BOB THE TRUTH BUILDER
Costas shows the on-air honesty woefully missing
OLD DOG, no tricks.
Bob Costas, trending done at NBC, called MLB Network’s Thursday night NLDS Game 1 of Braves-Dodgers, and soon reminded us that he remains what he always was: someone with too much regard for baseball to lie for it.
Early in the MLBN telecast, Costas said that though it’s still early in L.A., this playoff game is well attended but well short of a sellout.
That brought to mind the NBC Sports days when imperious, “plausibly live” Dick Ebersol ruled the kingdom, back when deceiving viewers — suckers — was a top priority. NBC promos would lie about World Series starting times by 30-45 minutes.
So when Costas, now 66, hit the air in the lengthy unadvertised pregames, among the first things he’d report is the actual time of the scheduled first pitch. He wasn’t going to mess with his integrity or ours.
And it was Costas, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, who first, in the late 1980s, put a suspicious TV voice to the unnatural feats he and we were witnessing: sudden sluggers of all ages in suddenly musclemassed bodies hitting, 50, 60, 70 home runs.
While most of baseball’s broadcasters celebrated these remarkable overnight feats, it was Costas who hinted that whatever’s going on carries an inescapable stench. It made no natural science sense.
In fact, many team and national baseball broadcasters still avoid mentioning the steroid era, pretending they didn’t know and still don’t know, thus viewers couldn’t possibly have known, thus still don’t know what went on during the watch of fast-tracked Hall of Famer Bud Selig.
So what seemed like a small and perhaps insignificant observation from Costas on Thursday served as a reminder that he’s a different kind of team player — he still plays for
our team. And as if in concert with Costas’s presence, MLBN’s telecast provided an unfettered view. There was no K-Box to distract, obstruct and confuse. All we could see was a baseball game. Can’t imagine anyone erupted in despair over its absence.
One other thing that seemed special, or at least different, Thursday night was the postgame work of Fox field reporter J.P. Morosi.
The Brewers had just beaten the Rockies, 3-2 in 10 innings, in another of those bullpen roulette numbers (12 pitchers, 19 strikeouts, 11 hits, 4 hours), when Mike Moustakas lined a two-out, 0-2 pitch single to right.
On Adam Ottavino’s first 0-2 pitch, Moustakas, a lefty batter, swung and 99 percent missed. He tipped the ball off by such a tippity tip off the end of the bat that the ball rolled to a slow stop in the opposite batter’s box.
That wasn’t lost on Morosi, whose first question to Moustakas was, “What kind of deep breath did you take when that foul tip was not caught?”
Moustakas laughed and said, “I turned back and saw that I got another life!”
Thus Morosi disregarded the Sideline TV Reporters’ Field Manual, which instructs the reader to ask, “How important was it for you to win this game?”