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Sunday - April 9, 2006

TV coverage rant

I've never been particularly impressed by the way any of the networks cover college baseball. For the most part, the announcers know very little about any of the players. They just have the stats. And, that's fine. I realize they can't possibly see all the teams on a regular basis since there's almost no television coverage. Actually, I suspect the only games any of 'em ever see are the ones they're forced to watch when they're in the announcers' booth. They make a lot of assumptions about how college ball is played based on the MLB games they see. They see a team in the Majors do something and automatically expect a college team to do the same thing in the same situation. And, it just doesn't happen. College baseball really is a whole 'nuther entity. It's frustrating to me, as a fan of Longhorn Baseball, when someone like Harold Reynolds who seems to know a lot about baseball says something completely wrong about how the Longhorns will perform in a given situation whenever he's calling a CWS game. And, of course, there's the usual bias in the national press against all things Texan. No matter the sport. But, none of that compares to the coverage we were treated to by Fox Sports Midwest today. It was just plain bad.

I know I'm supposed to be grateful that I was able to watch the game at all. Woo hoo! Fox Sports Southwest is giving us the Midwest feed. Woo hoo! And, to some extent, I am. But, please.

The announcers were completely lost. They rarely noticed lineup changes. They made flat out wrong pronouncements about the game throughout. One example: in the 9th, when KSU came up to bat, one of the announcers stated that KSU had scored every time the lead runner had reached base. Not true. In the 4th, Matt Marasco singled to start off the inning and KSU did not score. In the 8th (one inning before the comment was made), Eli Rumler walked and KSU failed to score. In the 1st and 5th, the lead-off man reached and KSU scored. So, that comes to 2-for-4. A far cry from every time, doncha think? I could go on but I'll just stop with the one promised example.

The graphics were off a lot. And, I mean way off. Quite often, there would be runners on 1b but the graphics would indicate that the runner was at 2b. And, vice-versa. The bases would be loaded but the graphics would indicate runners at 1b and 2b. The count would be 1-1 but the graphics would insist it was 0-2. It went on and on and on like that throughout the game.

The camera men missed a whole bunch of plays. At some point in the game, there was a runner at 1b. The graphics indicated that there was a runner at 2b, however. And, at least twice, the pitcher threw to 1b to keep the runner close to the bag. They didn't show the first baseman's end of the catch, though. Either time. It was as though, since the graphics indicated there was no runner at 1b, the pitcher must just be playing catch with the first baseman or something. And, why bother showing that? I guess that particular example is really more indicative of a blunder on the director's part. I have no way of knowing if the cameras caught the action at 1b, though. Since it was never shown.

Honestly, it was like watching a high-school AV production. Actually, that's probably an insult to a large majority of high-school AV classes. I don't know how much the poor production values added to the stress of the ugly ugly game. But, I do know that they did not help the situation at all. Sigh...

End rant. For now.

UPDATE.. See the related post by Brian at Big Ten Hardball. It looks like he might've seen a game put on by the same crew! Different teams. But, the same horrendous production values. Wow.

Posted by Joanna at 11:03 PM