Continued from Part 1
MLB
I had a truly nuclear take ready to go if the players and
owners hadn’t come to an agreement to play this year. I’ll save it for next year when the players
go on strike, since this “agreement” was pretty much the owners dictating their
will. Even with the proposed shortened
season, I doubted it would really happen until I got to watch a couple training
games from the Rangers’ new stadium,
Globe Life Park. (Oh, and the Rangers are being pressured to
change their name too now like the Redskins. It’s racist.)
The new park was absolutely stunning. The suites behind home plate will make the
stadium instantly recognizable. There’s
a row of wooden rocking chairs in one section.
There are giant bobble heads of the Ranger legends in the
concourse. I was momentarily excited for
the start of the season.
Then it all came crashing down. MLB and the players announced right before
first game that they were going to turn the whole thing into social justice
propaganda. They did this appease ESPN.
Dodger Mookie Betts signed a
12-year, $365M contract soon afterward.
I was listening to ESPN Radio
the day of the opening games. They
brought on an expert to discuss the contract.
They spent most of the interview doing funny voices and goofing
off. They were in agreement that the
contract was a travesty and that Mookie is being criminally underpaid. At least ESPN was talking baseball, but
unfortunately they were talking about it the same way they always do, badly.
The opening games were all ESPN could hope for. BLM is now the MLB logo on the field. Players were trying to one-up each other in
the knee-taking ceremony, formerly known as the Anthem. There was Mookie taking a knee to protest his
contract. The Yankees and Dodgers both
won their games on their way to undefeated 60-0 regular seasons (only to be
beaten in the first round of the playoffs).
The potentially biggest story of the night was Nationals’ star, Juan Soto,
testing positive right before the game.
This could have been a disaster, like Ranger Joey Gallo’s positive test, but it turned out to be nothing. Joey had tested positive and negative twice
each within a week. The cold testing might be a bit flawed.
During the Yankee game, they did announce an expanded playoffs
for 16 teams. So, just like the NBA and NHL, more than half the league will get into the playoffs. What could be more exclusive than that? The DH will be in the National League
now. Relievers have the three-batter
minimum, but still no pitch clock. And,
there will be automatic runners for extra-inning games. There also won’t be any fans in
attendance. This is going to be crushing
for TV broadcasts as the fans are actually integral to the game. Other sports aren’t as dependent, but they
are a major part of screen time in baseball.
The next day I got to hear the end of the Rangers and Rockies’ first game at the new
ballpark. I assume most of broadcaster Eric Nadel’s comments on the stadium
came at the beginning of the game. The
Rangers won in a 1-0 shutout. This might
be a bad sign for offense at the park. A
worse sign was that the game still took nearly three hours.
On Saturday, FOX
did an unprecedented baseball triple-header (quadruple if you count the late
game on FS1). I actually kind of appreciate the effort they
made to make this opening weekend an event.
There was a little bit of social justice mixed into the broadcast, but
mostly they kept to calling the games and having a good time. Both Trump and Biden were running
presidential ads during the games, so you still had plenty of politics.
I’m not recapping any of these games. I’ll just hit some random observations. The Cubs
and the Brewers played first at
Wrigley. I got together with dad to
watch the game. We got a pizza and
breadsticks from a local place, Roadrunner
Pizza. I’m somewhat sorry to report
it was subpar. It was hard and thin, as
opposed to chewy. I like their pizza
generally, but the quality varies widely from visit to visit. Don’t be the first pizza order of the day, I
guess, which is what I think ours was.
I was somewhat amazed by the inclusion of virtual
computer-generated fans in the stands for the game to go along with the
artificial crowd noise. I’d say the main
problem with the effect was that they weren’t doing it in every shot. The games somehow had a listless quality to
them without the fans there. Certainly,
the coverage suffered without having cute kids, hot chicks, and guys dropping
foul balls. There were a few real fans
across the street in the Wrigleyville
Rooftop stands at least.
For the game itself, I’m still snickering over Lorenzo Cain getting out of a pickle
from the Cubs’ infield with himself and another runner avoiding a rundown. There was a near bench-clearing brawl after a
couple of hit batters. The umps had to
explain to the managers that the revised cold protocol rules don’t allow for
fighting. It turned out to be a pretty
good game, but it ran for three-and-a-half hours. I knew we were in trouble when we were an
hour in and it was the top of the third.
Dad was being a bit uncommunicative for some reason in the
afternoon, so I left after that game. Since
I’d already missed the start of the second game with Dodgers and the Giants
and the Rangers and Rockies on the radio, which started at the same time, I
decided to go to the mall for a minute to get a couple of things. One thing was an artbook that was recommended
to me last week by a clerk as I was at the checkout buying different
artbook. If buying three artbooks this
year and drawing from them doesn’t finally turn me into a great artist, I’m
going to give up.
At Dodger Stadium,
cutouts of celebrities sat behind home plate.
The game seemed pretty good, but I had the Ranger game on the radio at
the same time. I’d also called my Aunt
Judy in Missouri to congratulate her on a Cardinals
victory this afternoon. She was very
happy to have her team back. I noticed
in the game was that FOX was trying to run a full commercial in during break in
the action on field. This resulted in
missing a pitch, but at least the cutouts weren’t missing any of the action.
The Ranger/Rockies game
was also pretty tight. In the ninth, Eric Nadel and Matt Hicks were surprised by a Roughned
Odor foul ball going into their broadcast booth. They’re six levels up and never thought one
would ever reach them and here it happened in the second game in the park. There was absolutely no panic over the foul
ball coming at them. They both just
moved out of the way.
The marquee game came afterward between the Yankees and Nationals. Surprisingly, the
Yankees and Dodgers lost today. I’m kind
of shocked. There goes the undefeated
seasons for both them. More
surprisingly, I saw my second pole shot homer of the day during the game. You’d think the foul poles would be
impossible to hit in a game.
On Sunday, I heard Joey
Gallo hit the first home run in Globe
Life Park in the stadium’s third game.
However, Trevor Story would
hit a pair of homers to lead the Rockies to victory. While listening, I flipped around the TV and
found another game on a Mexican station between the Astros and Mariners. The game was on a different Mexican station
than the one who was broadcasting MLB last year. This is good news for my baseball viewing for
the rest of the summer. And there was a game
on ESPN Radio right after. They were even calling the game fairly straight
without being totally annoying in shoving The Agenda down people’s throats.
So, what have we learned about sports overall this
summer. Seemingly, the condition of
these sports coming back was that they all had constantly remind viewer about
the cold and had to promote BLM. NASCAR got hit very hard with that BLM mandate. (I just noticed that I’d actually said
something nice about Bubba Wallace
last year 7-7-19.) Sports is no
escape from current events, if it ever really was. Now it’s simply another mouthpiece for
propaganda for the democrat deep corporate media state. Just to spite them, I’m going to still watch
and enjoy what I can.
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