Now Playing: Sox 5, Astros 3
Why does Fox hate baseball so much? I can't imagine why a network would spend so much money and effort broadcasting a sport it so obviously despises. From the inanities constantly spouted by its announcing team to its annoying habit of punctuating every graphic with a ridiculous sound effect, Fox shows its contempt with every inning it telecasts.
For instance, the pregame show featured an old man talking about the 1919 "Black Sox", the White Sox team that threw the World Series in the employ of gamblers, and the White Sox "curse", which never existed in anyone's mind until just now. The old man was an actor babbling about the old days, and then there was a reenactment of a little kid saying "Say it isn't so, Joe," to Shoeless Joe Jackson. Good grief. Then "Joe" told the camera about how the players "had" to do it (yes, Fox is making heroes out of the corrupt Black Sox). Then, another actor playing legendary Sox owner Bill Veeck portrayed the likable, intelligent man as a fat, motormouthed, greasy used car salesman. Doesn't anyone who works on Fox's telecasts actually, you know, know something about the sport?
It then took Jeanne Zelasko about ten minutes to talk about how Roger Clemens' dead mom predicted that her son would be pitching in the World Series. Good grief. During the game itself, Fox missed Joe Crede's home run because they were boring the shit out of us with a taped interview with Houston's pitching coach. In-game interviews are dull and worthless. Nobody wants to hear them, and we certainly don't while a Crede homer is going over the outfield wall and the outfielder is making a valiant attempt at a miracle catch.
Tim McCarver was his usual idiot self, saying things like "Bobby Jenks certainly wasn't tonight" (wasn't what?) and "In the World Series, the world is watching this play". He also constantly calls pitches as being fastballs when they're actually breaking balls.
Throw in Fox's repetitive marketing of its prime-time lineup, which includes about 1000 viewings of the same HOUSE and PRISON BREAK promos (notice ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, maybe the best show Fox has, never gets mentioned, but the anemic THAT '70S SHOW pops up about ten times). Even worse, during the game, Fox throws up one of those annoying corner promos, complete with a loud police siren while the announcers are speaking!
To quote Casey Kasem: ponderous, man. Fuckin' ponderous.
Posted by Marty
at 11:24 PM CDT
