baseball telecasts are being ruined (games, women, MLB, White Sox)

[Aldous9]

Originally Posted by paulsonj72

Then get your butt in the booth and try it. Not as easy as it looks

So, we should never criticize bad announcing? We should not criticize badly produced sporting events?

I'm watching game four of the ALCS right now on FOX. It's the bottom of the 3rd inning and Joe Buck and Tim McCarver are interviewing Justin Verlander. They aren't even paying attention to the game. And neither is the camera. It's on Verlander most of the time. Buck is now asking Verlander about his fantasy football team.

We're supposed to just put up with this crap? I want to watch the game. Players and managers should not be interviewed during the game. This interview with Verlander took up the whole bottom of the inning.

[Mike from back east]

I hate the constant flicking from facial closeup to facial closeup to catcher's crotch signals to facial closeup.

We get it that modern video cameras can count the pores on a player's oily nose and see the bubbles in their spit.

I really don't want to watch a player re-doing his batting gloves after each and every pitch, especially for a long at-bat. Nor do I care to watch Jonny Gomes twerk his batting helmet 4-8 times between EVERY pitch; the guy needs an analyst for OCD issues. Isn't there something more interesting on the field to see?

I'd like to see a few entire plays from the perspective of a guy in the front row of the upper deck right behind home plate.... all the players in motion on a ground ball to the infield, etc. We can see all the closeups during the replays between batters. You'd think that the "professionals" in the control rooms could figger that out for themselves.

Too many closeups, not enough field-of-play shots. It's claustrophobic to watch baseball today.

[mco65]

I don't know about you guys but I mute every game these days, be it baseball, football or whatever. Actually I don't mute racing because the information you gain from the announcers can be critical. but for most sports, i simply mute the announcers.

There are a lot of distractions on the screen these days. I am not a big fan of most. I used to keep score with my own book but now I don't have too.. I miss that sometimes..

[Grandstander]

What I find most annoying is the banal, bland quality of the interviews. Seldom is anything said which you could not have predicted and the majority of the players have decided that they are most comfortable delivering recycled cliches. There are a few players who can be amusing, a few who attempt to go beyond the standard babble, but these are the rare exceptions. It doesn't help that the questions are typically vacuous, especially the all purpose "How does it feel?"

[Velvet Jones]

Originally Posted by Aldous9

Baseball telecasts are being ruined by the following:

- sideline reporters. Don't need them. Worst offender? Erin Andrews.

Hey, the sideline babe on NESN is hot as hell. That is about the only reason I can tolerate a NESN broadcast. The color guy has the most annoying Boston accent I've ever heard. But overall I agree, they add little to the coverage.

[Milwaukee City]

Originally Posted by Velvet Jones

Hey, the sideline babe on NESN is hot as hell. That is about the only reason I can tolerate a NESN broadcast. The color guy has the most annoying Boston accent I've ever heard. But overall I agree, they add little to the coverage.

Well can we get a name?

[sskink]

Originally Posted by Grandstander

What I find most annoying is the banal, bland quality of the interviews. Seldom is anything said which you could not have predicted and the majority of the players have decided that they are most comfortable delivering recycled cliches. There are a few players who can be amusing, a few who attempt to go beyond the standard babble, but these are the rare exceptions. It doesn't help that the questions are typically vacuous, especially the all purpose "How does it feel?"

Bull Durham - Cliches - YouTube

[chickenfriedbananas]

Baseball and other sports are turning me off because of their insistence of putting them on pay-tv networks. I know that in this day and age, it seems trivial - most people have expanded cable or satellite, but I'm a hold-out. I understand that this is how the networks have to support their new sports networks like Fox1 or whatever, but I don't want the cable bill jacked up to watch a new network which will probably have only 5 percent of its programming worth watching.

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by sskink

Bull Durham - Cliches - YouTube

Love that clip!

I've told my wife scores of times that all sports interviews sound the same, the same lines and cliches, like:
- We gotta bring our A game
- We didn't bring our A-game
- It is what it is
- We're only focused on the next game
- We got a great bunch of guys
- They're always tough to play
- We came to play

[Grandstander]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

- We gotta bring our A game
- We didn't bring our A-game
- It is what it is
- We're only focused on the next game
- We got a great bunch of guys
- They're always tough to play
- We came to play

"We're not thinking about what the other guys are doing, we're just going out there and playing hard for nine innings and taking it one game at a time."

"I just went up there looking for a pitch I could hit and put the bat on it."

My personal favorites are "Giving 110% percent" and "...staying within ourselves" which one often hears in the same interview. That of course raises the question of how one may stay within himself if he is already 10 % beyond himself.

Managers are always trying to put a good spin on some wretched outing by one of his pitchers..."Soandso had good command and velocity today, he just lost concentration on a couple of pitches, I haven't lost confidence in him."

Then there are the utterly vacuous ones such as "There is no "i" in "team." Okay, so what? There is an "i" in "win", there is an "i" in "victory" and there are two of them in "idiot."