Hey Chris

Maybe if you actually read my posts in their entirety you'd know when to not expect anything from me. Anyways-

1. Sportscenter is obviously the most important TV show in the history of, well, sports. Yet its recent transition from comprehensive highlight show to ABC cross promotional tool was so subtle that many undiscerning viewers might have missed it. Actually, scratch that- pretty much anyone whose head is not being stored inside their ass probably noticed. It's just really sad that a 90 minute Sunday night edition of the show doesn't include highlights from every baseball game played that day, but does include a 6 minute Sunday Conversation with Jason Taylor which focuses primarily on his "Dancing With the Stars" appearance. Way to know your audience, idiots. I'm sure there's a real significant demographic overlap between the kind of person who watches Sportscenter and the kind of person who might be interested in a celebrity dancing show. Slightly more interestingly, but causing just as much frustration for those of us who didn't get to see our baseball team's highlights from the night before, was the 6 minute segment on the resurgence of Rollerderby. How'd that make the cut? My guess is that ABC is about to buy the rights to some Rollerderbies and start airing them on Friday nights or something. Stay tuned for that. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

2. This is a little bit late, but work with me here- did anyone watch the Sunday Night Baseball telecast featuring the Yankees and Mets? Two gems in there, neither of which I have verbatim transcripts for, but both of which are worth complaining about-

a) In the top of the 4th, the Mets' Carlos Delgado hit an opposite field home run just a couple inches over the left field fence and off the very base of the foul pole. The third base umpire originally got the call right, then conferenced with his colleagues and incorrectly changed it. That's not the real story, however. The real story involves both Joe Morgan and Jon Miller (bless his Joe Morgan-dealing-with soul) spending a good 15 minutes watching replays from a couple camera angles and then concluding that the foul pole was actually installed incorrectly, i.e. not in alignment with the foul line. They were shocked that in one of baseball's oldest and most historic parks, a massive mistake like that could have slipped through the cracks for so many years! The comedy here being, of course, that there is no mistake. Just like in baseball's 29 other parks, the foul poles at Yankee Stadium line up correctly with the foul lines. You fucking dummies. Looking at a camera angle aimed straight down the third base line later on in the game allowed the guys to realize that fact and amend their statements. Still pretty hilarious in the moment, though.

b) At one point, in order to analyze a taken pitch's location, Joe (or Joe's producer, bless his Joe Morgan-dealing-with soul) decided to bring up ESPN's "K Zone" feature. He explained why K Zone is helpful to any fans who might not be familiar with it, and that explanation went something like this:

So now let's got to K Zone to see where that pitch ended up. The reason we need K Zone is because the camera angle you watch the game on doesn't actually come from directly behind the pitcher. It's kind of off to the side a little bit, so you can't really trust what you see from that angle. The reason we have to show you the pitches from that angle is because if we put a camera right behind the pitcher, you wouldn't be able to see the catcher's target or the strike zone! So that's why we have K Zone.

Ohhhhh.... is that how the placement of objects in 3 dimensional space works? Thanks Joe. If I'm in the neighborhood, I'll be sure to drop in for your guest lecture on physics at MIT. Also, it doesn't really need to be said, but K Zone is a joke.

3. You know what Gregg Easterbrook said about the Patriots in this piece has to be dumb if my response to it amounts to a quasi-defense of the Patriots. (The article as a whole isn't terrible at all, and makes some good points, but this particular one stinks on ice.)

"Cheaters! Cheaters!" the crowd at Radio City Music Hall chanted when New England's name went on the clock at last month's draft. "Cheaters! Cheaters!" crowds will chant next fall when New England takes the field, if the cheater Belichick is still running the show. The way to stop that, and bring Spygate to a close, is to suspend the person responsible. The $500,000 fine assessed against Belichick is a token sanction at his income level. The draft choice fine against the Patriots penalizes mainly the team's fans, who are not responsible for what happened.

Saying that voiding a draft choice primarily punishes a team's fans is like claiming when a business is broken into and robbed, it primarily punishes their regular customers. Are the fans very disappointed about that situation? Undoubtedly. Are they being punished harder than, you know, the team itself? Of fucking course fucking not. That ruling hit the team hard, and definitely changed their offseason plans significantly. Even for Easterbrook, this is horrifically dumb.

OK... sorry about the pu-pu platter... but at least you got a post centered around something besides photoshopping a 20 year old video game.