Who won the game? It’s a ‘long’ story
PERHAPS it is because I’m hopelessly stuck in the 20th Century — digital content? I just learned how to use our toaster — it is more logical than it seems.
The third quarter of Thursday night’s Ohio State-Indiana game on ESPN ended at 11:15 — 15 minutes after “SportsCenter” was scheduled to start.
With work the next day, I guess we were expected stick past midnight to watch the end of a game played in the Eastern time zone.
Then there was Thursday night’s big, big Red Sox-Yankees game on Ch. 11, played to hundreds, likely thousands, of conspicuously empty good and even better seats.
The Yanks won, 6-2. Yet it ended in a nearly empty Yankee Stadium just before 11, a 3-hour, 45-minute 8 ½-inning game.
And given that neither the baseball nor football game was out of the new ordinary, my consistent time-of-night plaints are hopelessly antiquated.
Tonight’s regular Sunday night Red Sox-Yankees on ESPN has an irregular starting time of 7:35 instead of 8:10. Thus, a now-standard 3:45 game on a Sunday night would end at 11:20 instead of near midnight — provided it is an 8 ½-inning game. And I guess that is the new normal.
We know most TV networks lack the inclination, feel and common sense to rescue play-by-players from digging new-habit, silly-talk holes for themselves. Still ... Dave Flemming, who also calls San Francisco Giants games, did OK Thursday on ESPN’s Ohio State-Indiana. He seems to know the game, speaks it succinctly and refrains from shoving calls down our throats via our ears.
Yet, his disinclination to speak simple, practical, nuts-and-bolts football, instead choosing nouveau-hip expressions, sounded sorrowfully selfdefeating. When Ohio State QB J.T.
Barrett ran for 5 yards on first down, Flemming should have told us just that. Instead, he said Barrett ran for “positive yardage on first down.” We couldn’t help but notice.
When Indiana called a late first-half timeout as a clear matter of sound strategy, Flemming went with new-form, “They burned a time out,” as if it was a wasted time out caused by confusion.
Then there was the Indiana first down that became “a first-down that moves the chains.” Oh, that kind.
Put it this way: If Flemming and scores of other sportscasters, said such things in a room with friends watching a game, his pals would think he either had gone goofy or was performing a parody of a neo-hack sportscaster. So why speak that way to a national audience?