Actually the Rox would need to take two in Denver to come back to Fenway, but I think they can do it (and I’m a Sox fan).
As far as the bullpen coverage and all the focus being on the Red Sox: yeah, that’s true. I think it’s partly because Red Sox fans (and haters) is just a bigger demographic than Rockies fans (and I don’t imagine too many people hate the Rockies except maybe in San Diego), so Fox is playing to the masses. But I think another part of it was that they were at Fenway… I’d expect the Colorado bench and bullpen, and the team in general, to get a lot more attention during the next few games in Denver - especially if they manage to take game 3.
I watched, but that’s basically because my “work” (writing a dissertation) is not time-specific, so i tend to keep funny hours anyway.
But fuck me, even though the late hour wasn’t a problem, i was still getting pissed off. I want to watch the goddamned baseball, not all the other bullshit, and the idea that a 2-1 game with a total of 11 hits and 6 pitching changes should take 3 hours and 39 minutes is fucking ridiculous. If it wasn’t so close, i would have turned the game off in a futile attempt to the spite FOX network. That game should have been over in less than 3 hours.
And i REALLY wish that baseball would, once and for all, do away with the whole “God Bless America” bullshit during the seventh inning stretch. That has to be one of the worst songs in history, and i fucking hate that they play it so often. Its jingoistic bullshit makes the Star-Spangled Banner sound like a self-effacing ditty by comparison.
I realize that MLB is a hugely commercial enterprise: practically anything and everything is for sale (the stands, the backstop, the infield tarp cover, and the uniforms on the players and coaches all provide a place for companies to hawk their wares), but I couldn’t believe Fox and MLB sold a “Sounds of the Game” segment. I thought those spots provided a glimpse into the seldom- or never-heard aspects of the game: discussions in the dugout, conversations on the mound, etc. They’re not supposed to be product placements. A miked-up Royce Clayton provided an ill-disguised commercial for Taco Bell when he was recorded talking about the free taco promotion with a teammate – it was painfully obvious that he’d been prompted to talk about it, and it was an exchange recorded from Wednesday’s game.
That was immediately followed by a live interview in the stands with a Taco Bell executive. Although my rage was softened a bit when Tim McCarver said something like “speaking of shilling” when the interview with the TB suit was over and the camera showed Curt Schilling on the mound, I turned off the game anyway. I’ll be listening to the rest of the World Series on the radio. And I won’t be going to Taco Bell today to get a free damned taco.
I turned the game off at that point. I find these games on Fox very trying to watch. The empty pomp is worse than regular-season broadcasts, the commercials are longer, and the announcers seem to know less about the teams than I do (and I’m a Mets fan, I probably watched the Rockies play twice this year). I have no rooting interest here, but I’d but 1000% more interested in hearing the regular Boston and Denver TV teams doing their normal broadcast. I wonder if the ratings would go up.
My beef with the constant shots of the Boston lay not just with the fact that it was the Sox 'pen, but also with the fact that FOX had to crank up the field mikes every time they went to that camera, so the home audience could enjoy all that annoying, grating noise they were making. It’s more typical FOX bullshit: “What’ll make the broadcast better? Hey, I know! How about a bunch of weird, pointless noises to go with the cheesy graphics?”
FOX has been covering baseball for about a decade now, and they still do a shitty job. Example: on some of those pitches that were called strikes but seemed high, would it have killed FOX to show us the side angle shot of the batter, so we could see how high the pitch was when it crossed home plate? I don’t remember seeing one such shot all night. All they did was put that stupid strike zone graphic up, which seems about as accurate as your average tabloid newspaper psychic.
How I long for the days when NBC was covering baseball, when they had been covering the game for about 50 years and knew exactly what to show and what to leave alone.
And I still believe, no matter where they’re playing, that Colorado would need to stage a full production of “Miss Saigon”–complete with helicopter–in their bullpen to draw the same amount of attention.
Grrrrrrr! Once again, college football has preempted the freakin’ World Series on my local sports radio station! Augh! What is wrong with those nutpuppets?
And why can’t the NCAA schedule these NFL tryouts (that’s all they are, really) so they’re not played at the same time as World Series games? I thought college football was supposed to be played in the afternoon?
All the Red Sox starters have hits except Manny, including the pitcher. Rockies have only one hit. Our batters are eating their pitchers’ lunch, while they are baffled by Daisuke. I’m thinking sweep now.
How cool was that? Seriously, two outs, bases loaded, and up to bat comes… the pitcher. How fast did we all go from “oh well” to “holy crap!!!” A two RBI single from a guy who’s probably had fewer than 10 at-bats in his life. (A figure I freely admit I’ve pulled out of my ass, just now. I have no idea how many at bats he’s had.)
That catch by Lugo to end the 6th was pretty sweet, too.
Colorado has made a real game of this. We’re in the 8th now and Boston has added 3 nice insurance runs so far, to allow me to breathe easier. But I like the Rox, they don’t give up and they are a damn fine team.
Dice-K was a pretty good hitter back in his earlier days, apparently.
Boston has about six flares, nubbers, and broken bat hits that have kept them alive tonight. These things were all going the Rockies way the last month - I guess things do even out in baseball.
Another outrageously, ridiculously long game. Four hours and 19 minutes. Two hundred and fifty-nine fucking minutes for nine innings of baseball. I know that higher-scoring games tend to go longer, but even a 10-5 game shouldn’t take anywhere near that long.
According to the retrosheet-provided game stats i have on my computer, which only go up to the end of 2004 (i need to update my database) there were 993 games with a 10-5 scoreline between 1886 and 2004. Of those, we have game times for 539 games, and the average time for games with a 10-5 scoreline is 173 minutes, or under three hours.
If we look only at more recent games, in order to account for overall changes in the way baseball is played and run, we still get an average of only 185 minutes for the 169 10-5 games played in the ten seasons 1995-2004 inclusive. That just a tad over 3 hours. This game took a full hour and a quarter longer than the average, regular-season 10-5 game.
In fact, this was the fifth-longest 10-5 game ever, and the four games that went longer all went well into extra innings.
June 19, 1987 NYY-BOS 13th 302 minutes
June 5, 1994 MON-CHC 13th 283 minutes
Sept. 12, 1980 CHC-NYM 14th 268 minutes
Aug. 7, 1994 CHW-CAL 12th 267 minutes
No wonder non-fans say that baseball is slow and boring. It’s not the game itself that’s slow; it’s all the interminable shit that they put in between, including FOX getting extra commercial time between half-innings and pitching changes. It sucks.
