MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
The only thing worse than Sunday Night Baseball in general is your favorite team playing on Sunday Night Baseball. Because then you have to watch it on ESPN.
ESPN used to be the network baseball standard (Fox easily is now), beginning with Baseball Tonight every night; and it used to be a very big deal when your team played on Sunday Night Baseball.
Of course, that was in the days of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan; but it isn’t that way anymore, not necessarily because the current broadcast team of Karl Ravech, Eduardo Perez, David Cone and Buster Olney are bad, because they’re not. They all have redeeming skills and qualities, particularly Cone.
Though there are legitimate issues in Baltimore with Buster Olney, a former Orioles beat writer (and a damn fine one) for the Baltimore Sun when it was a legitimate newspaper, there have been far worse teams in the Sunday Night Baseball booth, believe me. For instance, Google, “worst Sunday Night Baseball ESPN announcers” and the first two names you will read are Alex Rodriguez and Jessica Mendoza. It’s just fact, because that happened. It truly and honestly did.
That said, ESPN Sunday Night Baseball is just a poorly-produced broadcast in spite of the on-air talent because everything and everyone on each broadcast, while trying to be so off the cuff comes across as cardboard and out of sync, which, clearly, does not work.
What works least of all is the broadcasters being uninformed and unfamiliar with the teams they are covering; and though they do not cover the teams on a regular basis, they need to be informed and familiar for this multi-million dollar production, and when they aren’t, it falls on production.
Take, for instance, the weekly in-game interview, and who doesn’t hate that? On Sunday night, ESPN had Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson mic’d up while he was in the field playing shortstop in the third inning.
Frankly, for a fan, this weekly exercise is distracting, as it distracts from the game (the reason we’re watching), because the player they are talking to has to be distracted from the game as well.
It’s a baseball game, not Entertainment Tonight.
Do we care that Karl Ravech gave Henderson an ugly pair of shoes to wear during the pre-game interview? (And they wonder why journalism is dying?) Do we care who Henderson’s favorite teammate is to play video games with in his off-time, even though it is not Colton Cowser, who they had asking the question?
In the end, though, this one ended up being pretty funny, as Ravech asked Henderson if he’d ever given any thought to competing in the Home Run Derby at the All-Star Game, and Henderson said, matter of fact, that, yes, he’ll be doing just that as part of All-Star Game festivities in two weeks, as MLB had just informed him of that earlier in the day.
Ravech and Perez both said, “Huh?” and “Really?” on-air. Neither one of them had a clue, which is not their fault, unless one of them is an attorney, because any attorney knows you never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to.
That’s not how it works in reporting – you ask questions you don’t know the answer to. But fluff pieces aren’t reporting, so for fluff pieces such as the in-game interview, the person asking the question needs to at least suspect, particularly since the Home Run Derby (a fluff piece in itself) will be broadcast by his own network.
As for the actual game, the ESPN crew collectively swooned and marveled over the Great Wall of Baltimore in the extended and deeper left field of Camden Yards as though they were tourists in China.
It was remarkable to me how oblivious they were to it since the Orioles changed the left-field dimensions in their home ballpark three years ago (despite Aaron Judge’s poopy-pouts) because it helps Orioles pitching, given Orioles pitchers pitch 81 games in that ballpark each year.
And, oh, by the way, the Orioles are well on their way to their third straight winning season since they made left field more spacious.
Other quick fact checks: They acted as though Ryan O’Hearn had never played right field before when he switched from first base to right late in the game. He plays out there quite a bit (and in left, too), but the ESPN experts acted as though they did not know that when they should have known that. Or, at least, pretended they knew it.
ESPN also announced that Hesten Kjerstad’s first two Major League career home runs came last Friday and Saturday nights. Research can be hard, but the two he hit last year for the Orioles don’t count?
As the great baseball scout Scotty Carson once called Roy Hobbs “a joke, a nobody from nowhere,” so, too, is ESPN Sunday Night Baseball.
Though Hobbs struck out in the book (which did come first), he ended up being pretty good in the movie.
There is no Hollywood narrative that could make Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN anything other than a joke.
You don’t believe me? Wait until your favorite team plays on Sunday night and you have to watch it and listen to it.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @MikeBurkeMDT