All-Star Broadcast Comments

classic!

The quote went something like this: "Damon's done for the day...which means a lot of hair stylists will be turning off the game...hair stylists on the West Coast."

Anyone else hear this?

Were there only THREE built-in movie infomercials? BNBears, Fantastic Four (a Fox dud, so that one was free), and...

Dontrelle, You Is My Man Now

Oddly, or I guess not, this makes me think of the 03 WS where Fox kept cutting to the Williams sisters during Dontrelle's start. Like they were playing up the whole, 'Ooooooo Dontreeeellllleeeee...' blackness of it all. It just seemed patronizing to me.

BRENNEMAN: Some guy in the stands just screamed, "I love you, Will!" to Will Clark.
BRENLY: Well, we are in San Francisco.
BRENNEMAN: ...
BRENLY: ...
BRENNEMAN: Here's the pitch. Pops it up.

god that game was a yawner though. highlights for me were lidge and rivera. fuckers were DEALING. didn't see a gun on lidge though, but i might've been too bleary-eyed by that point.

that teixeira hr was strange.

State wants to weed out marijuana-flavor candy Reuters - Wed Jul 13, 8:21 AM ET

willie shakes!!!

McCarver is no idiot, he's just leans on many bad habits common to broadcasters / comedians / musicians / editors who are still working in their mid 60s and sailing on their reputations...

scooter: a changeup is like a fastball that goes really, reaaaallly, sloooooooooooow!

jbuck: for those adults out there who consider scooter to be childish, condescending, insulting, we thought we'd go to someone with a more grown up, professional perspective...

[pre-recorded closeup of jeff suppan]: hi kids! this is scooter's pal, soup!! a changeup is like a fastball that goes really, reaallly, sloooooooooooooow.

well, i thought it was pretty funny anyway.

Chad Cordero is short! Yeah right he is six foot tall.

I was thinking the same thing ... more precisely, I was thinking "MLB needs to watch some NBA games and learn how to make the introductions more exciting" ("Around the World" =! good intro music for sports).

-- Stormy Davis (electrifyingmoj...), July 12th, 2005 10:06 PM. (diamond)

Dude, three innings of 1.67 WHIP ball!

Y'ALL READY FOR THIS?

also, way to go fox, you showed 'em that you don't have to recut your all-star ads, and that you agree with sheff that JETER GOT ROBBED!!! oh noes noes noes

American TV public showed its good taste: all-time All-Star ratings low (for the 2nd straight year). IT COUNTS!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/13/foxsports_ruse_web/

http://www.zunta.org/blog/
as if the don mclean association wasn't enough pop culture
Jesus fucking christ. Argh. Charles and I are watching the All-Star game right now. The broadcast comes back from break, and the announcers tell us (paraphrasing) "a banner's just been unfurled in the outfield" -- and indeed, a large vertical stripe of fabric, seemingly hand-painted, has been draped over a billboard suspended above the outfield, and it's got the letters HHRYA.com painted on it -- "I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but clearly someone went to a lot of trouble to do it."

Hmm. Some sort of guerilla website promotion at the All-Star game? Intriguing. It's a little weird that the FOX broadcast would give it exposure, but baseball games, even the All-Star game, consist of an awful lot of airtime to fill with chatter. The HHRYA website is slammed, of course, and the Coral cache won't load, but it gets far enough that I can see it's trying to get content from textamerica.com. Somebody's moblog? Very interesting.

Well, it's been a few more minutes, and now I can load the site. And you know what? It's a fucking viral marketing campaign for a fucking Chevy. Rewound the Tivo -- hey, whaddayaknow! The banner was draped over a Corvette ad. And the greenscreened batter's box ad for that at-bat was a Chevy billboard. Yeah Joe Buck, I bet you had NO FUCKING IDEA what was going on with that banner. Must be some kind of authentic piece of underground culture asserting itself upon Major League Baseball! Yup, that's the only explanation. Look at those jagged letters! Look at the amateurish fabric! Yes, somebody is really desperate to share their love of an UPCOMING GODDAMN AUTOMOBILE. And they want you to upload your pictures and music to their site! Or something! And become part of the HHR community! WOW! Are tattoos available?

Man oh man, Chevrolet. I already disliked you for the design abomination that is and has been the Corvette. But now I outright hate you. Fuck you, Chevy. Don't try to relate to me, don't demand my attention, and most of all don't try to fool me. Stay out of my goddamn culture. You make cars. You are not a community, you are not an aesthetic, you are not a way of life, and now you are not a brand I would ever consider purchasing.

Thoughts on the 1979 All-Star Game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMJK6CA6G3Y

- The Kingdome was one of the best stadium names in professional sports
- Tom Seaver is part of the broadcast team (along with Garigiola and Tony Kubek), and he more than holds his own. i didn't realize he was doing tv work during his career?
- Nolan Ryan and Steve Carlton get the starts. Ryan looks extremely Nolan Ryan-y. I know what Steve Carlton looks like, both in old photos and also from a recent tv appearance he did…maybe in a mets/cards broadcast? for some reason, he just looks like a complete stranger to me in this game. maybe it’s his hair? maybe it’s just the old 1979 tv quality, digitized to a 480p youtube video? (but again, Nolan Ryan)
https://i.imgur.com/GjgMQvF.png
- umpires are George Maloney, Lee Weyer, Nick Bremigan, Billy Williams, Terry Cooney, and Dutch Rennert (!)
- the pirates and white sox uniforms were so, so good in 1979.
- Pete Rose gets some boos, and a lot of cheers too. Everyone loves Lou Brock, who is in his final season. Not as many people love Keith Hernandez as should be the case. don’t worry Keith, you’re going to go through a lot but you will get there, both in the 1979 MVP chase and also in life.
- Gaylord Perry looks like he is Phil Niekro in 1987
- Don Stanhouse understands
https://i.imgur.com/vwNPPHH.png
- reggie jackson gets booed quite a bit. the yankees, in general, get booed quite a bit.
- bruce bochte gets an enormous ovation. he tips his cap to the crowd several times. it is pandemonium from the hometown crowd the kingdome.
- the honorary captains for the teams are Carl Hubbell and Lefty “arguably only the third best Lefty of the ‘30s” Gomez.
- both the Canadian and U.S. national anthems are sung. Andrea McArdle sings the Canadian anthem first. she stares blankly after the conclusion. a few seconds later, the U.S. anthem begins, and she sings that one as well.
- in the ceremonial first pitch, Danny Kaye and about 50 kids throw about 51 baseballs at poor Darrell Porter. don’t worry, Darrell. you’re gonna win that world series, at a place that doesn’t use children to try to kill you. the Kingdome leads people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do…
- your starting lineup for the NL
https://i.imgur.com/Yd3Xt0g.png
- it’s amazing to hear them talking about Ryan’s longevity, saying that no one has thrown as hard as him for so long. it really is amazing that we would be ace quality for another 12 or 13 years after this game.
- Garvey gets a 2-out walk, then Schmidt drives him in with a triple high off of the really tall KINGDOME wall. Fred Lynn almost catches it and was going at full effort - notable because he had a “severe groin pull” the week before! if i get a severe groin pull, i wouldn’t jump for many years. crazy.
- interesting to see this ad for the Polaroid “smart camera”, the SX70-SONA (sp?). “a computer sets the exposure!” the most amazing thing about the ad is that they never show the words SX70-SONA (sp?) on the screen. i watched it three times just to make sure. he just says it out loud.
- bottom of the first, and by the time you are known as YAZ, you are in the hall of fame
https://i.imgur.com/xT0uoHZ.png
- easy pop-up to third, clearly in Schmidt’s territory, and he gets rudely bumped out of the play by his own teammate, Larry Bowa. yiiiiiikes, that was not good defense lol
- a woman with above average-sized boobs runs onto the field. the cameras follow the entire thing, from beginning to end. her chest really is quite large, and the crowd seems, by and large, delighted. Larry Bowa must be glad this happened only seconds after his blunder with Schmidt.
- Don Baylor drives in George Brett with a double down the left field line. i can’t look at Brett without thinking of that video about the farting and shitting of his pants. he was an absolute legend.
- Fred Lynn’s groin is just fine. He hits a 2-run HR deep into the Kingdome Bleachers. i was hoping for a Steve Carlton banger but both he and Ryan have gotten roughed up.
- YAZ has an amazing stance!
- the miller high life commercial with the steelworkers heading to the bar after work reminds me of A Woman Under the Influence.
- “The Chicken”, “I tell you - he’s a phenomena [sic]! the players are coming out of the dugout to check him out, Pete Rose, Keith Hernandez…”
https://i.imgur.com/xCgfTMr.png
- Ryan’s run into some trouble again. bases loaded with Parker coming up. how many outs are there? i don’t know, because there isn’t a constant box score overlay like there is nowadays. it’s just a nice, big empty camera shot. bring this back, imo. it doesn’t bother me that i don’t know how many outs there are. There’s at least 1 now, because he hits a sac fly to bring Boone in. 3-3.
- a wine store worker puts red wine into the fridge. the wise buyer/owner reminds this fool that you don’t put red wine in the fridge. the upstart says that actually, you do put this red wine in the fridge. it’s chilled burgundy. nonsense, says the wise owner. no one will ever buy this is in a million years. less than a million years later, in fact just one second later, someone walks in and asks if they carry the chilled burgundy. the up and coming worker smiles. look at who knows things now.
https://i.imgur.com/S2ItxIX.png
- that’s just the quality of the video, sorry. but it’s reggie jackson in a mariner’s uniform. apparently they didn’t ship his NYY uniform in time before the game so as a contingency plan he was going to wear the mariner’s uniform?
- i want to like the Astros uniform but it just reminds me too much of oil companies and gas station logos. The player number on the top of the pants is kind of an interesting move, though.
- these guys are playing hard! winfield almost took out the SS as he tried to break up a double play. i had forgotten how take out slides were so normal! but it’s all in keeping with the rest of the game, like Flynn going hard into the wall in the first inning.
- shoot, is this on youtube because it’s a recordbreaking game or something? It’s already 5-4 after 3 innings. there’s a lot of talk about the infield dirt, particularly right in front of the plate. apparently it’s so packed down that the ball bounces off of it like artificial turf and sliding on it will give you a strawberry.
- Terre Haute. That’s where this broadcast is coming from. Important because of local commercials. The first words of this one are “We don’t know if you’ve heard about it or not, but in case you haven’t, we just wanted to mention that MEIS is having a sale.”
- “You work underwater in a treacherous world most men never see. A dark world of unseen dangers, with a jagged steel skeleton of a ship which could rip a hole in the belly of a tanker. In dive after dive your torch burns through the cold steel until it’s nothing but another pile of rusting metal. Now comes Miller Time.” - is this ad directed by James Cameron or is the entirety of the target market James Cameron?
- Tom Seaver says Steve Rogers is “the best pitcher in the NL right now”.
- Gaylord Perry is 41 years old, and iirc was grandfathered into being allowed to basically doctor up the ball however he wanted. a jar of vaseline was put in his locker room the day before the game during the workouts.
- Carlton Fisk reaches for a copenhagen smokeless tobacco when he wants to relax on the bench. “or for you fellas just starting out, Mild Happy Days”
- Parker misplays a fly ball in RF, it takes a gigantic artificial bounce, and then he throws a pill to Ron Cey at 3B to catch Jim Rice trying to extend it to a triple. nice throw!
- A frisbee lands in CF. Winfield picks it up and throws it smoothly back into the crowd, which cheers. Dave Winfield is awesome.

I may take a look at that...I was surprised at first that Ryan got the start over Guidry, but--after his historic '78 season--Guidry started slow in '79 (slow as measured by W-L record, which was almost everything for a starting pitcher back then). Couldn't get a better illustration of how arbitrary that could be in-season: he was 6-7 in the first half, 12-1 in the second, and he pitched better in the first half. Ryan was terrible in the second half and signed the first million-dollar contract (I think) with the Astros for '80.

Guidry got into the 9th for an out.

it was truly a fantastic all-star game, all the way til the end.

happy new year clemenza!

i had never watched Andujar pitch before, at least not in "real time", for more than a pitch or two at a time. i was thrilled that he lived up to his reputation as amped up, competitive, emotional, all that. i was surprised at how intensely the game was played!

You too, Karl. If you want to see intense Andujar, watch this (or at least start around 1:38:00).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqAPmdnzxdE

Happy New Year, Don Denkinger (still alive at 86).

In the immediate aftermath of the 1985 World Series, Denkinger received many hateful letters, including death threats, from Cardinals fans. Two St. Louis disc jockeys went so far as to reveal Denkinger's telephone number and home address. Denkinger claimed that the letters continued on through 1987, when the Cardinals were ramping up for another World Series appearance, this time against the Minnesota Twins. Denkinger got into contact with Major League Baseball Security, who in turn contacted the FBI, when he received a particularly menacing letter with no return address, in which the writer said that if he sees Denkinger in person, he would "blow him away" with a .357 Magnum.

"joaquin andujar may never recover from the second half of this season"

and it's true, he never did. what's crazy, to me, is that in 1985 he was 21-12 with a 3.40 ERA, ok, but also 3.74 K/9 and 2.7 BB/9. i don't even know how that happened

sorry, very unclear there - the quote in my last post was from one of the announcers - sounded liked either mccarver or al michael (i may be getting them way wrong, just going by their voices). but they were right

Karl: Highly recommend the '71 AS game, highlighted by Reggie's HR that almost left Tiger Stadium.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrIuUvTtdZ4

I watched the game that year, and then, just before YouTube came along, a friend gave me some VHS tapes he'd saved from when the Sports network in Toronto was showing old games during the '94 strike. Instead of repeating everything here, I'll link to something I wrote about the game after watching the tape:

https://phildellio.tripod.com/reggie.html

If you want to skip right to Reggie, it's the bottom of the third at the 56:50 mark.

No joke, I watched it just the other day! And yes, it was an excellent game!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but when I was a kid I had a hand-me-down board game, based on the 1971 all-star game! It had little circular cards for each player, and you’d spin a dial for each PA to see whether your player hit a single, HR, struck out, double play, etc. I played with it all the time and got to know all of the early 70s pretty well, or at least their statistical tendencies as represented by the game. But until this week, I never thought to see how the actual game turned out!

you might recognize it - they kept reissuing the game throughout the late 60s to the 80s (and beyond?), with updated player dial-cards

https://i.imgur.com/HO50a4d.png

I've never seen that, no. Familiar with Strat-O-Matic, APBA--owned the '75 or '76 version--and Extra Innings, a loose-leaf binder my friend ordered in the late '70s. Amazingly, the first two are still around.

https://www.strat-o-matic.com/

http://apbagames.com/apbabaseball

Geez, so is Extra Innings, sort of (not sure that I'd trust any of these downloads, but they look okay).

https://www.tabletop-sports.com/downloads.php?cat_id=16

Looking forward to selling my copy of Quantum Baseball (1987) for dozens of dollars someday.

"Dozens of dollars"--best description I've ever heard for the clueless collector of junk (like me).

i almost mentioned it on another thread, re: being interested in stats, but for me, stats/probability was a big part of how i appreciated and learned about the game, both as a child and then around the late 2000s when i started following baseball again. as a kid, i was too young to comprehend the golden 80's cardinals era, and started being able to watch the games without shitting my pants in the late 80s/early 90s, in time to catch ozzie and willie and some of the others, but also during a relatively rare downturn in the cardinals fortunes. the games were barely visible on the tv, but i spent much more time going through my uncle's 1987 topps collection, and the aforementioned 1971 all-star board game, just looking at the stats. i remember looking at Rob Deer's card a lot, wondering what his deal was.

later on, in the 2000s, i got back into baseball almost entirely because of the advanced stats. i thought i knew pretty much everything there was to know about stats, so it was interesting to read baseball blogs that were using all these terms i'd never heard of before. WAR, sure, but also the attention paid to OBP, OPS, all the + stats. it gave me a whole new way to look at the game. it's a bit of a stretch, but it's kind of like how when you've learned how to make music, or sing, or draw or paint, it fundamentally changes how you listen to music or look at a painting. it's a great complement/contrast, i think, to the personalities and oddities of baseball players and throughout the game, which i also adore.

I mean, that's it: baseball isn't one thing, it's dozens of things. It's great plays, it's arguing about MVPs and the HOF, it's laughing at the endless absurdity of the game (some reviewers thought Bouton hated baseball because of him highlighting that aspect in Ball Four, when clearly it was just the opposite), it's trying to project a 20-year-old's phenomenal rookie year forward, it's rewatching great games from the past, it's stats, it's everything. And stats, for me, have been there right from my earliest interest in the game (part of which is that I'm a math person by inclination).

it's all that, and so much more. :) i might add to the list, it's involuntarily yelling "shit!!" whenever the ball is hit to you in the outfield

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaQlAHptguM

lol

somehow, i have never seen or read moneyball (though i've seen some clips on youtube, like that). one thing that always amazes me about professionals is how, despite that clip, so many of them say they deeply want the ball to be hit to them, every single play.

Something I also take with a huge grain of salt, and argument #937 I used to have with Morbius. He thought the whole postseason-inside-Kershaw's-head thing (or, more recently, Verlander's) was a myth, that a professional athlete can shut all that out. To me, they're prey to the same emotions anybody is. They're better at keeping that under control, most of the time, but why wouldn't Kershaw or Verlander think "Oh god, not again" at a certain point? If you don't believe that athletes can summon superhuman clutch abilities whenever they want--which they can't--why would you credit them with the superhuman ability to completely shut out fear/anxiety/etc.?

With eight defenders on the field, I'm guessing one or two really want it hit to them, five or six have cleared their minds and are just waiting for the pitch, and there's one or two Scott Hattebergs who are thinking "Please, please, not to me." And the pitcher's Dave Stieb or Nolan Ryan, he's thinking "Let's get a strikeout--I don't trust any of these bozos."

I confess all these mic'd up players are more entertaining than the booth guys.

Just got back from tennis, flipped on the game, and from another room, I swear it sounds like they're playing in an empty stadium.

did you win tennis?

I did--I've got Djokovic on Thursday...Second year, used to play as a teenager; getting much better.

Derivative Sport in Southwest Ontario

Looks interesting--I'll have to zoom in about 400%.