Baseball Like It Shouldn't Be

There is nothing more exciting than October playoff baseball.   And the best way to watch it is with a ticket to a stadium.  Luckily, that includes me. Because the rest of you are relegated to watching it on television with what is now perhaps the worst coverage ever.

It used to be so much better but, then again, you can say that about mostly anything.  In the olden days, you didn't have to look far to far the baseball playoffs on television.  NBC and ABC alternated year to year with one covering the early rounds and the other doing the World Series.  Easy peasy and you could rely on having the likes of Al Michaels, Vin Scully, or Tim McCarver behind the mike.  Of course, NBC and ABC can't be bothered any more, thinking that they don't want to disrupt their viewers' expectations of seeing the next episode of "Superstore" or "Black-ish."

As a result, all the rounds of the playoffs got carved up among a bunch of networks.  This year, you can find baseball on Fox, Fox Sports 1, ESPN 1, ESPN 2, TBS, TNT, the MLB Network, and probably even the Cartoon Network.  As a result, you can never find the game you want unless you do an hour-long scroll through your on-screen program guide.

Once you arrive at your designated channel, you are greeted by either a pre or post game show with expired baseball stars who stopped making any sense when they stopped making their millions.  Plus the in-game announcing squads are clearly on top of some teams and woefully behind, information-wise, on other teams.  For me, only Fox' Joe Davis (from the Dodgers) and TBS' Ron Darling are stand outs.   The rest totally forgot to do their homework.   

Yep, the networks are mostly all bad.   But not equally so.  Because, as long as TBS continues to touch postseason baseball every October, they will always be the hands down winner for worst coverage all around.     

Hmm.  Where do I start?   How about the in-studio reporting which prominently features former pitcher Pedro Martinez, who has such language deficiencies that you fondly remember the late Bill Dana's old "Jose Jimenez" routine.  Trying to figure out what Pedro is saying is akin to listening to Charo read the Book of Psalms.

During the game, TBS has inexplicably reduced the now-important scoreboard bug into mosquito size so you literally have to squint to see how many outs there are.   After watching TBS for two innings, I literally had to drop some Murine into my eyes.

Now if I could only find something to fix what was going into my ears.  As a Dodger fan, I could not believe the number of informational points the TBS clowns got wrong.  Of course, they also sport among their announcers the now-requisite female voice whose commentary was so insipid that she may have wandered in from a Beverly Hills 90210 rerun.

Trust me.  TBS should be nowhere near a baseball playoff game ever again.  Instead, the network should stick to doing what they do best...running endless reruns of "Friends" on a loop.

Paging Lindsey Nelson....

Dinner last night:  Leftover chicken with prunes and olives.