The Futility Infielder

On Tuesday evening, my pal Nick and I finally broke down and saw Star Wars Episode III: Just Give Us Your Money, the anticlimactic final installment of a groundbreaking, once-great series we had grown up on. Neither of us would dare subject our significant others to the movie -- my wife fell asleep halfway through Star Wars Episode II: Send in the Boring Clones and quite frankly I envied her -- so when the new one opened seven weeks ago, we vagueley agreed weeks ago to attend together once the hype died down. Obviously, it wasn't a high priority.

I'm old enough to remember the excitement and wonder I felt at seeing the original Star Wars trilogy on a big screen, and so felt some inevitable sense of allegiance towards the new trilogy despite the realization halfway through the first bit of Jar Jar Binks dialogue in Star Wars Episode I: Bait and Switch that we've been had. As I pried $10.75 (the cost of a first-run movie in New York City) out of my pocket, I was secure in the knowledge that George Lucas will never see another cent of my money. I was being duped -- by him and his franchise, at least -- for the last time.

As such, I missed most of the All-Star Game, at least in its live broadcast format. Nick and I caught about an inning and a half at our local English pub, where we washed away the sour taste of our inevitable capitulation to the dark side by marveling at Andruw Jones' towering home run off of Kenny Rogers. Later I wizzed through a TiVo'd version of the game, mainly to see how the runs were scored. I was quite satisfied to see that Miguel Tejada's monster shot came at the expense of John Smoltz, a man who spends an inordinate amount of time obsessing about bestiality.

Before I saw that, however, I made the mistake taking in a smattering of the pregame festivities, mainly because I was multitasking by reading my email. But between Jeanie Zelasko shoddily cutting off the legendary Tiger broadcaster Ernie Harwell (a travesty remarked upon by Salon's King Kaufman) in favor of the "Taco Bell Throw The Ball At The Damn Target," (to borrow Bat Girl's phrase) and the appearance of Scooter, the talking goddamn baseball whose face I want to smash, I soon wished I hadn't. Fox Sports: It's All About Everything But the Game.

My dander already raised, I sped through the game in vaguely disinterested fashion. I'm pretty good at watching on fast-forward; I generally get into an at-bat after the first two pitches, saving myself time without spoiling the outcome. But with so many first- and second-pitch hacks, I was too heavy on the button, so I missed at least one half-inning. Big deal.

But I did see the travesty that took place in the bottom of the third, when Joe Buck and Tim McCarver -- without a trace of guile in their voices -- gave airtime to a large Corvette advertisement hanging in the outfield as if it were the handmade work of some fan. "Welcome back to Detroit," remarked Buck. "A lot of banners and signs around the ballpark. No surprise there. Somebody just unfurled a big banner behind left field."

Uh-huh. Of course, this was a premeditated advertising opportunity of which Buck and McCarver were fully aware. "Buck might have been saying that tongue in cheek," Fox Sports spokesman Dan Bell told The Register, a UK tech publication which carries syndicated news feeds. "For sure, it was planned. It's not like we didn't know about it. Both parties knew about it." As the Register's Ashlee Vance reported:

Buck certainly did not sound "tongue in cheek" to us at all. Both he and McCarver sat there debating the sign like marketing automatons, wondering if it was real and how much time some true fan of baseball spent hammering it out. They most certainly wanted all the saps watching to believe in the sign's authenticity and go hunting for this mysterious website. "Yet another Chevy ad" probably would not have worked as well.

Blech. If you listened carefully enough, you could hear Jack Buck, Joe's Hall of Fame-honored father, spinning in his grave. His son has long since barreled through any line between reportage and corporate prostitution via the Budweiser "Leon" commercials. Now he's added to that distasteful legacy.

Look, I realize this isn't first-degree murder, or even all that surprising; I expect no better from Fox with all of its tacky lasers and sound effects and the entire network's complete abdication of journalistic integrity. Baseball and advertising have gone hand in hand since the early days of radio. But it's one thing for a radio announcer to read promos between innings, quite another for a pair of TV announcers to pass themselves off as innocents as they shill. So it's with more than a little glee that I note that Fox's broadcast set a new ratings low for the second year in a row. The people have spoken, and no sir, they don't like what Fox does to the game. As Kaufman put it, baseball fans "get slapped every time they try to tune in to Fox, the network with a contract to broadcast the biggest events of a sport it hates..."

Enough is enough, so I've decided to give the All-Star Game the Star Wars treatment, at least for one year: I wash my hands of the entire franchise. I won't watch next year's game, I won't write about it, I won't vote, and I won't give a shit who makes the team. To Fox Sports, Buck and McCarver and anyone else involved in this charade, I say, "This time it's FUCK YOU."

• • •

Not that Fox's A-team of broadcasters are the only ones on my shitlist, or that they weren't already there before the ASG. I can barely watch ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball because of the continuing ignorance foisted upon listeners by Joe Morgan, who in his anti-Moneyball crusade couldn't be bothered to figure out that Michael Lewis, not A's general manager Billy Beane, wrote the book.

That's old news, of course. Many folks, including Mike Carminati, have been lampooning Morgan's crusade for years. Carminati, who routinely deconstructed the man's ESPN chats, even waxed poetic a couple years back:

These are the gladdest of possible words:
"Joe Morgan Chat Day tomorrow."
Reductio ad absurdum, his facts fleetly blurred,
Joe Morgan Chat Day tomorrow
Ruthlessly promulgating gonfalon babble,
Making a giant hit with the ole rabble--
His words numb your brain like a bad game of Scrabble:
"Joe Morgan Chat Day tomorrow!"

Good stuff. But there's even better stuff to be found in a piece for SF Weekly by Tommy Craggs which was published last week. Craggs caught up with Morgan, who didn't cotton to the writer's line of inquiry.

"Both of you are jokes," he is saying, and what I will learn is that there are many jokes in Joe's world. We are jokes, those of us who dare have a thought or a theory about The Game though we have never worn the flannels of a baseball team; we are jokes, those of us who think a catcher has an effect on base stealing; we are jokes, those of us who believe in science and reason. The Oakland A's, if I may extrapolate, are a joke. Their general manager is a joke (though he played The Game). The front office of the world-champion Boston Red Sox is a joke. The guy in the ESPN.com chat room who had the temerity to question Joe Morgan's wisdom is definitely a joke. The author of Moneyball? Joe's not sure who that is, but he's sure he's a joke. The writer Bill James is a joke, and so for that matter is the entire masthead of Baseball Prospectus. I'm a joke. You're a joke. We're jokes, if not all of us, very, very many of us.

So I wonder: Why isn't Joe Morgan laughing?

Socratic exchange with Joe Morgan No. 1, on the subject of Moneyball, base running in the 2002 American League Division Series, and the use of statistics in baseball:

Me: It seems that you almost take [the book] personally.

Joe: I took it personally because they had a personal thing about me saying Durham should've stolen second base in the game that they lost -- he stayed at first base, and they hit three fly balls, and the A's lose another fifth game.

Me: And that's the chief reason you don't even wanna read the book?

Joe: I don't read books like that. I didn't read Bill James' book, and you said he was complimenting me. Why would I wanna read a book about a computer, that gives computer numbers?

Me: It's not about a computer.

Joe: Well, I'm not reading the book, so I wouldn't know.

Me: I'm not --

Joe: Why would I wanna read the book? All I'm saying is, I see a game every day. I watch baseball every day. I have a better understanding about why things happen than the computer, because the computer only tells you what you put in it. I could make that computer say what I wanted it to say, if I put the right things in there. ... The computer is only as good as what you put in it. How do you think we got Enron?

Yikes. Enron? Craggs goes to great lengths to explore Morgan's Flat Earth Society viewpoint, providing the most thorough glimpse to date of the Hall of Famer's deep-seated insecurity about the stathead movement and the reactionary viewpoints he counters with. He even interviews Carminati, along with Will Carroll, Bill James, and Rob Neyer.

This is essential reading, easily one of the best pieces of baseball writing this year. Read it and weep profusely at one man's disconnection with reality.