OK, so you run a 75-year-old business that once thrived but has been losing popularity among your most devoted, longtime customers and their progeny.
What do you do?
1) Ignore those customers’ complaints and advice?
2) Treat those complaints as quickly, smartly and long-term logically as possible?
3) Make your product even more difficult and expensive to endure, let alone purchase?
Since roughly the start of this century, MLB and its national TV partners have annually chosen No. 1 and No. 3. Taking their best customers for drooling, money-to-burn saps and gawkers of product logos attached to every sight has become MLB’s business model.
Name one thing TV has done well — or even marginally better — during this postseason than previous postseasons. Nada, si?
What does now do or continues to do worse? Gotta a couple of hours?
We’ve been through this, over and over. It doesn’t benefit anyone or anything.
The host voices and analysts are either out to drown us in hype or bad info. They talk far more than live TV logically demands.
The views of live play are increasingly lost to in-game interviews; irrelevant, context-ignorant statistics; computerized, multi-colored lines tracking pitches and batted balls that allow audiences mere seconds to read, consider and apply — if they determine to read them to begin with.
Oh, and endless crowd shots of fans waving hand towels that could be, for all we know and all they’re worth, file footage from the annual Diet Ginger Ale Festival in Lambertville, N.J.
And you know by now what it takes to suffer games determined by managers taking their orders from computers that duplicate conditions and circumstances that can not be duplicated without complete devotion to science fiction.
Plus, we can all see, by now, that the more millions paid to players, the less they’re inclined to play winning baseball and the more likely they are to get commercial endorsements and bat-flipping roles in baseball TV promos.
Are TV’s excesses, which give greater focus to what doesn’t count, supposed to be an improvement from its technologically unsophisticated days, when it arrived at the ballpark only to pay full attention to the games? Instead, every advancement sends us backward.
And that likely will grow worse, as someone will come up with another artificial distraction device that will cause a rush of blood to the indiscriminate heads of TV execs.
Remember the Maine? No, remember ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” Booger Mobile!
Cowherd hadn’t heard about tragedy year after
Call me crazy, but if I paid a fellow $6 million per to host a cable TV sports show, as Fox pays Colin Cowherd to host one on FS1, I’d occasionally check up on such a hire to learn if he’s any good, or at least knows what he’s talking about.
In the case of Cowherd, Fox execs presumably would repeatedly learn that he’s as much of a fake, a steady disseminator of embarrassingly rotten guesswork and obvious but unadmitted 180s as is Stephen A. Smith and Mike Francesa. But that’s the business.
Last week, as can still be heard on from reliable baloney-tracking X user @BackAftaThis, Cowherd suggested Mets-Padres “as a juicy World Series matchup.” MLB has made a lot of money-first changes under Rob Manfred, but given that the Mets and Padres both still play in the National League, that’s impossible.
Cowherd, who has struggled with his career bio, once produced a list of QBs he felt will never make it to the Super Bowl, let alone win it, as they’re simply not good enough.
On his list, and spoken by Cowherd in the active tense, was Dwayne Haskins. He clearly did not know — and might’ve been the only one — that the Washington then Steelers QB, and former Ohio State star, was killed by a truck while walking a highway more than a year earlier.
It was a story that was, especially for $6 million per, that was impossible to miss. Or so one might think.
Well, the highly-ranked Georgia football program took a week off from being cited for reckless driving. Including one fatality, between 25 and 30 full-ride-plus players have been busted in just the past 18 months.
Last week, however, receiver Colbie Young, a recruit from Binghamton who transferred from Miami, was arrested for assault on an unborn child carried by a woman identified as an ex-girlfriend.
Georgia’s crime-infested football program has escaped the media attention it has earned due to its perceived value to TV networks, plus pandering to Machiavellian yahoos. The SEC Network, for example, is owned by ESPN/Disney, thus, well, you tell me.
Shehadi stands out for great question
There is no better chance to conduct a good postgame interview than to have paid attention to the game. TBS’ Lauren Shehadi proved that after Thursday’s Game 4 of Guardians 5, Tigers 4.
Shehadi stood with first baseman David Fry, who hit a two-run homer for the lead in the seventh, then a sacrifice RBI bunt in the ninth.
Instead of asking one of those “How important was it …?” questions, Shehadi asked about bunting in the ninth after homering in the seventh. And good questions deserve good answers.
Fry laughed, then said that the last time he bunted was into a double play! Great stuff.
By the way, for those who don’t recall or weren’t yet born, Cleveland won that game the old-school/smart-school way. Same guy who hit the go-head homer next bunted for a two-run lead in the ninth. Whatever it took.
It was a throw-back, good-for-better-senses ending, like a cold glass of Fox’s u-Bet chocolate milk.
Johan Neeskens, the Dutch midfield star who later played — and hard — for the Cosmos, died last week at 73, in Algeria.
Neeskens was easy to root for, as he played with a verve to win every ball in his space, where other late-career Cosmos imports only chased women in Manhattan clubs. I immediately wrote that he was a “Leapin’ fool,” American slang for playing with enthusiasm, though his European reps didn’t quite understand. They threatened to sue me for defamation.
Roger Goodell’s NFL remains a great source of perverse comedy. He has allowed the Super Bowl to become an annual extravaganza starring vulgar, crotch-grabbing, N-word-spitting, gun-worshiping rappers as representatives of the NFL, yet now there’s a penalty on players who make post-play gun-shooting gestures.
As part of the next CBA, the NFL and NFLPA will negotiate the legality of players who make post-play stabbing motions.
In other ho-hum football news, Browns’ $230 million (all guaranteed) QB Deshaun Watson last week settled his 24th or 25th — who’s counting? — sexual assault suit. But in Goodell’s NFL, Harrison “Family Man” Butker is publicly condemned for not being in line with the league’s social values.
