You’re Killing Me

I don’t know which is worse, watch­ing the Red Sox lose the first two games of the series to the Yan­kees or watch­ing it on Fox.

Their announc­ing crew is hurt­ing my ears. Some­body named Joe or Jack Buck sounds like the most intel­li­gent of the three, but he doesn’t have to go far. Tim McCarver doesn’t seem to be watch­ing the same game as I am, he con­sis­tently gets names of the play­ers wrong and is out of step with the action. And Al Leiter is so quiet that the only time you know he is there is when they show him on cam­era explain­ing how to throw a cer­tain pitch and for a for­mer pitcher he does that badly. They talk when they sound be quiet and when they should be talk­ing there is silence. We see every pitch four times, first when it hap­pens and three replays includ­ing one from a cam­era buried in the dirt near home plate. Please an impor­tant pitch in an impor­tant sit­u­a­tion, but not every sin­gle one. The direc­tion is herky-jerky. It is all over the place and makes MTV jump cuts seem sedate. When­ever they switch to the cam­era down the first base line the sound jumps 10 deci­bels louder too. They have a very annoy­ing ani­mated base­ball that is used once a game to explain some facet of the game, I think, I turn the sound off. Fox is insert­ing an extra bit of pro­mo­ing in between innings, we get back to the game just in time to see the pitcher release his first pitch of the inning. No lead in at all, if a pinch hit­ter is in or a new pitcher, you don’t know until after the action (if they tell you.)

I know this might not be Fox’s fault (although it prob­a­bly is) but what is up with the ameriquest blimp? We get some nice aer­ial shots of the sta­dium and then they flash a lit­tle box telling us that it is com­ing from the ameriquest blimp with a nice illus­tra­tion of a red, white & blue blimp. We never see the blimp. I’m bet­ting if it is not a heli­copter, and in fact a real blimp, it is not painted that way, but some­thing in plain white hired for the occa­sion from the ACME Blimp Co. in Lake­hurst, NJ.