Shark Bytes

Hi all!

What do you think about this? When it happens?

Tim McCarver, for all his rambling, is baseball. He loves the sport and represents everything from when the game used be great. Joe Buck, on the other hand, is a spoiled brat who shouldn't be a sportscaster, much less a baseball broadcaster. He is only on TV because of his father and is the most dispassionate sportscaster I have ever heard in my life. He should be a corporate, gradusted from an ivy-league college robot, not a sportscaster. Joe Garagiola and Tony Kubek were the best of all time on this show, hands down. Vin Scully was just corny. Tin McCarver was corny but funny. "The Agony of Da feet" as the 1st baseman was making 1 of the last outs in the playoff game? Classic stuff, even though that wasn't the game of the week.

Baseball jumped the shark when FOX took it over in the mid-'90's. Back when NBC had the rights to it in the '80's, they really knew how to do baseball. I am still of the opinion that whenever NBC's "Proud N" was on a baseball game, you were in for an enjoyable baseball game-- straight-up, no-bull, no excessive hyping of other series (that is to say, NBC didn't hype "St. Elsewhere" and "Hill Street Blues" the same way that FOX hyped "Prison Break" and "24"), no excessive force-feeding of graphics, no unpleasant sound effects/music, etc. All you got was pure baseball and nothing more.

You're all nuts, When Diz and Pee Wee
went off the air it was all over for me.

I have been a baseball analyst since 1983 and I used to watch NBC's ``Saturday Baseball Game of The Week'' with either Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola or Bob Costas and Tony Kubek. When NBC and ABC had the baseball coverage, they were dedicated, timed, and patient. But in 1988 when the television rights moved to CBS, the ``bombshell'' came. I had good memories of the NBC and ABC coverage. I vividly remember the 1987 All- Star Game that NBC did to the 1989 LCS NBC did to the 1989 WS that ABC did. From 1984-1988 ABC had ``Monday Night Baseball'' on Mondays but in 1989 it movoed to Thursdays with some Sunday afternoon games. When CBS got the rights, MLB hasn't been the same. Fans complained that CBS showed games ``every other week'' and that they lost so much money in their contract. They reportedly asked for a rebate but MLB said no. Here are some facts:


1. In 1989 CBS was reportedly interested in a venture that they would do coverage of the AL West teams playing NL East teams.


2. When ``The Baseball Network'' failed, there was so some talk of CBS returning to baseball.


3. In 2006 I heard that FOX's MLB contract was going to expire but they announced at the All- Star Game that it has been renewed through 2013. That means that FOX Saturday Baseball will now last through the entire season; Division series games will now be shown on TBS with FOX doing one LCS game each year instead of two to cut back on their costs. The World Series and All-Star game will continue to be on FOX. Under the new contract, fans will not be able to see the DS games because of cable. If the FOX contract had expired, there was talk of FOX and NBC sharing the duties like they did from 1996-2000. Why can't NBC or ABC do the Division Series or one of the LCS and FOX can do the other one? NBC and ABC have a great baseball history so why couldn't they step up?

There was an incident with FOX. When one of the games ended early, they didn't show the other game they were airing. Instead they signed off for the day. What was FOX thinking? The longer FOX does baseball, the bigger the ``paradox'' will be.


I notice that sometimes Joe Buck isn't always on FOX Saturday Baseball telecasts. I know he has NFL on FOX coverage duties and he does the World Series if he has a baseball assignment. Dick Stockton fills in for Buck on the NFL and MLB. Joe Buck is the lead play by play announcer. I saw a Red Sox game and I was hoping that Joe Buck would do it with Tim McCarver but Dick Stockton did it for him. Another time it was Kenny Albert. I only heard Josh Lewin once this year. I also heard Matt Vasergian in SF. Doesn't Josh Lewin do the SF Giants games? I notice that when the Athletics and Giants have a night game, they show a national game. When the Giants play in the afternoon, they show that game. If FOX did not do baseball, and if the TBN had run through 1999, here is how it would have been:


1. 1994 World Series ABC

2. 1995 World Series NBC

3. 1996 World Series ABC

4. 1997 World Series NBC

5. 1998 World Series ABC

6. 1999 World Series NBC

Clearly Fox would be much better off if McCarver didn't harp so much on any subject. The problem is that he won't just mention something once and then move on. He has to beat what ever subject he is talking about into the ground.

As for team coverage, Fox has to cover the big market teams because that is where the ratings are.

It's plain and simple. Baseball on Fox is painful to watch, first of all, because of the hype and neverending coverage of the large market teams. They need to learn that they should cover other teams than just the Red Sox or Yankees. I don't have anything against showing a game between those guys a few times, but over and over again?

Single handedly, Fox has ruined the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry.

Joe Buck is an arrogant, smarmy idiot, and I think that he hypes players way too much.

Tim McCarver is the worst commentator on television, and my ears bleed when I hear him hype every players on every team.

When the network brought on Lou Piniella in the playoffs as another commentator, that was a major jump towards sharkdom. Piniella may be a "baseball man", but he isn't coherent.

Zelasko and Kennedy to me just add to the hype.

Fox has got to take a much more low-key approach. I'd say they need to hire a low-key play-by-play man such as Josh Lewin (as someone else mentioned), Ken Singleton of the Yankees, or Gary Thorne of the Orioles.

Then, they need to fire McCarver and hire Al Leiter and use Buck Martinez as well.

That's just my opinion.

In the 70s and eighties you could catch a pirates-expos game on national tv. Now you never see any small market teams nationally, always yankees red sox cardinals cubs mets are always involved. Too bad all the small market teams have the budding stars I want to see, before they end up on one of those teams I mentioned..Alas all sports are like this now..lol the code to post ia 'no bb or' hilarious you cant make that up!!

I love baseball. I wish it were on TV 24 hours a day. It's the best sport ever devised. However, the MLB national broadcasts of today seem to lack the zip that the NBC broadcasts had in their heyday. Vin Scully, Joe Garagiola, Curt Gowdy, and Tony Kubek were all special broadcasters. Nobody could explain a defensive shift like Kubek, the ex-shortstop. We seemed to see a wider variety of teams back in those NBC days too. Today it's generally the Yankees, Red Sox or Cubs. I used to enjoy watch the Phillies play the Cardinals or the Tigers play the Twins.

I have this nagging suspicion that the Fox Television Networkis the one that has been killing baseball all this time. I think back to Game 6 of the 2002 World Series between the Anaheim Angels & San Francisco Giants. The Giants were up, three games to two, and all the typical dramatic elements were in place. Support for the World Series is not particularly difficult to drum up: a few folkloric highlights and an action montage set to music is usually more than enough. It works in the Super Bowl, which has not had to change its advertising chic at any point in recent memory. Fox, apparently, had not nearly as much respect for baseball fans as it does for football fans. The pregame for Game 6 opened with a human interest story about the Angels' Scott Spiezio and his offseason rock band, Sandfrog. The name, he explains, originates from the last names of its members: Spiezio, Anderson, Froilan, Garry. Get it? Then Spiezio picks up a guitar and says “There are two things I’ve always wanted to accomplish in my life. Winning the World Series, and this!” Spiezio then smashes his guitar against some rocks. “That’s one down, one to go,” he says, beaming in front of the camera. Meanwhile, Fox was up to its tricks again. We go to commercial. Then we come back to rapid-fire images of Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu, who are, as you know, the stars of Charlie’s Angels. Diaz was wearing an Angels jersey tied in a knot above her navel. The next 90 seconds or so moved too fast to process. All I could make out were flying legs, some explosions, and lots of flashing lights and Elvis Costello’s “Angels Wanna Wear My (Red Shoes)” in the background. Some producer must have been very proud of his work tonight. So that’s what we got: a nominally-connected string of images designed for no purpose other than attracting attentionless teenagers. Am I wrong to be angry? Doesn’t baseball deserve better than this? This is not how baseball should be sold. It should be sold by hoarse-voiced curmudgeons who still wear the scars of the 1954 World Series, not glitzy up-and-comers who would sooner spring for a facelift. Footage of Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” should've replaced Sandfrog singing “Redeem Your Pain.” It would've been better to look at Boog Powell’s red 1975 Cleveland Indians uniform pants than Spiezio’s 2002 hotpants. I date my baseball fandom to 1991; that’s the earliest I can be held accountable for the way in which the sport was advertised. I remember star-shaped wipes and blurry hazes surrounding Kent Hrbek as he watched his home run cruise towards the domed ceiling of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. A glowing Dan Gladden as his mane-like hair flowed behind him en route to his historic collision with Greg Olson. Even this stuff was gauche to my ten-year-old eyes, but at least it was baseball, and not Charlie’s Angels. What hurts the most is knowing that Fox produced these sequences because their marketing researchers came back with results: no one wants to hear about Boog Powell or even Dan Gladden anymore. America has fallen out of love with baseball. And the Super Bowl. That’s when they show those funny commercials. Maybe there is solace to be found in the fact that things weren’t this way when Fox wasn’t around. CBS was the network that authored the blurry Hrbek haze, so maybe they will make a comeback. Or maybe the outrage of viewers like me is good enough to do it. We could trust baseball to be a traditionalist’s sport, angry and staid enough to brush off the shimmering graphics in favor of something sanctimonious. Will this work? Can we believe in this? Probably not. I’ll probably just have to wait until Fox’s contract runs out.

I wish FOX sports would cover each big league baseball team regionally (I can understand why they don't cover Toronto) at least once a season. On the 2005 schedule they have the Cubs listed 7 times, the White Sox 6 times and the Reds not at all. Some of these teams, like the Reds are only available on cable or satellite. We see enough of the Cubs, White Sox, Braves, Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox with cable. Well, I guess Ken Griffey Jr. wouldn't be on playing in the MLB Game of the Week this season, even if he is healthy! Not to mention Brewer, Rockie, Pirate, Devil Ray, Tiger and Royals fans wouldn't being seeing their squads on the Game of the Week either. Some of these teams listed, haven't been on in several years! Yet, the Diamondbacks have three games on FOX this season! C'mon FOX, give them at least one game on free TV for their home cities.

In light of the on-going NHL lockout, I have to say that at least the NHL owners aren't the only one that spend money foolishly. Major League Baseball owners can spend like there is no tomorrow as well. I still remember March of 1989, soon after MLB signed a national TV contract with CBS worth about $1 billion. Peter Ueberroth, commissioner at the time, celebrated the deal by saying there was no way the owners could spend themselves to bankruptcy. Their newfound wealth was out the door faster than they ever imagined. In fact, they spent so much so fast some teams were near bankruptcy. CBS was hurting, too. The network was losing so much money on the deal it asked baseball for relief. There was nothing MLB could do. Owners had mortgaged their future with anticipated wealth from television. In fairness to all 30 teams, only a few have spent big. The Mets, trying to compete with the Yankees for New York attention and anticipating large revenue from a new cable TV operation, have spent the most - $197.8 million on seven free agents, including $119 million for outfielder Carlos Beltran. After the Mets come the Los Angeles Dodgers ($142.65 million), the Seattle Mariners ($122.45 million) and the Boston Red Sox ($119.15 million).

This show jumped when FOX got game of the week (I didn't watch baseball when CBS had it). I don't watch This Week In Baseball because it's too boring. FOX wants to run these long pre-game crap for like the 1st 25 minutes of their broadcast. Nobody cares about that FOX! Just shows us the game and be done with it. In case you want better ratings that's how you do it.

I dont think it jumped. Baseball is still baseball. My all-time favorite moment was when Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek were doing yet ANOTHER Red Sox game on a Saturday afternoon, and Curt Gowdy notices a young couple trading kisses in the bleachers, Kubek watches this for a bit, and says "Curt, there's a pattern to it. After every pitch, one of them initiates a kiss. He kisses her on the strikes, and she kisses him on the balls." You could have heard a mouse fart, it got so quiet. I'm still laughing at that one.

The problem with Major League Baseball on national broadcast television began in 1990 when CBS came into the picture. CBS paid way too much money for exclusive rights for the package. To make a long story short, because CBS lost so much money off of their baseball deal the Baseball Network (a joint venture between Major League Baseball, ABC & NBC) was created. The Baseball Network was bad because it completely killed the aspect of a national Game of the Week (outside of ESPN). TBN started the process (which Fox soon inherited) of regularly telecasting games on a regional basis. To make matters worse, TBN didn't allow the fans to view postseason games (outside of the World Series) nationally. In the process, many of the playoff games were played at the same time. Under the Baseball Network did you see the very rare case of two different networks alternating coverage of a single World Series (as was the case in 1995). I heard that this was done to allow for ABC & NBC to recoup for lost revenue because of the strike. If it wasn't for the strike, then ABC would've covered the 1994 World Series (since NBC already had the All-Star Game that year) and NBC would've had exclusive rights to the 1995 World Series. This led to the current scheduling of the DS. Game times spaced in an attempt to have minimal overlap of games. The main down side of this practice is there is the occasional west coast game that begins at 10:00 ET. A number of east coasters have complained on the www.mlb.com board about this every year. But the alternative is to start the games at the same time. Which it seems few want. TBN was a collosal failure. The networks actually abandoned it before the contract for it ran out. It was obvious it would be a failure from the start. Yet, this was another thing MLB OK'd that actually hurt the game instead of helping it. The 1990's were filled with that kind of stuff. The negativity from the strike as well as CBS' exploits had a lot to due with MLB having to resort to a lesser established and/or legitament network like Fox. Sure, NBC came back around the same time that Fox started covering baseball but it just wasn't the same. NBC didn't even bother to cover regular season games even though they've been always regarded as America's #1 television network for baseball. I hope that Major League Baseball will go back to the set-up that they had back in the late 1970s on through the 1980s. NBC had the Saturday "Game of the Week" which was for a national audience (unlike Fox) and on every single week (unlike CBS when they had the rights back in the early 1990s) and ABC had "Monday Night Baseball." NBC would get the World Series and 1st Round Divisional Series in even numbered years. ABC would get the All-Star Game and LCS in years that they don't have the rights to show the World Series. Unforunately, they lame way that NBC's Sports division has been run in the past few years will in all likelyhood, not make my wish a reality (at least in the foreseeable future). I just hope to God that once, 2007 (the year after Fox's current deal with MLB is set to expire) roles around, we no longer have to put up with Fox's nonsense (even if it means, bringing CBS back into the picture) anymore.