Baseball-Related Program Activities

• Perhaps you should not, during your pregame show that is tightly timed and controlled to the second, go live on the air and ask Ernie Harwell a question about Al Kaline, because he will of course give a long-winded answer, thus causing Jeanne Zelasko to have to cut him off and look like a jerk doing it. (I almost wrote "big jerk," but I don't want some pro-pregnancy group complaining about my choice of words to describe a woman who is, uh, with child.)
  
  
• British national anthem? I know "My Country 'Tis of Thee" when I hear it! The amount of patriotic songs played before and during baseball games is growing out of control.
  
  
• Hey, I thought Scooter was dead! Too bad every kid who cares already knows what a change-up is because they're faithfully rendered in video games these days, probably with better camera angles than Fox has available.
  
  
• Hey, it's the descendant of the glowing blue hockey puck, this time showing the path of the ball to the plate.
  
  
• For a second, I thought they said Jim Bouton was the general manager of the Nationals, but it's actually someone named Jim Bowden. Too bad; Jim Bouton might reach Ed Hart-ian levels of general manager-ness.
  
  
• I should have realized the game was going to be sponsored by Chevrolet and gotten an apple Home Run Pie at the supermarket on Sunday, but no, all I had was lemon. It was slightly better than the vanilla pie I ate Sunday, but not much. I think I'm going to stick to Hostess fruit pies for my future fruit pie needs; they also do a good job of distracting comic-book villains, as I understand it.
  
  
• Joe Buck: You can tell a lot about Dontrelle Willis by the way he wears his hat.
  Me (singing): The way he wears his hat, the way he sings off-key...
  Tim McCarver (starts babbling about how if Gershwin were alive today, he might have written that song about Dontrelle Willis)
  
  Oh, my God, I'm starting to think like Tim McCarver -- well, sort of, since I had the sense to just start singing the damn song, instead of talking incoherently about it.
  
  
• Those red-white-and-blue bases that were used at Tiger Stadium for the 1971 All-Star Game look pretty cool and retro, like ABA basketballs. All we get in the 21st century is "Spider-Man" advertising.
  
  
• Doesn't Fox realize "Bad News Bears" is not a 20th Century Fox movie? I guess they'll take anyone's money. And I guess no actual Fox stars wanted to go to Detroit, just noted crazy person Billy Bob Thornton.
  
  
• No Danys Baez in the game? Poor Devil Rays. Guess I'll have to take advantage of DirecTV's post-All-Star-Game preview of MLB Extra Innings to watch, say, the Devil Rays-Blue Jays game on Friday. The TiVo is already set.
  
  
• Is the National League ever going to win the All-Star Game again? I know, one might have expressed similar sentiments about the American League in, say, 1981.
  
  

Labels: al kaline, all-star game, bad news bears, danys baez, ernie harwell, jeanne zelasko, joe buck, Scooter, tim mccarver, tv

# posted by Jim @ 11:53 PM