Ruining a Good Thing

 Baseball is a game so sublime it’s entering its third century of popularity in this country.  If Fox Television has any say in it, there won’t be a fourth century.

The one intelligent comment I heard all night came from color commentator John Smoltz, that hitters would be swinging at the first and second pitch because they were facing, well, All-Stars on the mound.  What that led to was 1-2-3 innings that took less time than the commercials that ran afterwards.

Then again, the less time play-by-play announcer Joe Buck gets to talk is a good thing.  Buck couldn’t even be bothered to follow the game.  New pitcher?  Figure it out who he is.  New batter?  Ditto.  Buck’s stream of consciousness would drown a whale.  This assault by jabber went on for three hours and five minutes.  Think about it.  Fox stretched a 4-2 game into three-plus agonizing hours.

Part of it involved the “war” on cancer, where everybody in Petco Park got up with signs bearing the names of people they were standing up for.  I don’t know.  If we are at war with this disease, I’d say we’re somewhere between Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, maybe as far as April 1942, but not a whole lot more.  But you’d think we were on the outskirts of Berlin from the sounds of it.  And one of the sponsors contributed $10,000 for every homerun hit; there were two.  But in a war you sacrifice in order to win.  Why weren’t sponsors and Fox and MLB offering $1 million, no $10 million, a shot?  Maybe because it was all for show.