Charlie Weis Ate My Baby presents to you definitive proof that there is no God:
Bob Kravitz is getting his own drive time sports talk radio show.
What did Indianapolis sports fans do to deserve this? Wasn’t The Brawl enough?
In tribute to Bob Kravitz I am writing this entire post with simplistic, one sentence paragraphs, just like Deadspin noted two years ago.
Just heard Kirk Herbstreit on ESPN regarding South Florida taking on #17 Auburn this weekend and the potential for an upset:
…on one hand Matt Grothe and South Florida have an opportunity to go to Auburn and compete. On the other hand I think their chances of pulling off this upset diminish as the days go by because too many people are talking about it.
What the hell does that even mean?!
I had no idea that people talking about a potential upset can cause it to not happen. Thank God no one talked about the possibility of Appalachian State beating Michigan. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to block that kick at the end of the game.
A thought from over the weekend…
Now that Lamar’s quest for home run number 756 is over, what’s gonna happen to ESPN’s Pedro Gomez?
“… it turned out that Bonds was just suffering from a bout of gas. For ESPN, I’m Pedro Gomez.” (image courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
In having to shadow Lamar daily for the last few years, Gomez had the Most Thankless Job In Sports On Earth, which he performed admirably. Frankly, if Lamar had griped about me as publicly as he did Gomez, I’d have fought him. Granted, I’d have taken my lengthy, steroid-fueled hospital stay afterward, but then, I’m a hack. Gomez deserves our respect as a professional.
I just wonder if I should be sending a check somewhere. Y’know, to help out until things pick up for him again.
Finally, someone did the necessary sleuthing to get the proper blacklist filter that will stop that godforsaken video from playing automatically when you go to ESPN.com. This man is a true hero to Blogospheristania.
- First, you need to be using Firefox. Please, if you’re using a PC… just use Firefox. I’m willing to entertain arguments for Safari, but to be using Microsoft Internet Explorer at this point is just… wrong. Objectively wrong. Don’t do it.
- Next, install the Adblock extension (which you should really be using anyway). Adblock, well, blocks ads online. It comes with a huge list of automatically-blocked ads, which is neat, but the great thing about it is that you can manually add other ads to the list. Like, I don’t know… the ESPN Motion video that starts whenever you visit ESPN.com.
- Next (after you restart Firefox to activate the Adblock extension), click on “Tools” in the menu bar. Then click on “Add-ons.”
- Highlight Adblock and click on the “Options” button.
- In the “New Filter” box, enter this: http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/fpp/*
- Click “Done.”
And that’s it. No more stupid videos advertising “Who’s Now” or WNBA broadcasts or Steven A. Smith’s newest show, “Spittin’ Mad With Steven A. (Brought to You by Cheetos)”. Enjoy.
Major major kudos to Jake for putting this out there. I can finally visit ESPN.com and only be slightly sickened by its horrendous design and cluttery crap. h/t to Deadspin.
This is nowhere near as funny as CJ’s entry in the Vickoblogosphere Sweepstakes, or as serious as my last post about hockey, but…. daaaaaamn ESPN, could you choose a more unfortunate set of words for your Vick headline on your front page?
Ummm yeah. The ony ones fighting for their lives were the dogs Vick and his employees tortured into fighting, or the ones that didn’t make the cut and were put to death at his own hands. *cough*allegedly*cough* of course. I’m surprised the lead text for the story didn’t read “Above all else, expect the legal battle to be a dogfight.” ESPN writers, you so clever! What next, alliteration? “Vick Vociferous: Vows Vengeance”
OKay so I’m normally not one for conspiracy theories (unless I’m listening to Coast To Coast AM and laughing my ass off), but the following post at The Situationist* really has me scratching my head and wondering… and it starts right off with something I somehow missed from the ESPN Ombudsman ( a laughable position, but I digress).
Negative Press: Is ESPN Killing the National Hockey League by Influencing Public Attitudes?
ESPN’s ombudsman, Le Anne Schreiber, felt compelled to examine hockey coverage on the network. In an article last month, she confirmed that hockey coverage has indeed diminished 28% on Sportscenter over the last three years and that hockey-oriented shows such as NHL 2Night were cut altogether since ESPN’s loss of NHL rights.
The reduced exposure on ESPN can only be harmful to the NHL. By minimizing coverage and highlights, the network is effectively reducing the imprint of the game on Americans’ collective sports consciousness. Worse still, several ESPN writers and commentators have gone out of their way to emphasize the demise of hockey. Le Ann Schreiber recently noted that during the NHL’s regular season, hockey was only mentioned on-air if there happened to be “some egregious brawl” or if it was being “dissed” for its invisibility and irrelevance.
28% decrease in coverage? Say what you will about the popularity of hockey in the United States, but not even ONE nightly show dedicated to hockey verges on ridiculous - especially with the number of ESPN networks approaching the highly desired The Ocho. And what will Barry Melrose do now?
It ain’t cheap to look this good.
But back to the seriousness. It’s obvious to anyone who watches ESPN that hockey coverage has become fewer and far between and when it is covered it’s usually about something bad or with a tinge of “yeah, but hockey’s in a bad state of things.”
In sharp contrast to the treatment of the NHL, ESPN favorites such as NASCAR face little scrutiny and massive hype. Once a niche sport with limited appeal, NASCAR is ESPN’s new hot property and has found itself to be the chief beneficiary of the network’s downgrading of hockey. Northwest News Group columnist Kevin Kaduk notes that since ESPN’s purchase of NASCAR broadcast rights, the network has been force-feeding the sport to its readers via its various news outlets. Indeed in January 2007, ESPN senior vice president Jed Drake explicitly promised as much. Unlike its coverage of the NHL, ESPN has shown remarkable patience with NASCAR as evidenced by its burying or putting a positive spin on negative NASCAR news such as that of falling TV ratings for the sport.
What? Falling TV ratings for NASCAR? Honestly I hadn’t heard that. Thanks ESPN for not reporting the news! If they made as big of a deal of falling NASCAR ratings as they consistently do falling hockey ratings, we’d be hearing about it all the time. Alas…
To make matters worse, such informational social influence can translate into normative social influence, which is born of the need to “conform to the rules of other people.” If it seems that a growing number of people dislike hockey or that being a hockey fan exposes one to ridicule, many will hide, ignore, or lose their affection for hockey.
Thus, the network’s negative portrayal of hockey is very likely causing a profound two-fold effect on the viewing public by prejudicing their perception of the facts and by affecting their feelings for the game.
Indeed. The more ESPN’s talking heads and faceless writers (or God Damnit I WISH They Were Faceless Writers) say hockey is failing, the more people will feel the need to believe that as well because ESPN is so ‘respected’ among the casual sports fan. So now hockey has yet ANOTHER hill to climb - fighting the biggest and in some areas ONLY source of sports-centric news into giving their sport as much credibility as even Arena Fucking Football.
Speaking of the Arena League, I was a brief fan when there was a team in Indiana, but finding news of that league on ESPN was like looking for a live dog in Michael Vick’s backyard: if you were lucky enough to find it, you probably would have been happier if you hadn’t. But then the AFL gets on ESPN (after ESPN buys a stake in the league), pimps out John Elway and Jon Bon Jovi, and suddenly I’m awash in AFL playoff highlights at the same time that hockey highlights are reaching the frequency of Jonathan Ogden stops Dwight Freeney highlights. Maybe it’s just me, but ESPN owning part of a sports league screams of conflict of interest.
When he’s not selling cars he’s desperately trying to get you to care about an obscure indoor sport that languished in the fringes of American minor-minor leagues until ESPN bought part of the league. Look, Jon Bon Jovi!
But reports of hockey’s death are greatly exaggerated. Professional hockey is doing relatively well in both its traditional and non-traditional markets. Financially speaking, the NHL’s has rebounded since its disastrous lockout during the 2004-2005 season. Television ratings may be down nationally but the NHL’s attendance figures are still relatively strong with record crowds attending games this past January. Indeed, the NHL’s attendance figures, while lower, are somewhat comparable to those of the NBA - a league widely hailed as successful by sportswriters. In addition, franchise values have gone up markedly since the lockout allowed league owners to break the players’ union (the NHLPA) and implement a favorable new collective bargaining agreement which included, among other features, a hard salary cap. As Eric McErlain details on Off Wing Opinion, prospective owners such as Jim Balsillie and an ownership group in Kansas City have been chomping at the bit to introduce hockey to new markets via re-location of struggling franchises after paying a hefty premium for the privilege.
Amen and hallelujah! It’s something that doesn’t really get mentioned by ESPN - while ratings may be down attendance is doing great. Something I didn’t realize - the NHL’s attendance is on par with the NBA. When are we going to get the “NBA is failing!” stories - something I’d be more prone to agree with (falling talent levels, a boring one-on-one focused game, no fundamentals.. but that’s another post).
As the author of that column states, all is not indeed well with the NHL. Versus as a network can barely be found on cable networks that actually carry it and the league has far over-expanded. I would have loved to have seen the NHL contract some teams during the lockout. I would have loved to see them trim down the schedule and make it harder to get into the playoffs than it is to predict the result of a coin toss. Can fixing these negatives and the existence of the positives of the game outweigh a negativity campaign by the bully in the sports world that is ESPN? I doubt it.
Now here’s the big question that The Situationist doesn’t seem to get in to - why? What interest does ESPN have in knocking hockey down to the level of curling and inclined extreme chair bowling? My guess is that it’s not so much a dislike of hockey - hey, The Worldwide Leader is full of sports fans and I’m sure there are a good number of hockey fans, being in New England and all - but a love of the STORY of a once proud league falling and falling fast. What makes a better story, a league suffering a lockout but stumping the critics with a successful comeback or the failure of an entire sport?
The latter, obviously. We’ve seen the former before. Baseball made its comeback. The NFL survived a strike to become the dominant sport in the country. Basketball has been strangely labor-trouble free and just sort of… stagnant since the Magic-Bird-Jordan era. But Hockey! ah! Only those weird Canadians watch that, and a story about that league failing so spectacularly - now THAT is news. It’s almost like ESPN was expecting the league to fold during the lockout, and when it didn’t, when it actually succeeded in fixing the problems that led to the lockout, they had to scramble for a storyline instead of reporting the one that was there.
It really ties into the idea that ESPN is becoming less about reporting sports news and more about making sports news, with their handling of hockey just another sad example.
Ageless badass Chris Chelios has something to say to anyone who disses hockey.
*While not a sports blog, The Situationist does seem to be a pretty interesting read for those into “a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions.” If you’re into that sorta thing. And apologies for liberally quoting so much of the column but it was very good and I couldn’t do it justice.
There’s a YouTube video just waiting to be made that runs together every Chris Berman “back back back” from the entire homerun derby into one constant video of pure annoying. So who has the Home Run derby recording and the video chops to make this happen?
And related, will someone tell Morgan, Berman et. al. that it’s an All-Star home run derby. Not the World Series. Asking the players about their “strategies” and the “pressure” of a Home Run derby is like asking the drunk in the outfield bleachers his strategy for getting drunk today and about the pressure of waiting in line for the bathroom with a full bladder.
Final All-Star thought: No one cares that “it counts.” Stop it. It’s annoying.
The “Who’s Now” segment.
On tonight’s segment, Alex Rodriguez outlasted Terrell Owens by a 67.5%-32.5% margin. What exactly was at stake here again? God only knows. (image courtesy of sportsunderground.com)
That’s what our society needs… to further inflate the exaggerated images of sports stars by ranking them for doing things other than playing sports.
To further exacerbate the situation, it’s all brought to us by a panel of respected sports personalities (well, respected sports personalities and Keyshawn Johnson), headed by Stuart Scott. I can’t reach my remote fast enough.
You better keep workin’ those fundamentals, Shaq. Word is Michael Phelps can hit his free throws. Wait, there’s no actual sports skill involved here? Well, then, just stay away from that “Kazaam 2″ script and you’ll be fine. (image courtesy of nba.com)
In ESPN’s latest attempt to fabricate news, they’ve circulated a rumor that implies that Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, the National League’s All-Star manager, will leave Lamar The Human Bobblehead off the All-Star team, despite his assault on the all-time home run record and the fact that the game will be taking place in San Francisco. What else could it mean, after all… LaRussa didn’t comment about the situation, which simply has to mean something potentially sinister is afoot.
It will be the first time “flaxseed oil” will keep a player from participating in the Midsummer Classic. (image courtesy of deadspin.com)
While this is not-so-secretly my heart’s desire, it’s just not happening.
Lamar’s 13 homers place him seventh overall in the National League, and third among outfielders behind Ken Griffey, Jr. and Adam Dunn. (The Big Donkey, it should be noted, should not be allowed near an All-Star Game until he stops being the worst situational hitter in the game. But I digress.) He’s second on his team in RBIs, despite having 64 walks cutting into his potential at-bats. Plus, since league rules require at least one representative to be present from each club, Lamar’s lackluster teammates are actually helping him here. Granted, Ray Durham (.250, 37 RBI at second base) could get hot again and Matt Morris (7-3, 2.56 ERA) certainly deserves consideration regardless, but Lamar is still The Man in the Bay Area.
Lastly, LaRussa’s a class act, and won’t introduce himself into the debate. Deserved or not, he’ll give Lamar his All-Star swan song in front of the one city that actually loves him.
Gotta love those slow news days in Bristol.
