--Sure, the grit and surgical control displayed by Cliff Lee translated to one of the finest World Series complete games in modern baseball memory. Fans marveled at Cliff's nonchalance in fielding hot shots back to the box, in a fashion altogether resembling a Subway employee scooping tuna fish into a bread tube. Best of all, though, was Lee's assassin-like calm at the post-game mic, recycling the word "ironic" when a reporter asked him to write her lede for her about his string of New York successes.
--CC could still have won the game, but he ran into the Lee buzzsaw. Chase Utley apparently sees his backspin like none other, or has employed guess hitting to its utmost effect. Some batters can assimilate a scouting report to a superior degree, regardless of the elite status of the pitcher. We appear to have one of those cases here.
--The postseason lens again humbles the best umpires in the world. Nonetheless, the confusion about the line-drive double play was largely the Yankees' fault, although first-base ump Jeff Nelson failed to notice that Ryan Howard had kept his toe on the bag to haul in Jimmy Rollins' throw.
--Rollins disrupts Phil Hughes on his way to stealing second, and the Yankee pen falls apart for the Philly offensive flood.
--So A-Rod whiffed not once, not twice, but thrice against Lee. That's no choke. Lee would have struck out every member of Murderer's Row I, the way he was rumbling. The Babe never saw movement like that at 91 MPH.
GAME 2 PREDICTION: A lot of doubt has been hung around the neck of A.J. Burnett, but he will locate well and try to pound Howard away (this is when Howard's spray power might come to the forefront). Despite no Don Zimmer to throw around like a rag doll, Pedro Martinez will befuddle and confuse the NYY order until the sixth, when he'll have to put the game in the hands of the pen. Yankee magic in the final at-bat may well earn them the split. NEW YORK 4, PHILADELPHIA 3.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Serious Business: 2009 World Series Preview
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES: Despite showers in tonight's Bronx forecast, Ryan Howard likely savors the opportunity to explore Yankee Stadium's right-field porch. He remains more likely, though, to explore the opposite field more often. Jimmy Rollins has again partially atoned for a middling regular season with a laudable postseason effort, and he must find a way to reach base in the late innings, because the Phils' chance to defend will partly rest on the clutch hitting of the bottom of their order. Carlos Ruiz comes to mind; Joe Girardi will have no qualms about pitching around more established RBI men to face Ruiz in a critical spot. Cliff Lee should pitch well enough to win at least one of his battle royales with CC Sabathia; this is not to say he'll take a W in either Game 1 or Game 4. Charlie Manuel cannot afford to under-manage.
NEW YORK YANKEES: By the same token, Girardi cannot afford to over-manage, especially against either Chase Utley or Raul Ibanez. In the AL playoffs, against a self-destructive Angels club, Girardi's insistence on turning real life into a video game - wherein every sim pitcher will always be rested, healthy, and warmed up - turned out in the Yanks' favor. I've heard these nasty rumors about NYY's true plan of a "four-man rotation" featuring CC, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettite and Mariano Rivera. In a video game, that sounds awesome. In October and possibly November, not so much. But always save an arm, Mastah Chief Girardi, for the inevitable showdown with Matt Stairs, who in a past life would be a shoo-in pick to DH every AL game of this Series.
WHAT MCCARVER & BUCK WOULDN'T SEE COMING: A defensive gem by Pedro Feliz turning a game around; a defensive miscue by Robinson Cano affording an opportunity for Derek Jeter to look good on a subsequent play in the same inning; Alex Rodriguez cracking under the pressure of the Philly rowdies who, from the front rows, will use their words to insult Kate Hudson until A-Rod thinks she looks like Ruth Buzzi.
GAME 1 PREDICTION: Lee bends but does not break, leaving the Phillies with a chance to win. CC gives up at least one bomb but overall outshines him, and Rivera resoundingly shuts the door at the end. NEW YORK 4, PHILADELPHIA 2.
NEW YORK YANKEES: By the same token, Girardi cannot afford to over-manage, especially against either Chase Utley or Raul Ibanez. In the AL playoffs, against a self-destructive Angels club, Girardi's insistence on turning real life into a video game - wherein every sim pitcher will always be rested, healthy, and warmed up - turned out in the Yanks' favor. I've heard these nasty rumors about NYY's true plan of a "four-man rotation" featuring CC, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettite and Mariano Rivera. In a video game, that sounds awesome. In October and possibly November, not so much. But always save an arm, Mastah Chief Girardi, for the inevitable showdown with Matt Stairs, who in a past life would be a shoo-in pick to DH every AL game of this Series.
WHAT MCCARVER & BUCK WOULDN'T SEE COMING: A defensive gem by Pedro Feliz turning a game around; a defensive miscue by Robinson Cano affording an opportunity for Derek Jeter to look good on a subsequent play in the same inning; Alex Rodriguez cracking under the pressure of the Philly rowdies who, from the front rows, will use their words to insult Kate Hudson until A-Rod thinks she looks like Ruth Buzzi.
GAME 1 PREDICTION: Lee bends but does not break, leaving the Phillies with a chance to win. CC gives up at least one bomb but overall outshines him, and Rivera resoundingly shuts the door at the end. NEW YORK 4, PHILADELPHIA 2.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
The Best Idea I've Heard Possibly Ever
"If Bud Selig had any balls, tomorrow would be a doubleheader." --J.E. Hutchinson
Friday, October 23, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Life's Ominscient Narrators
As seen on tenandfiveguys.com...
First, a solemn reminder of the legacy of Joe Buck, courtesy of the fine fellows over at Kissing Suzy Kolber. Having had my share of brushes with broadcast royalty, I see no reason to doubt the veracity of that woeful tale, which concerns Buck's vasectomy, his awkward insurgency on a girl in a club, and other boner-legend moments. However, KSK must believe that what happens in Vegas need not stay in Vegas. Leaving Las Vegas is one of my favorite motion pictures, and if you happen to ask me about the coolest way to do oneself in, I'll suggest you watch or re-watch that film and Nicolas Cage's Oscar-winning suicide bender.
If Joe Buck was having his mid-life crisis last year, I understand. I had mine when I was 23. And it's my belief that Tim McCarver is at least partly responsible for Buck's mid-life crisis.
In a separate post, you'll note my YouTube send-up of a fairly benign (by his standards) yet mind-boggling statement uttered by McCarver on CBS during the final inning of the 1993 World Series. McCarver, who condescended to us by entitling his 1999 how-to tome Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans, holds the distinction of having commentated on a League Championship Series in every year of my life. I was born in the 1983-84 offseason, and McCarver's first LCS assignment came as a field reporter for ABC in 1984. Tim broke Curt Gowdy's record in 2003 when he called his 13th World Series on national teevee.
My earliest televised sports memories begin around 1988, when I derided my Ohioan preschool aide Cammy for wearing her Bengal slippers during the week of Super Bowl XXIII. (Yes, I do remember preschool, and quite well, actually.) Among my most prized possessions was a beige Fisher-Price cassette player/recorder with a carrying handle and a built-in microphone. At one point - it had to be early in 1989, because Hank Greenwald was working for the Yankees in 1987 and 1988 - I brought the recorder over to the RCA set in the living room and taped Hank's post-game recap on a Giants telecast, along with a Budweiser commercial whose jingle I incessantly sang for days on end at Lakeside Presbyterian Center for Children.
As Joe Buck will tell you, Bud and baseball just go together, don't they? Even when you're four years old.
It's never been a secret to anyone who knows me, or knows of me, that the ultimate mission of my existence, a mission beginning with that Fisher-Price tape recorder, a mission of which I have never lost sight, is to broadcast Major League Baseball for a living, specifically Giants baseball. As I wend my way slowly toward the top of the mountain, I have always taken note of the good, the bad and the ugly in our business. I am not writing this to throw stones; I don't live in a glass house. I am still more or less a nobody, although I do presently work the radio broadcasts for the King Kong of high school football programs on a heritage station in a major market.
One day, if we haven't yet blown ourselves to smithereens, I would like nothing more than for a young whippersnapper to take me to task on his blog for being unfunny and out of touch with my audience and my sport. If that happens, it means I made it to The Show.
Whether or not I succeed at my life mission, I am first and foremost a baseball fan. And as a baseball fan - and I speak for a great many of you out there - I am dog sick and dog tired of hearing Tim McCarver every October.
To their credit, Joe and Tim acknowledged that Saturday night's ALCS tilt at Yankee Stadium was a real cracker, albeit in such droll and distant tones as to imply irreverence bordering on mockery. ("What a game." Yawn.) Remember, Joe blithely confessed last summer to Colin Cowherd - whose crimes against sports broadcasting need not be rehashed in this space - that he barely pays attention to baseball games he isn't scheduled to cover.
Tuning out the sports nexus when you're off the clock is by no means unprecedented in our business. In an interview some years back, Kevin Harlan said that when his NBA on TNT work wraps up for the season, he and his family go on vacation for several weeks and he pays zero attention to sports of any kind. When Bill King was out of season during his heyday with the Warriors, Raiders and Athletics, he would go completely off the grid and spend most of his free time on his sailboat.
Joe Buck, however, never intimated that he ignores baseball because he seeks refuge. He intimated that he doesn't care about baseball because not caring is cool. Very high-school of you, Joe, very Hollywood. Joe has also rationalized his lethargy as a means of avoiding the grind his late father Jack endured. But see, nobody ever questioned Jack Buck's love of baseball or football. With his son, the issue seems to come up all the time.
However, for all his dourness and disenchantment, Joe Buck doesn't bother me so much. Not compared to Timmy Ballgame.
In Saturday night's third inning, McCarver believed he would achieve his moment of zen, his golden chance to tell the nouveau school of baseball analysts to go to hell and wait. When Derek Jeter homered, FOX flashed an on-screen graphic about baseball's postseason home-run champions. Jeter is in the top five, as is Manny Ramirez. All fans are duty-bound to admire Jeter's breathtaking consistency and brilliance at the plate in postseason play. You also have to remember that Jeter has always played for the best team money can buy. Manny didn't always.
But, clutch hitter though he may be, Jeter is no prize pupil on defense. In a sane and rational world, he'd have moved to third base the instant Alex Rodriguez came to town. I'll let my brethren handle the number-crunching - I always do - but statistically, Jeter continues to rate among the worst defensive shortstops in MLB.
For the first 12 innings of ALCS Game 2, 10&5 contributors John Padua and James Hutchinson sat with me on JP's couch inside his SoMa flat, as we are wont to do at weekends, enjoying the telecast on the apartment's wall-size projector. (We dashed out the door at the end of the 12th and caught the 13th at Bloodhound, where we chanted "Daaarrrrylll" until the Dodger fan and her two pals next to me flew the coop.)
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, five-year-old Scott was taking a bath in preparation for World Series Game 3, while Dad and Uncle Paul were rocking and rolling in Candlestick's upper deck, directly above McCarver, Al Michaels and Jim Palmer, who nearly fell out of the ABC booth because they were sitting on the counter with the window open to do the pre-game on-camera segment. Next door, Jack Buck saw his CBS Radio partner Johnny Bench duck and cover, and Jack quipped, "If you had moved that fast when you played, you wouldn't have hit into so many double plays."
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 2009, JP brought his clock radio from his bedroom and we attempted to catch Jon Miller and (gulp) Joe Morgan on ESPN Radio. But DirecTV was almost 15 seconds behind Miller's call, so we had to scrap that plan. We then decided to put the FOX audio on low, and keep the chatter among ourselves fresh and lively, the better to neutralize Buck and McCarver.
Sooner or later, one or the other was bound to say something ridiculous, and McCarver obliged when he started in about Jeter. I haven't the benefit of DVR from whence I write, but clear as crystal in my mind is McCarver's incendiary remark about Jeter's critics, who figured last year that Mr. November might be washed up.
"Most of them are silent now, hiding under a rock in a cave somewhere."
Well, guess what. We are them. You were talking to us, weren't you, Tim?
Though it's in a sketchy part of town, JP's apartment is no cave. But I'll cop to acting like a caveman in one sense and one sense only. A benefit of watching a sporting event on a projector is your ability to hurl pop tops, wadded-up napkins, ping-pong balls and other objects at the people on screen. At that moment, after McCarver referred to us as prehistoric rubes, we threw everything we had at the X-mo replay of Jeter's home run swing. (Later during an A-Rod at-bat I nailed him in the groin with a bottle cap.) Buck readily buttressed McCarver's opus with a flip comment about scouts who love Jeter in the seventh game of a World Series, or some such bollocks.
Hutchinson [as Buck]: "And here's a stock photo." Armstrong [as McCarver, viewing the obligatory shot of the Empire State Building]: "Joe, ain't that a tall building?"
And then in the eighth inning, in a game notable for both grand defense - Johnny Damon pulling his weight, for one - and jaw-dropping errors, Jeter booted a tailor-made double-play ball.
The timbre of McCarver's voice was reduced to a whimper. McCarver did not renege on his earlier titanic statement, the one that would once and for all topple Bill James' house of cards. He meekly recapitulated Jeter's muff - "the ball comes up on Jeter" - and waited for the moment to pass. Cavemen everywhere rejoiced.
First, a solemn reminder of the legacy of Joe Buck, courtesy of the fine fellows over at Kissing Suzy Kolber. Having had my share of brushes with broadcast royalty, I see no reason to doubt the veracity of that woeful tale, which concerns Buck's vasectomy, his awkward insurgency on a girl in a club, and other boner-legend moments. However, KSK must believe that what happens in Vegas need not stay in Vegas. Leaving Las Vegas is one of my favorite motion pictures, and if you happen to ask me about the coolest way to do oneself in, I'll suggest you watch or re-watch that film and Nicolas Cage's Oscar-winning suicide bender.
If Joe Buck was having his mid-life crisis last year, I understand. I had mine when I was 23. And it's my belief that Tim McCarver is at least partly responsible for Buck's mid-life crisis.
In a separate post, you'll note my YouTube send-up of a fairly benign (by his standards) yet mind-boggling statement uttered by McCarver on CBS during the final inning of the 1993 World Series. McCarver, who condescended to us by entitling his 1999 how-to tome Baseball for Brain Surgeons and Other Fans, holds the distinction of having commentated on a League Championship Series in every year of my life. I was born in the 1983-84 offseason, and McCarver's first LCS assignment came as a field reporter for ABC in 1984. Tim broke Curt Gowdy's record in 2003 when he called his 13th World Series on national teevee.
My earliest televised sports memories begin around 1988, when I derided my Ohioan preschool aide Cammy for wearing her Bengal slippers during the week of Super Bowl XXIII. (Yes, I do remember preschool, and quite well, actually.) Among my most prized possessions was a beige Fisher-Price cassette player/recorder with a carrying handle and a built-in microphone. At one point - it had to be early in 1989, because Hank Greenwald was working for the Yankees in 1987 and 1988 - I brought the recorder over to the RCA set in the living room and taped Hank's post-game recap on a Giants telecast, along with a Budweiser commercial whose jingle I incessantly sang for days on end at Lakeside Presbyterian Center for Children.
As Joe Buck will tell you, Bud and baseball just go together, don't they? Even when you're four years old.
It's never been a secret to anyone who knows me, or knows of me, that the ultimate mission of my existence, a mission beginning with that Fisher-Price tape recorder, a mission of which I have never lost sight, is to broadcast Major League Baseball for a living, specifically Giants baseball. As I wend my way slowly toward the top of the mountain, I have always taken note of the good, the bad and the ugly in our business. I am not writing this to throw stones; I don't live in a glass house. I am still more or less a nobody, although I do presently work the radio broadcasts for the King Kong of high school football programs on a heritage station in a major market.
One day, if we haven't yet blown ourselves to smithereens, I would like nothing more than for a young whippersnapper to take me to task on his blog for being unfunny and out of touch with my audience and my sport. If that happens, it means I made it to The Show.
Whether or not I succeed at my life mission, I am first and foremost a baseball fan. And as a baseball fan - and I speak for a great many of you out there - I am dog sick and dog tired of hearing Tim McCarver every October.
To their credit, Joe and Tim acknowledged that Saturday night's ALCS tilt at Yankee Stadium was a real cracker, albeit in such droll and distant tones as to imply irreverence bordering on mockery. ("What a game." Yawn.) Remember, Joe blithely confessed last summer to Colin Cowherd - whose crimes against sports broadcasting need not be rehashed in this space - that he barely pays attention to baseball games he isn't scheduled to cover.
Tuning out the sports nexus when you're off the clock is by no means unprecedented in our business. In an interview some years back, Kevin Harlan said that when his NBA on TNT work wraps up for the season, he and his family go on vacation for several weeks and he pays zero attention to sports of any kind. When Bill King was out of season during his heyday with the Warriors, Raiders and Athletics, he would go completely off the grid and spend most of his free time on his sailboat.
Joe Buck, however, never intimated that he ignores baseball because he seeks refuge. He intimated that he doesn't care about baseball because not caring is cool. Very high-school of you, Joe, very Hollywood. Joe has also rationalized his lethargy as a means of avoiding the grind his late father Jack endured. But see, nobody ever questioned Jack Buck's love of baseball or football. With his son, the issue seems to come up all the time.
However, for all his dourness and disenchantment, Joe Buck doesn't bother me so much. Not compared to Timmy Ballgame.
In Saturday night's third inning, McCarver believed he would achieve his moment of zen, his golden chance to tell the nouveau school of baseball analysts to go to hell and wait. When Derek Jeter homered, FOX flashed an on-screen graphic about baseball's postseason home-run champions. Jeter is in the top five, as is Manny Ramirez. All fans are duty-bound to admire Jeter's breathtaking consistency and brilliance at the plate in postseason play. You also have to remember that Jeter has always played for the best team money can buy. Manny didn't always.
But, clutch hitter though he may be, Jeter is no prize pupil on defense. In a sane and rational world, he'd have moved to third base the instant Alex Rodriguez came to town. I'll let my brethren handle the number-crunching - I always do - but statistically, Jeter continues to rate among the worst defensive shortstops in MLB.
For the first 12 innings of ALCS Game 2, 10&5 contributors John Padua and James Hutchinson sat with me on JP's couch inside his SoMa flat, as we are wont to do at weekends, enjoying the telecast on the apartment's wall-size projector. (We dashed out the door at the end of the 12th and caught the 13th at Bloodhound, where we chanted "Daaarrrrylll" until the Dodger fan and her two pals next to me flew the coop.)
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, five-year-old Scott was taking a bath in preparation for World Series Game 3, while Dad and Uncle Paul were rocking and rolling in Candlestick's upper deck, directly above McCarver, Al Michaels and Jim Palmer, who nearly fell out of the ABC booth because they were sitting on the counter with the window open to do the pre-game on-camera segment. Next door, Jack Buck saw his CBS Radio partner Johnny Bench duck and cover, and Jack quipped, "If you had moved that fast when you played, you wouldn't have hit into so many double plays."
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 2009, JP brought his clock radio from his bedroom and we attempted to catch Jon Miller and (gulp) Joe Morgan on ESPN Radio. But DirecTV was almost 15 seconds behind Miller's call, so we had to scrap that plan. We then decided to put the FOX audio on low, and keep the chatter among ourselves fresh and lively, the better to neutralize Buck and McCarver.
Sooner or later, one or the other was bound to say something ridiculous, and McCarver obliged when he started in about Jeter. I haven't the benefit of DVR from whence I write, but clear as crystal in my mind is McCarver's incendiary remark about Jeter's critics, who figured last year that Mr. November might be washed up.
"Most of them are silent now, hiding under a rock in a cave somewhere."
Well, guess what. We are them. You were talking to us, weren't you, Tim?
Though it's in a sketchy part of town, JP's apartment is no cave. But I'll cop to acting like a caveman in one sense and one sense only. A benefit of watching a sporting event on a projector is your ability to hurl pop tops, wadded-up napkins, ping-pong balls and other objects at the people on screen. At that moment, after McCarver referred to us as prehistoric rubes, we threw everything we had at the X-mo replay of Jeter's home run swing. (Later during an A-Rod at-bat I nailed him in the groin with a bottle cap.) Buck readily buttressed McCarver's opus with a flip comment about scouts who love Jeter in the seventh game of a World Series, or some such bollocks.
Hutchinson [as Buck]: "And here's a stock photo." Armstrong [as McCarver, viewing the obligatory shot of the Empire State Building]: "Joe, ain't that a tall building?"
And then in the eighth inning, in a game notable for both grand defense - Johnny Damon pulling his weight, for one - and jaw-dropping errors, Jeter booted a tailor-made double-play ball.
The timbre of McCarver's voice was reduced to a whimper. McCarver did not renege on his earlier titanic statement, the one that would once and for all topple Bill James' house of cards. He meekly recapitulated Jeter's muff - "the ball comes up on Jeter" - and waited for the moment to pass. Cavemen everywhere rejoiced.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Sources of Excitement II
1. Thursday, September 24 at Retox Lounge: This native's inaugural venture into the Dogpatch - besides the impound lot and the post office to mail tax returns in broad daylight - yielded high entertainment value at one-horse-town prices. Upstart bands LateNiteDrive and Red Light Mind put on a fabulous show in a swanky little club at the corner of 3rd and 20th Sts., the existence of which I was not previously aware.
2. Friday, September 25 at Diablo Valley College: The most dramatic high school football game I think I've witnessed in person, let alone called, between De La Salle and Lakeland, FL. The two former national champions, both coached by legends with more than 30 years in charge and more than 300 victories, proved to be quite evenly matched. I'm listening to the aircheck now, syncing the replay with the ESPN2 telecast on my DVR. We did it live like O'Reilly.
3. Saturday and Sunday, October 3 and 4 at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park: My first Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, because I've had to work instead the past couple years. Free from retail hell at last, I will enjoy the likes of Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Aimee Mann, Neko Case, and Amadou & Mariam (!!!!).
4. Saturday and Sunday, October 17 and 18 on Treasure Island: My buddy Jon's rugby match on the man-made isle serves as an appetizer for Treasure Island Music Festival. MGMT caps night one, The Flaming Lips culminate night two, and I look forward to avoiding arguments with militant fans of Tegan and Sara, who don't appear to be on the bill this year.
5. Sunday, November 8 at Fox Theater, Oakland: Pixies. Pixies. Pixies.
6. More later.
2. Friday, September 25 at Diablo Valley College: The most dramatic high school football game I think I've witnessed in person, let alone called, between De La Salle and Lakeland, FL. The two former national champions, both coached by legends with more than 30 years in charge and more than 300 victories, proved to be quite evenly matched. I'm listening to the aircheck now, syncing the replay with the ESPN2 telecast on my DVR. We did it live like O'Reilly.
3. Saturday and Sunday, October 3 and 4 at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park: My first Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, because I've had to work instead the past couple years. Free from retail hell at last, I will enjoy the likes of Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Aimee Mann, Neko Case, and Amadou & Mariam (!!!!).
4. Saturday and Sunday, October 17 and 18 on Treasure Island: My buddy Jon's rugby match on the man-made isle serves as an appetizer for Treasure Island Music Festival. MGMT caps night one, The Flaming Lips culminate night two, and I look forward to avoiding arguments with militant fans of Tegan and Sara, who don't appear to be on the bill this year.
5. Sunday, November 8 at Fox Theater, Oakland: Pixies. Pixies. Pixies.
6. More later.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
