Perhaps no team needs a day off more than the Blue Jays, unless we're talking about the Detroit Tigers, which, fortunately, we are not. After today's off-day, Toronto will finish the non-mathematical first half of the season with six games against the Red Sox and Yankees. Once the final out has been recorded Sunday -- hopefully for Jays fans with an Alfonso Soriano strikeout in the top of the ninth inning -- we will be that much closer to knowing which end of the buy/sell arrangement Toronto will fall upon.
Meanwhile there is the (equally non-mathematical) mid-summer classic itself, and, no matter what you may think of the new format in which the game now "matters," it has generated renewed interest in an idea -- the supposed best players of both leagues dueling "mid-summer" -- which calls to mind memories of Fred Lynn, of Ted Williams, of Pete Rose, of Fernando Valenzuela, and, more than anything else, of tedious 2-1 games. These latter incidents are a delight when it's Roy Halladay vs. Pedro Martinez in September, not as pleasing in exhibitions in July.
But now that the all-star game has become the Game Formerly Known as an Exhibition Game, there is, as I said, a sense of renewed enthusiasm for it, even though that renewal came about because of last year's tie and subsequent Bud Selig machinations. Most anything involving Selig, other than if he said "I am resigning, effective immediately," connotes negativity, but as any shrewd PR director, Rupert Murdoch, or Mick Doherty will tell you, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Most of the time, that is. Ask Kobe Bryant, among others, his opinion.
Yesterday, of course, rosters for the revamped game were selected, and, as always, there were the usual omissions and Say what? picks. There's not much we can do about the starters, because our control over such matters is limited, but that does not stop us from nit-picking the other selections. I won't get into much detail -- I'll leave that to the other members of the ZLC, if they're so inclined -- but for my money, I would like to have seen Tim Hudson make it, as I discuss in my latest ESPN column, and there is virtually no justification for putting Mike Williams on the NL roster. Lloyd McClendon, the rotten hitter he was, would have been as deserving. I was, however, pleased to see Brendan Donnelly, who was selected by the players and other managers, make the AL team. Those are just three observations; there's more to say, of course, but I'm mindful of the 'ol journalism/writing saw, "Know your audience." In this instance, I suspect this audience, like Aaron Gleeman, couldn't care less about the game or its players. If that is not the case, then I am mistaken. And in that happy and frequent event, let us go then, you and I, and discuss.
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On a previous thread a poster had mentioned one of the Blue Jays' announcers describing a home run as a "Shallow fly ball to the outfield," or something of that sort. Probably we all know this, but if there's one thing harder than playing baseball it's announcing it. Not long after I moved from southern California back to the San Francisco Bay Area, an independent minor-league team started in Rohnert Park, a small town about 35 miles north of San Francisco. Rohnert Park Stadium had once been home to a low-A-ball California Angels team, and I recall seeing Mark McLemore, Devon White, and Kirk McCaskill, among others, and I further recall White being the fastest player I had ever seen. (I myself had the pleasure of playing in Rohnert Park stadium, where in the same game I broke up a no-hitter in the sixth inning with a single to right field and gave up a ton of runs pitching in relief of another pitcher who had similarly given up a ton of runs.)
When the Sonoma County Crushers, the new independent team, started up, they naturally needed announcers. And naturally my friend Ed and I decided to send in an audition tape. We had played baseball all our lives, we had followed it just as long, we had degrees in communication studies, we had decent voices, we had done a public access TV sports-talk show together, etc. Plus we had low-paying, crummy jobs. There was nothing to lose, in other words. Oh, but so much to be gained!
So to make our tape, we decided to go to a Cal-USC game over in Berkeley. (I can't recall why we didn't go to an A's or Giants game; surely one or the other was in town. Perhaps, like everything else for 24-year-old roustabouts, it was a matter of finances, or to be more precise, a lack of finances.) Arriving a few innings into the contest, a tape recorder in my hand -- well, technically in my pocket at that point -- we spied a spot under a tree near the left-field fence, away from the students and scouts, and made it our base. And so we went to work.
After two innings we gave up.
What did it for me was when USC's Jacque Jones, in the middle of a long hitting streak, had just singled up the middle to extend the streak to 35 games or something, and all I could say was, "That is truly amazing." In a sense, I was spot on. It is truly amazing Ed and I thought we could do it, and it is truly amazing that anyone can do it, let alone do it with the ease and mastery of someone like Vin Scully. What was even harder than the play-by-play were the natural interstices of the game. I must have mentioned, during the gaps, ten times that Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Jeff Cirillo and other big leaguers had also played for USC. It's not easy to fill those holes; some can do it, some can't. Whatever the case, it's not easy. I'm sure it would have been easier if we had actually seen major leaguers; I knew a fair amount about USC's team, but not nearly as much as I did about, for example, any major league team. Besides, "easier" is a long way from "easy."
I won't defend the inanity that comes out of many play-by-play announcers -- color commentators and studio hosts like Rob Dibble don't fit here -- but I will defend the difficulty of their "job." Next time someone says "Neifi Perez was a great pick-up for the Giants," chastise them, to be sure, because they deserve to be chastised. But remember that these people are often as not hired not for their baseball acuity but rather for their skill at a craft which, if done adroitly, a la Scully, is as difficult, if not more so, than hitting a Pedro Martinez slider.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20030707043618999