SHELL GAME
TV's dramatic flourishes obscure facts and treat viewers like naïve marks
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 2106 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 Shep- ard 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?