2008 Woodie Awards
Baseballs and McCarver need to stop talking
Dave Bartlett
Issue date: 10/13/05 Section: Sports
|
And besides, Fox holds the rights to most of the playoff series this year, including the two league Championship Series and the World Series.
This is really too bad, because if you're a person who loves baseball, Fox is probably the bane of your existence.
Fox's motto seems to be, "If it's obvious, let's state it" and "If we state it, let's do it in a really abrasive manner."
The prime example of this is Scooter the Talking Baseball. For those who have thus far been able to avoid this monstrosity, which seemingly was born in between the fourth and fifth layers of Hell, this is Scooter in a nutshell:
Imagine that person you hang out with who screams and yells during inappropriate situation-especially in an instance when everyone already knows what is happening. He probably wears a backwards baseball cap, right? Sometimes he gets so excited by something stupid that he can't even articulate his argument, choosing instead to point at the thing and make noisy, unintelligible sound effects.
Got that? OK, now imagine if this guy was a talking baseball with googly-eyes.
This is Scooter.
Fox will unleash Scooter two or three times a game, which is two or three times too many. Scooter enlightens the viewing audience by making informative observations such as "a slider goes zip-zippity-zowy!!!"
All the small children who stay up until midnight to watch playoff baseball must love this abomination. All six of them.
While Scooter is certainly irritating and ill-advised, ultimately he (it? What pronoun does one even assign an androgynous talking baseball?) does not detract from the overall game.
The stunt Fox pulled during the last weekend of the regular season, however, did.
A Saturday, Sept. 30 game broadcast locally featured a hard-fought battle between the Red Sox and the Yankees. A Red Sox loss meant they would not win the American League East pennant this season.
High drama was unfolding across television sets in New England and New York.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox were playing a game with implications for the Red Sox as well. Had Cleveland lost the game (which they did), they would not have forced a one-game playoff against the Red Sox to decide the fate of both teams.