Completely RedZoning Out

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The Fall Classic and 'What Is a Classic?'

I don't think the tenth inning was even halfway over when Joe Buck started referring to Game Six as a classic. I don't know if that's true. A moment after Game One ended, writers praised it as a cerebral masterpiece, but the eagerness to make these games into metaphor and referenda probably overlooks what they've actually been.

Game Six does seem hard to top. This surprising, infuriating series demands a lot of energy even from spectators. In the ninth inning, I yearned for it to end, just to stop the frustration. I suspect the Texas Rangers might feel similarly. It would shock no one if both they and the Cardinals were unequal to the task of playing like they did last night.

Luckily for the Cardinals, they can feel buoyed by a thundering positive crowd and by the fresh memory of overcoming two different two-run leads in deciding innings. The Rangers must confront blowing those leads, blowing Josh Hamilton's redemptive moment, then come back to try it all again under a blanket of hostile noise.

Remembering the League Division Series

GAME 162
On the last day of the season, the Phillies eliminated the Braves, letting the Cardinals slip into the NL Wild Card spot, while a rain delay and extra innings allowed a historic Red Sox collapse to nearly synchronize with an Evan Longoria homer that sent the Rays into the playoffs as the AL Wild Card. It was amazing, and it prompted an almost explosive joy from fans. This was what the end of the season should be like. This is why we didn't need another wild card team: "This is what you can shove up your horse and ride outta town, Mr. Bud."

At once, I sympathized and felt confused.

Disliking Bud Selig feels natural, like flowers growing toward sunlight or toddlers fearing snakes. Bud Selig does bad things to baseball, but wanting another wild card isn't bad so much as it's the least progressive solution to expanding opportunity for all teams. It's a simple solution, and as is the case with most institutional solutions in America, we assume that simpler ones are better because difficult or unseen challenges automatically portend something worse. Adding another wild card feels a lot like solving the inequities of private health insurance by mandating everyone buy it instead of trying a public option: when in doubt, motion will be mistaken for a valid substitute for real improvement.

Beautiful Returns: NFL Kickoff, 2011

Whenever the first NFL game of the year comes on TV, I completely slacken in my chair, let my mouth fall open and emit a narcotized "aaaahhhhhhh" noise. Mostly I do this to bug The Wife, whose loathing of football I've never managed to lessen with cajoling, barbecue, beer or desperate garment-ripping (mine, not hers) pleas. I like to play to every addiction stereotype she already believes football induces.

If I'm honest with myself, I admit that this play-acting isn't entirely insincere; I really am incredibly happy to see football back on TV. Perhaps not slumped irremediably on a sofa and drooling with a soporific smile on my face, but I get excited about the start of the game and notice myself relaxing, happy, when it starts. Make of that what you will, traders in "bread and circus" metaphors. The producers of the NFL on NBC certainly mined the event for all they could.

If they were cowed by the negative response to last year's show, opening with Taylor Swift and Dave Matthews Band, they certainly didn't show it, going this year with Maroon 5 and Kid Rock. The first one seemed an obvious choice; I'm actually surprised that NBC didn't run a crawl during the Maroon 5 performance with, "Catch lead singer Adam Levine on the next season of The Voice, only on NBC!" Then again, doing this might remind viewers that Cee Lo Green is also on that show and make them wonder why no black musicians were available (again) for this event. Maroon 5 edged dangerously close to provoking this realization with the presence of a black guy playing keyboards and uncomfortably representing the antithesis of Maroon 5's kind of music.

The Box We Want Boffo Big Ben to Bust

Normal people of any stripe should not watch Super Bowl pregame shows. They offer bad history, bad biography, bad analysis and bad logic. Just when they finish laying waste to all of these, they also manage to be a bad version of Entertainment Tonight, country music concerts and daytime talk shows.

If you managed to overhear this year's pregame show while getting ready for a party or waiting seemingly forever for the game to start, you probably heard a lot of faulty analysis and logic about Pittsburgh Steelers starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Most fans of American sports can diagnose the bad analysis easily enough: "Ben Roethlisberger is one of the all-time greats because he just wins ballgames." But the bad logic was the more compelling. FOX NFL host Curt Menefee kicked off a theme that was carried throughout the pregame and into the game broadcast: this was Big Ben's "redemption season," and winning the Super Bowl would complete that redemption.

It takes an awful lot of question begging to construct any scenario wherein winning a particular ballgame can redeem anyone of anything, let alone two separate accusations of rape. What's more interesting is the converse implication, one the broadcast didn't address. To wit: if winning a Super Bowl morally redeems an alleged two-time rapist, then doesn't losing it confirm that he's just a piece-of-shit rapist? More importantly, why would anyone have any interest in an argument that tortured? What do they earn from that, and from whom?

Harry Potter and the NFL Wild Card Weekend

Somewhere around hour #6 of the first day of NFL Wild Card weekend, I began to suspect that I'd been cured of my loathing of sports announcers.

Nearly two years spent luxuriating in the NFL Red Zone channel's absence of commercials and its frenetic jumps from game to game and from big play to big play meant that I'd experienced unmediated football. When big important things are happening in the game is when most announcers are too focused to go on inane time-filling mental jags. I had been spared about 30 weeks' worth of ads about THE ONLY TRUCK WITH A HEMI, Lipitor and dick medicine, and also "end zone" reporting from the obese Tony Siragusa, who needs to have a heart attack from mistaking his dick medicine for Lipitor — then have his corpse dragged into a ditch by a truck.

I was cheerful and, at times, a little bit rueful. This was fun. Who could fail to have total fun while watching football, and why had I failed at that so long? Could it be that I hadn't given people a fair shake?—that so much familiarity over so many years bred such contempt that I willfully blinded myself even to some announcers' good qualities? Were they actually good people, and was I actually just the jerk?

On the second day, during the fourth game of the weekend, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dispelled all my doubts in less than three minutes. They didn't just suck; they sucked expeditiously. They sucked like they'd just gotten hired at Suck Co. by the Director of Suckery, and they were still in their 30 day probationary period wherein they could be terminated instantly for failure to suck hard, suck often and suck with vigor. Their ratio of minutes spent talking to minutes in which they were sucking approached one. They were truly doing yeoman's work, if "yeoman" is old English for the blowjob caddy on a ship that's falling apart because the people who built and run it are all assholes.

What I had forgotten to take into account was that minor but cherished delight of the NFL playoffs: that networks send out their best people to cover games because their limited broadcasting access allows them to know which is the game to cover. (For instance, of the four games this weekend, NBC covered the first two, while CBS and FOX covered the next two.) Generally, the people who have been around the longest are the people who viewers complain about the least, so networks send out the veterans expecting to satisfy the viewership.

This can still get screwed up, though. FOX Sports, for instance, is categorically horrible, which is how their premier announcing team can be universally regarded as the worst one on their payroll. Buck and Aikman have reached the top of the pyramid — and with any luck they will be entombed in it soon — but it's as if Egyptian civilization was based on the glory and immortality of turds. FOX Sports' national football (and baseball) empire is a ziggurat of cowpats lorded over by retards.

Let's go to the games.

Stu Scott and The Ultimate Hustler

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching Monday Night Football and got a phone call from a buddy. I paused the DVR and tried to cheerily say hello when my eye caught the TV screen, and I started laughing uncontrollably. I could hardly get a word out and eventually settled for taking a picture of the screen and texting it to my friend.

As you can guess from the title, the screen froze on an image of ESPN personality Stu Scott. I wasn't laughing at his eye. I don't enjoy making fun of it; it's just a thing, a condition so normal by now that I think of Thom Yorke as having a Stu Scott eye. There are other things to mock Stu for, like thinking that he would be a great Sportscenter anchor not by following Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann's lead and writing witty copy that fans turned into catchphrases, but rather by skipping the wit and fan parts, deciding on catchphrases himself and then running them into the ground. No, what I was laughing at was his huge, fabulously repulsive tie.

After I got off the phone, I shared this picture with other contributors to (and friends of) this site. Some people saw to it that a few eye jokes made their way into the piece. As a guy named The Bi Bandit put it: "[Given] Scott's tendency to say booya I'd like to encourage that stray football [that injured his eye] to maim harder in the future. But I feel really bad that I'm still laughing about a guy getting his eye all fucked up from a football-throwing machine." Agreed.

Still, that didn't stop anyone. Enjoy. (Click to embiggen.)

Good Riddance, Joe Morgan; or, 'We Won't Really Be Safe Until We're Sure the Head Has Died'

On Monday, ESPN announced that it would not invite Jon Miller and Joe Morgan back for a 21st season as play-by-play and color-commentary men for their flagship baseball show, Sunday Night Baseball. Response across blogs and message boards ran the gamut from celebratory to orgasmic. Wishing that Joe Morgan would somehow please shut up has been common practice amongst fans for nearly a decade, to the extent that I'm sure some enterprising viewer has tried to deliver a pizza to the announce booth to contrive a way to at least temporarily stuff Morgan's word hole.

Morgan exemplifies old-school baseball thought. For intelligent and progressive fans, he's an antique impeding smart new approaches to understanding the game. For those afraid of change, for traditionalists, for the incurious, he's a relic that must be preserved, locked in the booth and left to talk until he dies. Even then his body should be encased in lucite, some tiny Easter Island head monument to calling the game the right way: gritty, devoid of senses, wrong. Naturally, it didn't take long for the defenders of the old school to lament his release. Because I have both cool friends and awesome readers, it also didn't take long for a guy named Nate to pass along a link to a truly disastrous piece of sports editorial.

The author in question is Milton Kent, one of those poor sorts saddled with two first names that could be read forward or backward and sound lame either way. Rounding out the bookishly forlorn picture his name conjures is the fact that under his byline he's listed as "National Reporter." It's just a sad distinction made on a major website, so unnecessary that it seems more like an affirmation than anything else. It brings to mind Wile E. Coyote holding out his business card labeled, "Super Genius," or those sorts of waterproofed pants that toddlers wear, the ones with names like "Big Boy Pants." Milton Kent is a big boy now. He's readed all over the America by grownups. If only he'd aimed his editorial at them as well.

When he sent in the link, Nate asked for only one thing: "Please go after this guy." With pleasure.

MLB Playoffs: (Not Really) NLCS Game 3, via Chatlogs

As soon as I knew I was going to do a few more playoff blogs this year, I sent an email to my buddy JShap, who last showed up in "The Emmys Are for Idiots, Part II," and asked if he was interested in joining in. Last year, during the second game of the World Series, he and I wound up commenting on the game via AIM, and it was easily the best part of the piece and the most fun I had writing about the postseason. Because I still find myself quoting from it — and think it has two of the best lines ever printed on this site — I figured there was no way another chat couldn't make the Championship Series at least a little more fun.

I was right, but inadvertently, we wound up overshadowing the game, almost bailing on it completely. That probably happened for a few reasons:

1. JShap had to do some work, which meant that he had to choose what to de-prioritize. Work wasn't an option, and since he was ostensibly there to chat with me, the game wound up less scrutinized.
2. I was up until eight that morning doing work and managed to get about three and a half hours' sleep. Basically, my brain was too sluggish to really follow too much at once.
3. Joe Buck and Tim McCarver were normal and on-point. I've covered them when they've been off-the-rails nutty, staggeringly stupid, offensively disinterested and plain mediocre. This was not only one of their better games, it might be one of the best that I've heard them call.
4. I was a little burned out on baseball in general, from having written two pieces and 6,000+ words about it the day before.
5. The game was quick, efficient and pretty conventional. The innings flew by, and nothing untoward happened. Apart from a few unfortunate errors for the Phillies, this wasn't a game where you could point to anything particularly momentous or worthy of contention.

In short, NLCS Game 3 was one of those ballgames where you can understand everything that happened by just reading a box score. There wasn't something visually odd that needed interpretation, nor was the announcing or presentation mistaken enough that it would be important to note in a way that an ESPN article would not.

Because of that, the few notes I took were mostly useless. They're play-by-play stuff, the sort of thing ESPN does better and that you don't need to hear from me. At the end of the game, well over 90% of what I'd written came in the form of chat. I'll go ahead and try to ground some of that conversation in terms of action on the screen, but much if it is untethered to the game drama. If you hate chatlogs, my apologies, but it's best you punch out now.


We open with the national anthem performed by a member of Death Cab for Cutie, putting his band's unique spin on the material, which is to say acoustical, stylistically inert, vocally sub-competent, and deadly fucking dull, dull, dull. His presence here also guarantees that of his wife, Zooey Deschanel, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl best known for playing the same tissue paper-thin waifish characters, making tissue paper-thin music of forgettable quality and being so genuinely banal that a website once asked (and answered), "Is Zooey Deschanel the Most Boring Person Alive?"

Anyway, I'm thinking these things when JShap finally swans in:

ME: You're late. The national anthem was sung by a douchebag from Death Cab for Cutie. The one married to Zooey Deschanel. Which is why, supposedly, Zooey Deschanel is singing "God Bless America" later. Really. The Land of the Twee and the Home of the Reedy, Weak and Affected.
JSHAP: I'd rather ride in a Death Cab for Cutie than listen to that!
ME: You realize you just backhandedly called yourself cute? I like this decision, though. It's like the people in the Giants' front office were programming the singing for this game and thought, "Wait, what if people in America don't know they're playing this game in San Francisco?" "Good point. Do you think we could have someone perform the national anthem as a series of pops and clicks?" "Yes, and let's have it sung by a tree." "The Stanford Cardinal is busy that day. Just go down to the Mission and straw poll people about what indie piece of crap they most want to hear."
JSHAP: What I love about Zooey and America both is that they're just so down to earth and relatable.
ME: I remember one time being on this plane going somewhere. I didn't know. I think I was trying to find myself, you know? Anyway, I had this really long layover at Midway, maybe four hours. I just wanted to be left by myself to work things out, but I met this really amazing country that wouldn't leave me alone until I came out of my shell and helped it perform an acoustic guitar song by clapping my hands and letting it see me smile. That country was America.
JSHAP: America totally got me into the Shins and taught me not to sweat the bullshit.
ME: America smiled at me, and I pulled a thin sundress over America's head and saw its tiny breasts, and it self-consciously covered the faint chestnut down of its pubic hair with a small hand girlish hand that had chewed fingernails and chipped polish.
JSHAP: My laughter is stifled by my erection. It's usually the other way around.
ME: I got uncomfortable typing that.
JSHAP: Well it was tastefully done, and the story called for it.

MLB Playoffs: Rangers/Yankees ALCS Game 3

Game 3 was over for maybe three minutes before my instant message client started popping with the sounds of people who never talk to me about baseball IMming me to talk about baseball. Texas Rangers starter Cliff Lee was sublime. No, on second thought, he was just vicious. Or, as a guy I know named Jim put it:

JIM: In three starts, Cliff Lee has thrown 34 Ks and walked one batter.
ME: I know.
JIM: If your blog about his pitching doesnt include the word "nasty," you should find a better synonym that sounds nastier than nasty.
ME: Filthy.
JIM: Pornographic. Although you're going to be posting about balls being thrown, so that may cross the line.
ME: Ahahaha.
JIM: Just say that it was "some Harry Potter golden-snitch-type shit."

It was. Cliff Lee threw his cutter as if he had bewitched it, striking out 13 Yankee batters and holding them to two hits — one a broken-bat blooper — through eight innings. But if you saw the game, you know that, and you're here for something else. You want the abuse, and the commercials and announcer scorn.

Call me Mr. Sharon Jones and dap-king me, motherfucker! Blog it! BLOG IT! Bwooooosh!


RANGERS at YANKEES—ALCS GAME THREE

• Your cretins for this game appear courtesy of TBS. On play by play we have Ernie Johnson, with John Smoltz and Ron "Hello, Darling!" on color. By the end of the game, Smoltz will have appeared funny and rational, Darling will remain unchanged, and Johnson will have his mic cut off for a prolonged attempt at an Orson Welles impression.

• This has been a thing with every bit of bumper music for every TBS game this postseason, but can someone explain to me what the fuck Kid Rock's "I WAS BAWRN FREE? I WAS BAWRN FREE? I WAS BAWRN FREE?" has to do with baseball? Seriously, just read this shit. If the rest of the album is anything like this, I'm pretty sure this is the first time someone ever cut an LP with the aim of selling Chevy trucks on TV for half a decade and spending the rest of his life having his face airbrushed on American flag tank tops. Also, my kid brother can probably grow a better 'stache than Kid Rock. Fuck anybody who gets in a truck with or because of him. You can't trust him, not with that Frenchie-stache action.

MLB Playoffs: Rays ALDS Game 1 & Roy Halladay's Gem

Welcome to the postseason. I promised a reader that I would do at least one full day of "liveblogs" of the MLB Divisional Series playoff games, so yesterday found me setting aside a 12-hour block of time to endure such indignities as drinking beer, eating Thai food, drinking iced tea, eating sausages, watching a no-hitter and sitting down. I also typed.

I can't promise that I will do a full day of these again, so let's play ball!


Pregame

Oh, we can't do that yet. We have to wait. It's time for the absence of analysis couched in vague non-answers and predictions so over-qualified that they declare nothing. This year TBS airs all the divisional games, which means that we open in the TBS studio, with your hosts, Cal Ripken, David Wells, Dennis Eckersley and some other guy who I would like to murder.

Offscreen (I just mistyped that as "offscream"), Cal Ripken hits balls in a batting cage at the edge of the studio. Awesome. He's way too old to play at anything like a major league level, and some boy cowers behind a net throwing him meatball pitches. We might as well be watching your drunk dad potato a bunch of fat, slow lobs for all the heroics on display here.

MLB Playoffs: Yankees/Twins ALDS Game 1

For earlier playoff games, please see MLB Playoffs: Rays ALDS Game 1 & Roy Halladay's Gem.

Pregame

After filling time to end the broadcast of the Reds/Phillies game, we have to go back to the TBS studio to fill time before the Yankees/Twins game. Because one of the most amazing things that can ever happen in baseball just happened, everyone in the studio feels he has to stamp his wisdom on it and offer some announcing stab at immortality. David Wells tells us all about how he knew Roy Halladay when he first came up with the Toronto Blue Jays and showed so much promise; then Halladay went back down to the minors and came out to throw a perfect game and have this kind of performance.

This is a really interesting summary, because Wells has just made 1998 and 2010 sound like they happened a few weeks apart. It's kind of like Kirk Douglas saying, "Well, I knew my son Michael had determination because once I showed him how to walk, he just wouldn't stop walking. That's how he graduated high school and produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and now he's finished filming the new Wall Street movie." I know Shakespeare used to compress time like this in many of his plays, but in this case a really dumb Falstaff just poached Doc Brown's DeLorean and used it to park on Octavian to keep him from murdering Prince Hal.

Opening Daze #2: First Games with the Rays... and with the Rays, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver

I realize after a while it might seem tiresome to target announcers when talking about baseball, but I think three things lend this space to that kind of attention. One, I like words, and, despite announcers having no more important tool than language, they manage to abuse it consistently. Sometimes just the act of lazily listening to a game is so disheartening and frankly weird that it provokes a sensation like the one I imagine I'd feel if I came upon a fire truck equipped only with colanders.

Two, nobody needs my play-by-play recap. There are some very good sports journalists out there and plenty more tolerable crafstman. Since it's in terms of broad opinion or player evaluation where these guys usually put a foot wrong, you're safe with recaps. Just check a local paper for a relevant game, and you'll find the thrills, setbacks, substitutions and dingers you need to know about. Granted, I can try to talk about an amazing baseball game I attended, but there's always the chance that you don't care about the teams that were there.

That brings up point number three: the announcer experience is universal. We all have to deal with them, and a few notable exceptions aside, we all have things we hate about them. While I think everyone in America loves the Dodgers' Vin Scully, I don't know a single Yankee fan who likes anyone who calls games for the Yankees. Even more universally, when it comes to FOX Saturday Baseball or ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball, we all have to deal with the same people, regardless of where we live. And they are all horrible.

Opening Daze #1: ESPN's Enduring Failure

When Josh Beckett throws his first pitch, on April 4th, to officially begin the baseball season, I emit one of those involuntary ahhhhhh sounds that you occasionally hear when you walk out the front door of an airport and are surrounded by smokers lighting up for the first time in five hours.

I'm sure that I have a sincere and elaborate opinion somewhere in me explaining why baseball is the greatest game, but at this moment, only three explanations come to mind:

1. It's back, and football isn't. Also, the World Cup hasn't started yet.

2. You really don't have to pay too much attention. I mean, yeah, there's all that poetry in what doesn't happen — or so say people like George Will, who claim that social justice occurs when you don't do anything either. Basically, you can glean as much or as little from a baseball game as you like. If you want to observe defensive shifts and whether a pitcher is banging the outside of the plate against somebody, great. If you've got work to do, great. You can hook up the radio, worry away at something on the computer, do the dishes, make a dinner or tinker in the garage. Baseball is the most rewarding auditory game. Vin Scully proves this. Most people who get all uptight about how you have to watch everything are usually annoying, even if they aren't statistics wonks or bad gamblers. Most of them are probably dishonest, too. Practically everyone I know grew up with as much baseball on the radio as on the TV. And we grew up into having MLB cable packages.

3. It's a long season, so missed games and losses don't matter that much. Football is so immediate and so statistically compacted that everything seems pressing. With football, most of the games each week happen at the same time on the same day. If you're busy then, you miss out. Worse, it's on for less than half the year (20 weeks, counting the postseason), and most of those weeks feature so much head-to-head stuff that you can't see it all. Baseball happens for most of the year. Many of those days, there are games on at 1 pm, 4 pm, 7pm and then 10 pm (Eastern). Best of all, even if your team is absolutely amazing, they're still going to lose 60 times. You can afford to not sweat the small stuff — while in the garage, trying to fix your stupid lawnmower.

NFL Wild Card Weekend: Cultural History and Murder Fantasies

It's NFL playoffs time, the wonderful five-week stretch of the year where telling our significant others that "every game is important" isn't a terrible lie and where three of those weekends feature two days back to back with perfect excuses to drink constantly and grill something that used to be alive, hopefully at the same time.

I originally planned to live-blog all four games of the wild card weekend until about halfway through the first one, where I realized the attempt would make me kill something and try to grill it just to break the frustration. Three of the four games were painful to watch.

Two reasons for that jump out:

1. Three of them were basically blowouts.
Blowouts rule when your team's doing them, but there's nothing fun about them if you're a neutral watcher. You have to feel some stake in it, like deeply loathing one of the teams or QBs. Of course, the announcers can't do this, and since it's the playoffs, nobody really goes daffily off-script talking about whatever occurrs to them. We have to take these very seriously and speculate baselessly about coming seasons for each franchise; losing focus is not an option. Thus the NFL wild card weekend turned into something like nine hours of quasi-indifferent solemnity, like being stuck at consecutive funerals for three bosses killed in some mass grilling mishap.

The Yankees Are Cancer: World Series, 2009

You already know the outcome, so welcome to the last bit of liveblogging doom, gloom, angst and loathing for the 2009 baseball season. Think of this as the sports equivalent of watching Glenn Beck read a newspaper. Only I'm not actually insane. Let us instead enter a legitimate Chamber of Loathing:

Being a baseball fan and rooting for the Yankees is like being an oncologist and rooting for cancer.

I don't remember when I wrote that. I want to say the 7th inning. And while I recognize that it is partially histrionic, I think also that it's true.

Most baseball fans want to see their teams win, and aside from a few sociopaths or fans of teams who've been so horrible for so long that they've earned a malicious desire, very few fans want to see their teams stomp holy hell all season and win a championship effortlessly. In video games, it's one thing to play in God Mode, to force trades and make your team a roster of monsters, but in real life I think we all acknowledge that victories are sweeter for being won rather than being taken and walked off with. I think any Red Sox fan would, in a candid moment, admit that 2004 and 2007 would have been dreadfully dull without the 0-3 and 1-3 comeback runs in the ALCS to get to the World Series, because those Series games were almost painfully lopsided. (I think any good Red Sox fan would also admit that the team had an obscenely large payroll and reaped the rich benefits of the same.)

Series Blog, Games 4 & 5: Gutty Twitter, Centaurs and Chinless Buzzards

This is the latest part in a volume of frustration. Part One deals with David Wells wearing a Member's Only jacket over his fatness. Part Two celebrates another postseason loss for the overrated/under-ridiculed Tony LaRussa. Part Three is your resource for FISTING and how getting a job because of your dad and grandpa doesn't work so well for people around you. Part Four details how godawful Joe Buck and Tim McCarver continue to be. Part Five focuses on World Series Game One and fan-paranoid jinxes. And Part Six covers World Series Games Two and Three. Let's play ball!

World Series Game Four

• Ugh, another national anthem, another gross martial display. Just once I sort of wish that the Air Force or Army (or whichever branch) didn't screen their singers carefully enough and sent someone out there with PTSD. We'd sit as baseball and the Armed Services again solemnized and venerated combat, death, injury and horror, and the well-coiffed representative would belt out the familiar lines, reaching the "laaaaaand of the freeeeeeeee" and hear the fireworks go off and immediately flip the fuck out. I think maybe that might dial back the aggressive patriotism to tolerable pre-9/11 levels, at least for a couple years.


• 8:23 pm:

McCARVER: More than anything else [Blanton's] a gutty performer, and that's why he's out there tonight.

We're not even at the first pitch yet, and we have a "gutty" sighting. As was the case with Chase Utley in Game One, McCarver has nothing to say and is scrambling for meaningless baseball generalities. In Utley's case, he didn't expect the guy to be the offensive hero of the first game, so he ad-libbed something that at first blush might have seemed meaningful. In this case, he's just trying not to insult Blanton. He can only bring up his good outing against the Rays in the 2008 World Series and the home run he hit off Edwin Jackson for so long — there is airtime to fill — but he can't go negative without alienating a huge FOX market share.

'Reverse Jinx?' World Series Game One — Sort of

I can't explain how I watched last year's World Series. I managed to pay attention, take notes and write not one but two live-blogs of the thing. I suppose I was distracted enough by the novelty of reacting to things via live-blogging to not collapse in a wet sack of neuroses about the games themselves. No such luck this year.

I'm genuinely sports superstitious. Even as I'm doing superstitious things, I can tell myself, "This is objectively nonsensical. There is no causal relationship between your behavior and team performance," yet I won't for a second stop whatever's occupying my attention. One time I saw my team win a late-inning playoff game while I was seated in a weird way and holding on to a magazine I'd been flipping through. I sat in that position, clutching that magazine, for the rest of the games. They won 'em all!—I developed a peculiar pain! No, seriously. I had trouble walking because I'd sat like a mutant to watch baseball. Somehow this made perfect sense at the time.

In a strangely obverse display, I once walked home from a trip to The Booze Store during the early innings of a playoff game and discovered that while I was out, the Red Sox had scored three runs. A few minutes after sitting down in front of the TV, they gave up two. I immediately left the house and walked around my neighborhood for what I later figured out was eight miles. I periodically called friends to check the score. The Sox wound up winning by nearly ten runs, but when I'd gone home in late innings and after they'd gotten a large lead, the opposing team put runners in scoring position (RISP), and I left the house again.

Having a McCarver Moment: ALCS Games 1 & 2

It was not a day well-planned. When you spend about four hours watching DVDs of The A-Team looking for godawful effects shots that you can rip off and insert in a deliberately godawful promotional video and then feel too wiped out to watch playoff baseball, you have gravely miscalculated.

But I had fun. I was with good people, and I think I strained something laughing when I saw the guy who played Rasczak in Starship Troopers guest starring as an evil taxi company mastermind who wore skin-tight nylon pants with no zippers or buttons up front, a prominent dong-bulge and a 1980s-sized cell phone improbably jammed in a pocket.

Still, when you wind up falling asleep in your chair after one inning of the first game of the American League Championship Series, you have managed your time poorly. You've done worse when you wake up and realize you didn't set the DVR to record the game. Consider this my McCarver Moment of the 2009 playoffs. Because of it, the Game One recap is going to be awfully short.

NFL Red Zone Is Sweet Freedom

I broke down and bought the NFL Red Zone channel. Call it premature or a lack of perspective if you want, but I believe this might be the greatest thing I've ever done. I like football. Football is awesome. It's 60 minutes of awesome. But, as you may have noticed, every football broadcast is at least 180 minutes. These others are not good minutes.

The NFL Red Zone channel essentially concedes that those 120 extra minutes are trash, and that even some of the 60 awesome minutes are not so great. You're paying $50 to not watch football as it is traditionally broadcast. It's a bold move for the NFL: their business model is, essentially, "We acknowledge that two-thirds of what we show you is flawed, interruptive, unappealing and dull, before and after the one-third you actually enjoy. We recognize these flaws are severe enough that you will pay to avoid them."

Here's the deal: for $50 per season, you get one channel and one HD channel that, from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. airs commercial-free football from every game. No blackouts, no mandatory games crowding out other broadcasts. No filler. No booth reviews. No sideline interviews. Essentially no commentators (more on this later). No dead air. For seven hours, a single host, Scott Hanson, does no-frills voiceover transitions, devoid of any attempt to foist his "personality" on the programming, as the feed cuts into any game where a turnover just happened, a team just scored or a team is about to score. It's seven straight hours of everything you like about football and nothing you hate. Unless you're deeply invested in a particular team or game, there's no reason to watch football any other way anymore.