Don’t, since the demise of the glorious Channel 5 baseball coverage ( come back JG and JC ) I have had to put up with day old ESPN highlights on Setanta at midnight.
Sound down, beer in hand.
I don’t know to cheer or not that Setanta have gone bust and ESPN have snaffled up one third of the Premier League live footie games.
Who in the name of sanity are they going to pick to present them?

Rory—that’s hardly a nit!  Thanks.  I was so caught up in my rant that I completely confounded the score.

I don’t know; she likes Family Guy more than baseball, so this rant may actually have been counterproductive for me.

I think her rule still holds, however: I can get it if and when writing about baseball becomes my full time job and thus disappearing down the baseball rabbit hole every evening is at least arguably justified. I can’t say I blame her for taking such a position.

I have MLB network, and watched Sandy Koufax shut out the Twins in Game 7 of the ‘65 World Series.

Here, Here Craig! I haven’t watched an ESPN baseball broadcast since the fateful day when Steve Phillips explained to me why Carlos Beltran was the worst baseball player/human being in history.

In fact, I have consciously tried to avoid ESPN in general since baseball is my favorite sport and they actively try to ruin my enjoyment of it. They have mostly lost a viewer in me and I hope that their continued mistreatment of the national pastime costs them more ratings.

I don’t even mind that stuff—at least not too much—on the studio shows. At least those are supposed to be venues for talking about games.  The booth, however, should not be turned into a talk show.  It strikes me that every ESPN-broadcast game comes prepackaged with “storylines” for discussion by the announcers, often with only a tangential relationship to the game.

How about this: discuss the game on the field. If the game on the field inspires another topic, great, but let the damn game lead, OK?

Sutcliffe and Phillips in the same booth?  Did that make four people trying to get their words in edgewise?

Craig:  We can both agree that the standard ESPN baseball hosts are not something that “hardcore”/knowledgeable fans find appealing, but in your own words, ”I am among those who will watch baseball under almost any circumstances.”   Because of your (our) passion for the game, the attrition risk of your respective fan segment is quite low.

I believe ESPN is more of a marketing company than a sports news company.  They make money by catering to the casual fan who is just learning, for example, why OBP > AVG.  ESPN has a responsibility to their investors to create a product that generates more ad revenue, which is accomplished by hooking the casual fan with overly clichéd catch phrases, stories about who ARod is dating, and highlighting how Manny sells used grills on ebay.

And finally to my question…If you were to switch your perspective to that of a casual fan, is the Phillips/Sutcliffe combo entertaining?  Perhaps the casual fan will get bored without partially relevant asides.  Perhaps they don’t have the desire to learn that Russell Oles (really cool middle name) Branyan’s hot first half is mostly a result of a .363 BaBIP.  While I believe that my barking dogs can be a comforting change of pace from Phillips/Sutcliffe, I also have the self-awareness to understand that my perspective is unlike that vast majority of those across the country also tuning in to my favorite sport.

Leo:  Many. I’d say most of the play-by-play guys I hear, be it on ESPN, local and RSN networks and radio broadcasts do a pretty good job.  They convey the info, they have pleasant enough voices, and they usually don’t get in the way. 

There are even many color commentators who do OK.  This may be shocking, but I think Joe Morgan is fine. Not because he necessarily brings anything to the party—he’s demonstrably wrong about so many things—but at least he doesn’t actively distract fromt he game. His voice is relatively low key, and while his points aren’t necessarily germane all of the time, he keeps them succinct.  The key is that, unlike Phillips and Sutcliffe, Morgan knows he’s not the show.

That said, I think we could eliminate most color commentary from baseball broadcasts and be just fine.

John_Michael: I see what you’re saying, and I’ll think about it some more, but I have a hard time seeing even casual fans finding these guys entertaining.

I couldn’t abide Phillips and Sucliffe last night either, but for me, rather than switching to Family Guy, I wandered over to ESPN2 and watched the College World Series game.  Sure, it’s metal bats, but it was a great game.  And hey, the announcers were all right.