Last night, like roughly 10 million Americans, I watched baseball’s All-Star Game.<\/p>\n
The game was over about fifteen minutes after it started; the National League jumped out to a 5-0 lead at the end of the first and the American League never seriously threatened.<\/p>\n
Still, I gutted it out and watched FOX’s coverage until the bitter end.<\/p>\n
And when I say “gutted it out,” what I really mean is “suffered the tribulations that come from listening to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver call a baseball game on FOX.”<\/p>\n
I’m sure they’re nice enough people in real life, but I can’t stand listening to them on television. With Buck, every single play is The Greatest Play Ever, and with McCarver, when he’s not making up nicknames for players (seriously, he decided last night that a player should be called “Hammerhand” so that’s what he called him during the game), he’s reciting baseball trivia, often pointless trivia, at that, in a blatant attempt at making some sort of human connection. And when you put them together, what you get is the baseball equivalent of Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call.”<\/p>\n
At the same time as the All-Star Game, “Cookie Monster” was trending on Twitter. I would much rather have had Cookie Monster in the broadcast booth than Buck and\/or McCarver.<\/p>\n
This, naturally, prompted an idea.<\/p>\n
What if FOX substituted broadcasters in the All-Star Game broadcast booth with the same frequency that the managers sub players in?<\/p>\n
Imagine this.<\/p>\n
Buck and McCarver in the first two innings.<\/p>\n
In the third inning, McCarver is replaced with Al Leiter.<\/p>\n
In the fourth inning, Buck is replaced with Len Kasper.<\/p>\n
In the fifth inning, Kasper and Leiter are replaced with Bob Uecker and Cookie Monster.<\/p>\n
In the sixth inning, Bob Uecker is replaced with Vin Scully.<\/p>\n
In the sixth inning, Vin Scully is replaced with Jim Palmer.<\/p>\n
In the seventh inning, Cookie Monster is replaced with Joe Miller.<\/p>\n
In the eighth inning, Miller and Palmer are replaced with two minor league radio broadcasters.<\/p>\n
In the ninth inning, the minor league broadcasters are replaced with Hawk Harrelson and Gilbert Gottfried.<\/p>\n
This is genius! Each inning is called in a different style!<\/p>\n
Maybe it wouldn’t be exactly<\/i> like that, but this should give you some idea of what I have in mind.<\/p>\n
It’ll never happen, but a guy can dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, like roughly 10 million Americans, I watched baseball’s All-Star Game. The game was over about fifteen minutes after it started; the National League jumped out to a 5-0 lead at the end of the first and the American League never seriously threatened. Still, I gutted it out and watched FOX’s coverage until theContinue reading “On Fixing Baseball’s All-Star Game”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4081,211],"class_list":["post-6518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball","tag-baseball","tag-fox-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}