UPDATE: MLB Network has decided to take Caught Looking's advice. I've noticed that the channel has decided to periodically devote an hour of the MLB Tonight program to something called Solid 60, a 60-minute commercial-free block presented by DIRECTV. According to Broadcasting & Cable, "the block will feature highlights, updates and live look-ins
at games. It will run as part of MLB Tonight, the network's nightly
studio show. MLB Network chose the 9:30-10:30 p.m. hour as it is the time
of day when most MLB games are in progress." Apparently this debuted on April 9, but was only aired on Friday nights until recently (which is why I never caught it). It's a little heavy on the voiceover commentary and isn't exactly what I proposed below, but they do show live games constantly throughout the hour and attempt to show a combination of popular player at-bats, run scoring opportunities and final outs. Pretty well done, MLB Network - thanks for listening!
Dear MLB Network,
I like you guys. I was skeptical when your network launched prior to the 2009 baseball season, but now that we've spent a full year together I'll admit you've grown on me. As an Atlanta Braves fan living in New York, I don't get to see my team play on live TV very often, and I often prefer to watch your various highlights shows (MLB Tonight, Quick Pitch, etc.) over yet another Yankees game on YES Network or Mets game on SNY. I appreciate how you rescued Harold Reynolds from the ESPN doghouse (did we ever find out exactly what happened over there?), stole Peter Gammons away from The World Leader, and brought in a slew of relatively-entertaining former Major Leaguers including Sean Casey, Al Leiter and Mitch Williams, among others.
At the same time, I realize nothing you do from a highlight show standpoint can hold a candle to ESPN's Baseball Tonight. You don't have a Web Gems or Touch 'Em All segment, and even if you were to try to replicate it you wouldn't have the Web Gems or Touch 'Em All "brands." You don't have the awesome Baseball Tonight jingle informing viewers of upcoming in-game updates and highlights. You don't have Tim Kurkjian, my favorite baseball analyst on TV right now. Last night, when the Dodgers vs. Mets game was rained out and ESPN decided to show a three-hour special version of Baseball Tonight instead, complete with live look-ins from games around the country (one of my favorite parts of your MLB Tonight show, by the way), I found myself glued to ESPN without even thinking of switching over to MLB Network. I realized that I enjoy MLB Network simply because it offers more baseball-related content than ESPN does on a regular basis, but when both are showing baseball I'll choose ESPN more often than not.
So, MLB Network, what can you do to differentiate yourself from ESPN's Baseball Tonight and pull viewers over to your channel? Take tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, for example; you'll be airing MLB Tonight Live for five straight hours, while ESPN will show Twins vs. Tigers on Wednesday Night Baseball, followed by an hour long Baseball Tonight. Why not convert some of the five-hour MLB Tonight block to something I call Ducks on the Pond? We already know you have the contractual rights to show live pieces of Major League Baseball games; you do it all the time on MLB Tonight. The problem is, you seemingly switch between games at random and have your analysts talk over the local broadcasters (quite annoyingly, I might add).
The Ducks on the Pond concept is simple; basically, it would be like the NFL's Red Zone Channel, but for baseball. For a few hours each night (on nights when you don't have live games, of course), you can take us live to games where teams have runners in scoring position, without a ton of additional commentary. If you were airing this tomorrow night, baseball fans who aren't very interested in Twins vs. Tigers (read: everybody) could click over to MLB Network, hoping to see their team drive in some runners or get out of a jam. You'd be giving your fans the opportunity to watch exciting moments from baseball games across the country, and require a lot less production and manpower than MLB Tonight in the process.
Anyway, it's just thought. Thanks again for everything you do, MLB Network. Just know that as long as I can find you in HD on Time Warner Cable channel 783, I'll keep tuning in (as long as there isn't anything better on ESPN, that is).
MLBwhiz
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
An Overblown Call
In order to complete a hat trick of commentary on the 2010 perfect games (or near perfect games, as the case may be), I wanted to post my thoughts on the Armando Galarraga / Jim Joyce debacle of last week. Obviously I'm late to the party on this one, but I wanted to let the dust settle a bit and allow the mass media to get their thoughts in first. For those of you who aren't familiar with the game or the situation: welcome back to Earth. I hope you enjoyed your interplanetary journey. Moving on . . .
It seems like the consensus regarding Galarraga-gate is that the situation ranks somewhere between Three Mile Island and Hurricane Katrina on the scale of Largest Disasters Ever to Occur on American Soil. People are saying the sanctity of the game will be in jeopardy until Major League Baseball implements instant replay, and that the lives of Galarraga and Joyce have been ruined forever by a scenario that could have been fixed by a simple review process. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree (after all, I can be rather combative). While it's true that I'm against instant replay in baseball and think that a small about of human umpiring error is part of the sport, my bigger issue is that I don't think this blown call is such a huge deal.
Undoubtedly, the whole thing is very unfortunate for both Galarraga and Joyce. I of course feel bad that Galarraga was robbed of a moment of baseball immortality, and realize that Joyce will, to some extent, have a solid career marred by this isolated incident. That being said, baseball is a team sport, and at the end of the night the Tigers still beat the Indians in a (relatively) meaningless regular season June baseball game by a 3-0 score. Had Galarraga been awarded the perfect game it still would have gone in the books as a 3-0 victory. While a number of individuals were negatively impacted by Joyce's blunder, the most important parties - the Cleveland Indian and Detroit Tiger baseball clubs - remained unaffected.
If baseball does implement instant replay at some point, it should be in the interest of ensuring that the right team wins each baseball game. While it's true that the errant call could have cost the Tigers the win (in addition to the perfect game), it didn't. To me, this situation doesn't compare this with Jeffrey Maier's interference with Tony Tarasco or Steve Bartman's confrontation with Moises Alou. The latter two played a major role in the outcome of playoff games; the former robbed a player of a remarkable individual accomplishment but, in my opinion, didn't damage the credibility of the sport. I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be the tipping point in the instant-replay-in-baseball war after baseball has basically ignored similar, more-significant episodes.
As I said, I feel for Armando Galarraga. But careers are rarely made off of a single regular season moment. Ask Bud Smith or José Jiménez if they'd trade their no hitters for better Major League careers and I'm sure they'd do it in a heartbeat. People will remember the perfect games by Roy Halladay and Randy Johnson because those guys are future Hall of Famers, and the perfect game will be one of many accomplishments etched onto their plaques in Cooperstown. One regular season game doesn't make or break a career. If Galarraga turns out to be a great pitcher over the next decade, we'll remember Galarraga-gate as a small bump in an otherwise smooth, long road. If he's out of baseball by 2012, we won't remember him even if he had gotten credit for the perfect game.
Jim Joyce's blunder will only define Armando Galarraga's career if we let it. Personally, I think this blown call has been way overblown.
It seems like the consensus regarding Galarraga-gate is that the situation ranks somewhere between Three Mile Island and Hurricane Katrina on the scale of Largest Disasters Ever to Occur on American Soil. People are saying the sanctity of the game will be in jeopardy until Major League Baseball implements instant replay, and that the lives of Galarraga and Joyce have been ruined forever by a scenario that could have been fixed by a simple review process. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree (after all, I can be rather combative). While it's true that I'm against instant replay in baseball and think that a small about of human umpiring error is part of the sport, my bigger issue is that I don't think this blown call is such a huge deal.
Undoubtedly, the whole thing is very unfortunate for both Galarraga and Joyce. I of course feel bad that Galarraga was robbed of a moment of baseball immortality, and realize that Joyce will, to some extent, have a solid career marred by this isolated incident. That being said, baseball is a team sport, and at the end of the night the Tigers still beat the Indians in a (relatively) meaningless regular season June baseball game by a 3-0 score. Had Galarraga been awarded the perfect game it still would have gone in the books as a 3-0 victory. While a number of individuals were negatively impacted by Joyce's blunder, the most important parties - the Cleveland Indian and Detroit Tiger baseball clubs - remained unaffected.
If baseball does implement instant replay at some point, it should be in the interest of ensuring that the right team wins each baseball game. While it's true that the errant call could have cost the Tigers the win (in addition to the perfect game), it didn't. To me, this situation doesn't compare this with Jeffrey Maier's interference with Tony Tarasco or Steve Bartman's confrontation with Moises Alou. The latter two played a major role in the outcome of playoff games; the former robbed a player of a remarkable individual accomplishment but, in my opinion, didn't damage the credibility of the sport. I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be the tipping point in the instant-replay-in-baseball war after baseball has basically ignored similar, more-significant episodes.
As I said, I feel for Armando Galarraga. But careers are rarely made off of a single regular season moment. Ask Bud Smith or José Jiménez if they'd trade their no hitters for better Major League careers and I'm sure they'd do it in a heartbeat. People will remember the perfect games by Roy Halladay and Randy Johnson because those guys are future Hall of Famers, and the perfect game will be one of many accomplishments etched onto their plaques in Cooperstown. One regular season game doesn't make or break a career. If Galarraga turns out to be a great pitcher over the next decade, we'll remember Galarraga-gate as a small bump in an otherwise smooth, long road. If he's out of baseball by 2012, we won't remember him even if he had gotten credit for the perfect game.
Jim Joyce's blunder will only define Armando Galarraga's career if we let it. Personally, I think this blown call has been way overblown.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Too Friendly
Note: I wrote this post about a week ago, but forgot to proofread / post it until just now. Better late than never, I guess, although a lot of the concerns I outline below were alleviated (somewhat) by the USA's performance against Turkey on Saturday afternoon.
In just overtwo weeks one week, the United States Soccer national team will play it's first game of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. For many casual / emerging soccer fans, this World Cup will be their first real exposure to high-level soccer; though the MLS is gaining in popularity and soccer is widely played among children, the typical American sports fan limits himself to watching baseball, basketball and football with a little hockey mixed in. To some extent, this will change over the next month and a half; the World Cup will begin to dominate ESPN and other international sports news outlets starting in mid-June and, as with the Olympics, Americans will begin to cheer on the red, white and blue in a sport they're not used to watching.
Earlierthis week last week, the U.S. played the Czech Republic in a World Cup tuneup game in Hartford, Connecticut. The Americans lost 4-2 to the Czechs, a unsurprising result considering U.S. coach (and Princeton alum) Bob Bradley elected to sit his top players. True soccer fans understood that, from the coach's perspective, the most important outcomes from this match were to avoid injuries to key players (such as Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey, neither of whom dressed for the game), evaluate players on the fringe of making the final 23-man World Cup roster (30 players were eligible to play in the friendly versus the Czech Republic), and determine the amount of progress made by players recovering from injury (such as Oguchi Onyewu). Despite the loss to the Czechs, who failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup, Bradley saw what he needed to see and had the information needed to trim his roster down.
Off the pitch, however, there were secondary goals that the U.S. soccer team ignored during their friendly match with the Czechs. For many, the 2010 World Cup will be an introduction to soccer, and last Tuesday's match was as an introduction to the 2010 World Cup. For fans looking to jump on the U.S. bandwagon, Tuesday's game had to be discouraging. None of the top players played, so anyone eager to see Landon Donovan (one of the few household-ish names on the U.S. team) or the other top players was likely disappointed. Although it was an exhibition game, the fact that the U.S. looked sloppy in losing to a team that wasn't able to qualify for the World Cup won't inspire confidence in casual fans looking for the Americans to make a run this June. While it's true that, to a soccer fan, the loss is easily explainable and understandable, someone tuning in to ESPN to watch soccer for the first time on Tuesday only saw mediocre play from the guys with USA on their jerseys.
Obviously, success in the World Cup will ultimately be what attracts casual fans to U.S. soccer, so if the information gained by Bradley and the rest of the U.S. coaching staff leads to first round success against England, Algeria and Slovenia, this will all be moot. That being said, the U.S. national team likely dug itself at least a shallow hole with its performance on Tuesday. Hopefully next time the stars will be on the field, the results will be different and the casual fans will give their team another pre-World Cup chance.
In just over
Earlier
Off the pitch, however, there were secondary goals that the U.S. soccer team ignored during their friendly match with the Czechs. For many, the 2010 World Cup will be an introduction to soccer, and last Tuesday's match was as an introduction to the 2010 World Cup. For fans looking to jump on the U.S. bandwagon, Tuesday's game had to be discouraging. None of the top players played, so anyone eager to see Landon Donovan (one of the few household-ish names on the U.S. team) or the other top players was likely disappointed. Although it was an exhibition game, the fact that the U.S. looked sloppy in losing to a team that wasn't able to qualify for the World Cup won't inspire confidence in casual fans looking for the Americans to make a run this June. While it's true that, to a soccer fan, the loss is easily explainable and understandable, someone tuning in to ESPN to watch soccer for the first time on Tuesday only saw mediocre play from the guys with USA on their jerseys.
Obviously, success in the World Cup will ultimately be what attracts casual fans to U.S. soccer, so if the information gained by Bradley and the rest of the U.S. coaching staff leads to first round success against England, Algeria and Slovenia, this will all be moot. That being said, the U.S. national team likely dug itself at least a shallow hole with its performance on Tuesday. Hopefully next time the stars will be on the field, the results will be different and the casual fans will give their team another pre-World Cup chance.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Looking Back: And 1 Mixtape Tour
For the latest installment of "Looking Back,"
here are my thoughts on the And 1 Mixtape Tour, which I attended in August 2007 at the Queen Mary pier in Long Beach, California.
Is the And 1 Mixtape Tour a true sporting event? I'm not sure. It certainly resembles a basketball game - there are two baskets, a court, a ball, dribbling (for the most part), etc. - so from that perspective I'd consider it an athletic competition. On the other hand, an And 1 basketball game is very different from what NCAA and NBA basketball fans are used to. The emphasis is on dunking, showmanship and swagger rather than teamwork, defense and rebounding. All joking about how "this is exactly like the NBA" aside, the And 1 tour is more "performance" than "competition." The tour isn't that different from that of a musician, actually; the performers travel between venues in a coach bus, perform a (mostly) pre-planned routine for the crowd, and do it all again in a different city a few days later. Since I'm not above attending non-competitive sporting events (I used to go to New York Islanders games all the time . . .), I was eager to give the And 1 tour a shot.
Is the And 1 Mixtape Tour a true sporting event? I'm not sure. It certainly resembles a basketball game - there are two baskets, a court, a ball, dribbling (for the most part), etc. - so from that perspective I'd consider it an athletic competition. On the other hand, an And 1 basketball game is very different from what NCAA and NBA basketball fans are used to. The emphasis is on dunking, showmanship and swagger rather than teamwork, defense and rebounding. All joking about how "this is exactly like the NBA" aside, the And 1 tour is more "performance" than "competition." The tour isn't that different from that of a musician, actually; the performers travel between venues in a coach bus, perform a (mostly) pre-planned routine for the crowd, and do it all again in a different city a few days later. Since I'm not above attending non-competitive sporting events (I used to go to New York Islanders games all the time . . .), I was eager to give the And 1 tour a shot.
Half sporting event and half hip hop concert, the And 1 Mixtape Tour is a lot of fun.
The And 1 tour might not be a traditional sporting event, but it's a lot of fun. Unlike most basketball games, everything was outdoors. The court was constructed outside the Queen Mary pier in Long Beach, right along the water. It was a great day to be outside, sitting in the bleacher seating watching basketball with the clear blue ocean serving as the backdrop. While the athletic feats were impressive (anyone who hasn't seen these guys perform should check them out sometime - they may not be "real" basketball players, but they're definitely athletes), what I found more interesting and entertaining was the culture that surrounds the game. It's not that often that a Jewish kid from Long Island gets to see a mostly black crowd root on mostly black athletes while an MC does half-play-by-play, half-freestyle-rap over a hip hop beat. Though smaller than a typical NBA or major NCAA crowd, the fans were passionate, involved and knowledgeable about their favorite players.
Blue skies, beaches and basketball. What more could you ask for on a weekend afternoon?
Like the Harlem Globetrotters before them, the members of the And 1 Mixtape Tour did a great job of entertaining the crowd (myself included) while making everyone feel like part of the show. The players seemed very approachable; their relative lack of fame made them extremely fan-friendly. Would I follow the tour regularly like I follow the New York Knicks? No, because the lack of a real competitive aspect gives little meaning to each individual tour stop. But on a sunny day next summer, when the And 1 Mixtape Tour bus rolls into a town near you, I would suggest you treat yourself to an afternoon of hoops, hip hop and heat.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Buying Perfection
Incredibly, this weekend produced the third no hitter, and the second perfect game, of the 2010 Major League Baseball season (see my previous perfect game-related post here). As amazing as this is, especially considering there have only been twenty perfect games thrown in all of MLB history, what's even more remarkable is the Florida Marlins announcement that the team will be selling the unsold tickets to Roy Halladay's perfect game at face value. This means that you can buy tickets to a game that already happened, either to own a little piece of history, lie to your friends and tell them you were at the game, or try to resell the ticket stub for a profit. From ESPN.com:
For a while, I used to save the ticket stubs from every sporting event I went to. The bulletin board attached to my bedroom wall in my parent's house is loaded with stubs from the games of the Huntsville Stars, New York Dragons, St. John's Red Storm and other assorted teams. My brother and I treated these tickets as badges of honor, each one a symbol of accomplishment (especially Montreal Expos ticket stubs; sitting though a whole baseball game at Olympic Stadium was often a painful experience). Just like a college freshman who keeps his empty beer bottles on the windowsill as a testament to his budding alcoholism, we thought the tickets granted us admission into an exclusive club of true sports fans.
In light of this upbringing, the sale of Roy Halladay's perfect game tickets seems shallow and cheap. Unless you're an avid sports memorabilia collector (in which case, it's likely that all the merchandise you own originally came from someone else anyway), what joy can you possibly get from a ticket stub from a game that you didn't attend? Instead of spending money on the ticket as a keepsake, I wish fans would instead buy tickets to a future game where they might see something magical happen in person. It might be a while until something impressive happens at a Marlins game again, though, so fans might want to spend the money they'll save on Dolphins tickets instead.
All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office. Paid attendance that night was about 25,000, a relatively large crowd for a Marlins' home game. By comparison, Florida drew a paid crowd of 10,115 -- its smallest of the season -- for Monday's game against Milwaukee.
For a while, I used to save the ticket stubs from every sporting event I went to. The bulletin board attached to my bedroom wall in my parent's house is loaded with stubs from the games of the Huntsville Stars, New York Dragons, St. John's Red Storm and other assorted teams. My brother and I treated these tickets as badges of honor, each one a symbol of accomplishment (especially Montreal Expos ticket stubs; sitting though a whole baseball game at Olympic Stadium was often a painful experience). Just like a college freshman who keeps his empty beer bottles on the windowsill as a testament to his budding alcoholism, we thought the tickets granted us admission into an exclusive club of true sports fans.
Why spend money on ticket stubs to a game you didn't even attend?
In light of this upbringing, the sale of Roy Halladay's perfect game tickets seems shallow and cheap. Unless you're an avid sports memorabilia collector (in which case, it's likely that all the merchandise you own originally came from someone else anyway), what joy can you possibly get from a ticket stub from a game that you didn't attend? Instead of spending money on the ticket as a keepsake, I wish fans would instead buy tickets to a future game where they might see something magical happen in person. It might be a while until something impressive happens at a Marlins game again, though, so fans might want to spend the money they'll save on Dolphins tickets instead.
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