Intolerable
It's bad enough when you're watching a game where your favorite team is turning a win into a loss, and watching it is like helplessly watching your friend getting eaten by sharks because you can't swim. But it's made a thousand times worse when the prism in which you're experiencing this game through is causing your brain to explode.
Now I don't want to overshadow the Mets 4-3 loss with talk about the poor wrapping of the television broadcast, but both together made for a truly insufferable evening. The first thing I see on the television when I get home are our "protagonists": Joe Buck and Tim McCarver sharing a television booth with Charlie Sheen and Todd Zeile. I should know better than to think that FOX would pass up an opportunity to cross promote their fine programming. But Charlie Sheen's show isn't even on FOX, it's on FX. So that's what it has come down to? Distracting baseball fans from a baseball game to promote a show on your f*cking cable channel? Why? On the oft chance that Sheen will go insane again on your air and the rating points can come rolling in? I shouldn't be surprised by this since Saturday FOX baseball and the World Series have become four hour long commercials for the Wednesday night lineup. But FX?
Except it wasn't Sheen that went insane, it was McCarver. As the two were interviewing Zeile (and no, it isn't lost on me what an odd and random pairing Sheen and Zeile are), he was talking about how Citi Field was nice but that it wasn't Shea, and while people "may have thought Shea was a pit, to those who played there it was home." McCarver, who called Shea Stadium home for many years, raised his hand and chimed in:
"Shea was a pit! Shea was a pit!"
Raised his hand while saying this. On camera. Like a f*cking 12-year-old.
And then when Zeile was talking about all the players he was associated with in his time with the Mets, McCarver ....while raising his hand ... again ... like a 12-year-old ... again, awkwardly interrupts again:
"Timo Perez! Timo Perez!"
Who is calling this game, a Ford C. Frick award winner, or Horshack?
Yes Tim, we know. Timo Perez screwed up. Thanks for interrupting your guest just to get that bit of breaking news from 12 years ago into the broadcast. I mean, between McCarver and his partner who mails it in every summer until that first Seahawks/Chiefs preseason game, and you've got a hankering for wanting to put an electric drill through your brain. Bobcat Goldthwait reading the balk rule every half inning would be an improvement over this weekly purgatory baseball fans have to go through (and don't get me started on the blackout rule). Hell, I was rooting for Ken Rosenthal to announce that Kevin Youkilis had been traded to FOX so that he can finish the rest of the game. That would have been an improvement over these two and their penchant for spitting on baseball fans by bringing in celebrities to hawk their latest project. I hear Octomom is working on something, maybe she'll be on in L.A. next week.
(This all made me do something I don't normally do, and really shouldn't have to do seeing as if this is a national broadcast of baseball ... I listened to the radio for a couple of innings. I was luckily that eventually the picture matched up with the audio for a couple of innings, which is a big reason why I never do it in the first place. I can normally deal with the national broadcast pretty well, but Saturday night was just especially awful. And it got worse.)
Now there was a baseball game happening, and the Mets were doing pretty well ... steaming into the seventh with a 3-0 lead thanks to a dinger by the Cyborg, and an RBI by Chris Young, who was also pitching great going into that inning. But leadoff walks will murder you. And Young led off the seventh by walking Mark Teixeira. Then Nick Swisher hit a ball that Lucas Duda went back on, then in, then looked like he was drinking to numb the pain of having to listen to Buck and McCarver. In actuality, we know two things: first, it was me that was drinking to numb the pain. And second, Duda is merely a large hulking designated hitter miscast as an outfielder. So the ball got by him and the tying run came to the plate in Raul Ibanez. Now, you certainly could have brought in Tim Byrdak to face him. And in hinsight, that would have been the move. But keep in mind that Ibanez's batting average had dropped close to 40 points since May 20th. So why waste the one lefty in the pen on him when you have Robinson Cano coming up down the line? You want to blame somebody for Young giving up the tying dinger to Ibanez? Blame the fact that there isn't a second lefty in that pen that Collins could have used in that situation.
So it's tied now and Jon Rauch comes into the game to face Russell Martin, a matchup that didn't work out so well the first time. Rauch exorcised that demon and got Martin looking. But where one demon leaves, another appears, and Eric Chavez hit a dinger down the left field line to give the Yankees the lead for good. And this is where McCarver went completely insane by telling us that last year, Chavez's home run down the line would have been foul because of the reconfiguration of the ballpark.
Foul???
What the ... foul? The fences were moved in, and down. Not around and to the left. Foul??!?!?!? Was the ballpark reconfigured by Sandy Alderson or f*cking Galileo?
Do you see the foul line in a different place? F*cking foul? This is what I have to deal with? Do I really have to shut myself off from the world at large ... important phone calls, the smoke alarm, raccoons tapping on the window begging for food ... so that I can put on noise cancelling headphones just for the sake of avoiding stupid shit like "that ball would have been foul last year?" Do I really have to do that, and deal with audio that's seven seconds ahead of video, to avoid a national broadcast of baseball? Has it really gotten to that? Bad enough I want to stab my eyes out watching the Mets some nights, I gotta stick ice picks in my ears too on Saturdays? Why does it need to come to this?
And then, after the Chavez home run, Buck and McCarver are talking about the Pirates! "It's 4-3 in the seventh inning, hey let's talk about how good the Pirates have been this season!" WHY????????????? Because you couldn't fit them in between Charlie Sheen's inning-long promo and Timo Perez jokes? For crissakes, let me do the broadcast if you want clowns in the booth. I'm glad they can give us national announcers who tell us that they haven't heard Mets and Yankee fans go at each other in three years when they did it last f*cking night, and who can't pronounce the name Nieuwenhuis ... but are up on who reached the finals on American Idol and can sure as shit make sure they get the pronunciation of Zooey Deschanel's name right. (Siri, make a note ... kill me.)
FOUL!??!???!???!??!??!??!????!!!!!
And then some nonsense about how the Yankees are so wonderful at charity work and no mention of the work the Mets do in the community, and people wonder why fans think announcers are biased. I don't think they are, but jeez when you make it a point to laud the Yankees for community work while interrupting your special guest to remind people that Timo F*cking Perez exists, what the hell are fans supposed to think?
Of course, let me not forget that the Mets completely blew this game. When Lucas Duda and Daniel Murphy (shave, please) couldn't get the job done against some guy named Cody Eppley, it hurt. And the fact that the Mets got runners on in the eighth and couldn't get the job done hurt worse, especially when with Cyborg batting against David Robertson, I knew he had no chance. And when Lucas Duda swung at balls 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 through 13 with David Wright at first and Rafael Soriano on the mound in the ninth (I almost typed Alfonso, that's how pissed I am), it got even worse. And don't even get me started on how Daniel Murphy looked like he might have had his first home run of the season to win the game only to have Ed Hardy in right field catch it and jump around like he was LeBron James. And then reality sets in: the Mets got beat by Raul Ibanez and Eric Chavez.
Then come to find out that Frangag Frantsisk, the guy who started the whole chicken mess, and perhaps the guy who fed Ike Davis bad chicken causing him to miss Saturday's game with food poisoning (yeah, let's start vicious untrue rumors, why not), has a sore oblique (he works extra hard to strike out chickens, apparently). Great. I complain about him and complain about him ... but now he's hurt and I'm staring down the barrel of Miguel Batista closing games and I want to massage Frantsisk's oblique myself to get him to pitch on Sunday so that he can strike out some more chickens. And then I'll go to the broadcast booth and be a clown for nine innings. This is what I'm willing to do for you, the fans, during interleague play.
I'd rather do that than sit through another Saturday baseball game on FOX.
