. It's every empty head behind Joe Buck and every other announcer like him. I say it's about time for the pendulum to swing the other way