Thursday, March 15, 2012

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

I'm still in full NFL mode.  The majority of my sports focus is on free agency and the draft, but with spring training winding down and opening day of major league baseball closing in, I've been trying to prepare myself for baseball season by watching Ken Burns' Baseball.  I've realised something very important, Ken Burns needs to learn the meaning of the word editing.  Baseball is not an exciting enough sport that you can afford to really slow it down and not put people to sleep.  There are 10 episodes, roughly 2 hours each, and so far I've made it through 3 and a half and it took over 6 hours just to get up to Babe Ruth.  I almost fell asleep on the bus ride home today while watching.  I've seen a few other Ken Burns documentaries, and they are all extremely long, slow moving, and self indulgent.  I don't know that I'll make it through before opening day.  I did learn something important though.  Rube was a much more popular nickname a century ago than it is today.  I'm going to have to nickname one of my acquaintances Rube, I don't yet know which one. 

I watched parts of the Mariners spring training games that were televised on Wednesday and Thursday nights.  There are quite a few guys I'm not familiar with, and I think this is going to be another long season.  I'm already tired of Rick Rizzs' terrible nicknames.  I can't sit through another season of just slapping a y on half of somebody's name.  A true professional broadcaster would be more creative.  This year I'm pushing for broad acceptance for Carpe Bat - or seize the bat in Latin - for Mike Carp.  And Peg Leg for Carlos Peguero if he makes the major league roster.

On the subject of announcing, I've decided that if I were an announcer, my home run call would be, "ding dong, the pitch is dead!"  If you can come up with something better, I'd like to hear it.

1 comment:

westmetromommy said...

You made it farther into the Ken Burns series than I did. I think I only made it through the first 2 episodes.