Tag Archives: baseball
TBS Announcers to Tweet During Postseason
The Major League Baseball announcing crew over at TBS will be using Twitter to provide extra insight into the network’s coverage of the 2009 baseball post season.
During TBS’ coverage of the Division Series and the National League Championship Series all announcers’ tweets will be made available on the network’s Hot Corner Twitter Feed.
Among those expected to tweet are studio announcers Ernie Johnson, Dennis Eckersley, Cal Ripken Jr. and David Wells along with game announcers Chip Caray, Ron Darling, Buck Martinez, Marc Fein and Craig Sager.
TBS is also promoting fans to follow the action via the network’s Facebook page and Hot Corner Blog.
Full o’ Buster
As I watch ESPN’s promos for the tireless work of baseball reporter Buster Olney — constantly taking phone calls, talking in Japanese to Ichiro, passing himself as he walks out of a building — I sometimes pause to consider how improbable this would have seemed in the ’90s.
I worked with Buster when he covered the Orioles for The Sun in 1995 and 1996. In fact, it was a running joke with one of my former bosses that Buster was “my hire.” In actuality, I was one of the sports department managers who was involved in reviewing candidates and I kind of favored another writer over Buster — yet another example of my poor judgment.
Of course, Buster turned out to be a terrific baseball beat guy — smart, plugged-in, insightful. He wrote great game stories that focused on the pivotal moments and key decisions. And no one outworked him as a reporter. He was hypercompetitive. In fact, his relationship with one of his Sun baseball colleagues was strained by the fact that this reporter was very friendly with The Washington Post‘s Orioles writer, back when The Sun and Post competed on the beat.
The thing is, I never would have pegged Buster as a future TV personality. I used to wonder whether he ever even smiled. That same guy who was always so serious every time we spoke now can sit in and crack wise on Mike & Mike in the Morning?
Then again, maybe Buster always was funny, but I wasn’t sharp enough to realize it.
Baseball: Stats all, folks
The news that a proposed movie based on Moneyball has been shelved could be viewed in a few ways. For one thing, just imagine you’re A’s general manager Billy Beane and you suddenly discover there isn’t going to be a movie with Brad Pitt playing you. Now, if that were me, I’d be majorly bummed. I’d have been telling everybody I knew, “Brad Pitt is going to be me in a movie!” (Yeah, I know, you’re looking at that photo and thinking I would be lucky to get Jack Black.)
Another view is to say this is a strike against the stat-heavy view of baseball, because Beane so famously is enamored of numbers in evaluating talent. The news should make for a happy day among those who deride the progeny of Bill James as baseball nerds.
(Not to beat this whole Brad Pitt thing into the ground, but having him portray a stat-head should be enough to remove the nerd tag.)
At the same time, we have a rather curious blog post by MLB Network commentator Harold Reynolds — whose work I have always enjoyed — who takes a puzzling, tortuous path to say he doesn’t buy the importance of the OPS stat (on-base plus slugging percentage). I’d summarize his argument if I could figure it out.
(Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski has a wonderfully off-the-wall reaction to Reynolds’ post in his own blog. Thanks to Deadspin for pointing these out.)
Some former players — and apparently Reynolds is one of them, with Joe Morgan being the most prominent example — want to disregard the statistical analysis they seem to believe takes the human element out of baseball and reduces their visceral experience to dry numbers on a page or computer screen.
Media polls — vote early and often
Last month, when we learned the final regular-season college football coaches’ poll will become anonymous starting in the 2010 season, it got me thinking about how the media have pulled back from exercising authority in polls and awards.
The Associated Press media poll no longer is part of the Bowl Championship Series ranking formula. Many prominent newspapers prohibit staffers from voting in polls, for league awards such as Most Valuable Player or for halls of fame.
The thinking is that, by voting, the media are making the news rather than just covering it. Media members also are put in position, the argument goes, to have significant financial impact on teams (getting them into lucrative bowl games) or players (who might have incentive clauses tied to where they finish in award votes or can reap the benefits of being hall of famers).
Well, maybe.
