Saturday
Today’s meal: A Digiorno rising crust pepperoni pizza from
my oven. Honestly, it probably beats
pizzas from most pizza shops.
Recommended.
Gobal Rallycross
“Who?” you’re asking.
I think saw one of their races once before, perhaps last year, or maybe
it was a different rally series. It was
on a different network. Whatever. It’s on.
This is the weekend for motorsports.
The series consists of little, up-armored compact cars
racing around an asphalt and dirt track in heat races. They use standing starts, which the cars
didn’t have any trouble with. (Ahem,
Indycar. Consider taking some
notes.) The track they were at was in Barbados and
featured one jump. The rules allow the
cars to a take a “Joker” lap, which lets them to bypass the jump once during
the race.
How was the action?
Pretty darn good. One of the
heats featured a car flying too far on the jump that caused his passenger side
door to fly off. The main event started
with one car sent flying into another car after hitting a high curb. The car rolled and flipped on its back,
spurting oil like a geyser. For the rest
of the race, you had cars going sideways and then some around the corners as
they banged off one another. The crowd
there went nuts watching.
Scott Speed, yes that F1/NASCAR washout, won the event
easily, with what the commentators were saying was a possibly broken car. I recognized a couple other names in
field. Speed was racing for an Andretti
team, so it has some participation by a well-known organization. F1 driver, Lewis Hamilton and his F1 car,
were there for a short exhibition race with one of the rally cars. I’m not sure when this event actually took
place, but I’d think Lewis would have some business in Monaco to
attend to this weekend. The expense of
sending him and that car over must have been enormous for a publicity
stunt. Red Bull may be putting up some
big money for this series.
In addition to commercials for the F1 race tomorrow, NBC was
also advertising for a special on Kurt Busch as he attempts “The Double.” There was also an ad for NASCAR on NBC,
coming summer 2015. I think they’re
excited to have them coming back.
NASCAR
I didn’t bother reiterating by ban on watching Nationwide
races as I sat down for the race. How to
describe what happened next? I was
receiving clear audio over the air for the local EL Paso ABC affiliate KVIA,
but no video. The other three digital
stations that come in on Channel 7 were fine.
It was working fine earlier this week.
Unlike most of my problems, this one did not seem like a personal one,
but rather one with the station.
Needless to say, I didn’t “watch” the race (or bother listening, I’m not
that desperate for racing action). I
have some grim foreboding about tomorrow’s Indy 500.
Baseball
The Tigers played the Rangers Saturday afternoon wearing throwback
Negro League Jerseys. Likely this choice
was made when they thought this would be a nationally broadcast game on Fox,
which it wasn’t. There wasn’t a lot of
suspense in this game as the Rangers won 12-2.
I still haven’t heard the result of Prince Fielder’s injury, whether
he’ll be out for the season or not. They
didn’t miss him today. Of note, I think
the Rangers had three triples in the game.
There were three challenges, all successful, two for the Tigers, one for
the Rangers. I’m forced to admit that
all three were rather quickly done.
Fox finally decided to broadcast a national game Saturday
night. When I saw the lineup, I said,
“Oh God, no!” To have to wait two months
into the season to finally get to watch an entire ball game on TV and then be
subjected to an Angel’s game, was too cruel.
Somewhere, the Baseball Gods took pity, or weren’t paying
attention. We got the Cardinals vs. the
Reds. Whew!
Fox seems to have ended their association with the MLB
Network. The pre-game was in the Fox
studios and all of the announcers were Fox.
This may be because the networks are now broadcasting national games
against one another. Veteran
play-by-play and Reds’ announcer Thom Brennaman was joined by the rookie color
debut of Gabe Kapler. There was a highly
unwarranted complimentary career reel for Kapler, who in my mind was one of the
most over-hyped, underperforming ballplayers of his era. In front of the microphone, I thought he was
pretty good, though he was talking way too fast. Keep the enthusiasm, but slow down the
delivery. Cardinals 6-3 with some 9th
inning drama.
The El Paso Chihuahuas had a double-header versus Rainiers
in Tacoma . Though both games were seven innings, they
started too late for me to even hear the results of one of them. I was pleased to finally have confirmation of
Rule 4.10 (a), which allows for seven inning games for double-headers.
No comments:
Post a Comment