ESPN: The Worldwide Leader in Shit

This week marks the beginning of the 2024 Major League Baseball postseason.  Unlike most seasons, I am watching the playoffs this year, and am doing so for the simple reason that, unlike most seasons, the New York Mets are actually in the playoffs.  They even pulled off some late-season magic to get there, so expectations and energy are at a fever pitch.  Could this be the year? 

Even the casual follower of sports is aware that Met fans are cursed on multiple cosmic, earthly, and metaphysical levels.  But one area where we are not is in the quality of the Mets television broadcast.  Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and the legendary Keith Hernandez are masters at what they do, and that is an understatement. But the excellence of the Mets broadcast permeates from top to bottom, as everyone involved, from the producers to the crew, seem to have an innate grasp of how to show a game on live television in a way to generate maximum interest, excitement, and enjoyment.  And they do so with zero bullshit.

Normally, one would not feel compelled to add this last part, that is, until you watch five seconds of any Major League Baseball game on ESPN.  To put it mildly, baseball on ESPN is an absolute and unmitigated nightmare.  We’re two games into the playoffs and instead of preparing myself mentally and emotionally for a series-deciding game tonight, I’m compelled to sit here and write this piece, because justice compels that someone curse every last soul involved with that broadcast into the fiery depths of hell.

The most brazenly offensive thing about the playoffs so far isn’t even ESPN’s fault, but needs to be acknowledged up front because this fiasco can only be regarded as a joint effort between ESPN and the league.  If you watched even a single at-bat during the postseason so far, you would know that this refers to the sponsorship logo slapped across every player’s batting helmet: STRAUSS.  It’s bad enough that every team now has an advertising patch on its sleeve – even the venerable New York Yankees (Starr Insurance, ha, ha!) – but now this.  “What the fuck is Strauss?,” you might reasonably ask.  In addition to being the company with the shit-ass dumbest marketing department in the history of capitalism, it’s apparently a German apparel company.  This officially drops National Socialism to the second worst thing to come out of Germany in the last 100 years.  Hey, the Germans didn’t care what the rest of the world thought of them in the 20th century, so why would they care now?  Fuck you back, MLB, and fuck you, Strauss, and everyone who is forced to work there.  

As for the ESPN broadcast, here is the root of the problem as I see it.  There is an unresolvable tension embedded in the fact that the fans of the teams playing in the game genuinely care about the game as a sports competition, a competition where one team wins and one team loses. This stands in sharp contrast to the mindset of ESPN, which clearly and emphatically doesn’t give two shits about winning and losing.  ESPN seems to believe that it is simply putting out an entertainment product into the world, which is intentionally designed to be digested by the widest possible audience, also known as the least common denominator, the most superficial, lobotomized, unsophisticated viewer possible.  But this is the postseason, and the fans of the teams who have labored through the 162-game season care, and they care a lot.  They, we, deserve better.      

You know who doesn’t care?  At the top of this list are the announcers who have been covering the Mets-Brewers Wild Card series.  Talk about lobotomized, these guys might as well be calling the play-by-play from the medication line in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Are they trying not to wake up the baby?  Holy shit, show some emotion.  Pretend that you care. It is no accident that the play-by-play announcer also does the voice for MLB The Show – you know, the video game.  He might have a great voice, but he calls every game like he’s just recording words to be used in next year’s version of the game, just spitting out detached phrases that sound like baseball words, but are only vaguely associated with the action at hand.  Part of me believes they just play the video game voice during the game itself, it’s that bad.         

Two guys who just don’t give a shit.

Speaking of AI, let’s talk about ESPN’s “Win Probability” graphic.  In the upper left-hand corner of the screen, immediately above the score, there is a graphic that tells the viewer what the odds are for each team to win the game.  What are these odds based on?  Presumably some complicated proprietary algorithm concocted by the same forces that have erected a gambling empire around every major and minor sports league.  They even have ESPN Bet now.  For example, in the bottom of the 8th inning, the Mets were winning 3-2.  Right above the number 3 was the percentage 69%, which was intended to show the chances of the Mets winning the game.  Did any Met fan honestly believe we had a 69% chance of winning that game?  Is there a more ridiculous “stat” to display than what a computer thinks is going to happen in the human athletic competition we’re already watching?  This is baseball, you assholes!  That statistic is not a real statistic.  It’s a bauble.  It’s a meaningless but constant distraction.  Any human mind that actually understands sports knows that it is bullshit.  That at best it’s a strawman to compare real-life events against reality when reality inevitably happens.  Sure enough, in that half inning, the Brewers hit a home run to tie the game and then a two-run go-ahead homer.  In the course of two minutes, the odds of the Mets winning went from 69% to 7%.  How utterly useless.

By far the most excruciating part of any ESPN game is the in-game interviews.  In the middle of Game 1, the commentators in the booth spent a grueling half-inning interviewing injured Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich from the Brewers bench.  It was worse than all the Jeopardy contestant introductions over the past 30 years put together.  I thought I was having my foot amputated.  Why they feel compelled to do this, in any game, is anybody’s guess.  But this is the playoffs.  Who fucking cares what Christian Yelich has to say about anything?  Seriously, who fucking cares?!  Only a well-timed inning-ending double play prevented by fist from going through the screen.

But that wasn’t the worst. 

ESPN is notorious for interviewing each team’s manager while the game is going on.  At least football sideline “reporters” generally have the good sense to wait until halftime to interview the head coach as they jog towards the locker room.  In baseball, ESPN cares so little about the integrity of the competition that they insist on jamming a microphone in the manager’s face and asking them, in some clumsily phrased question, how the game is going so far.  To me, “how do you think it’s going, you fucking asshole?” is literally the only appropriate response.  So far in the postseason they have limited this intrusion to the managers, which is shitty, but nothing compared to what they do during a regular season Sunday night game, when ESPN routinely “mics up” a player on the field while the player is watching whether a baseball will be hit towards him travelling at 110 miles per hour.  Why on earth would any team or manager allow this unnecessary spectacle? Aren’t they trying to win the game?  Stop asking the player on my team about what restaurants he likes to dine at.  He’s playing third base, you cocksuckers!

But even that wasn’t the worst.

Last night, we witnessed the depths to which ESPN will sink to prove to the world that they just don’t give a shit.  In the 9th inning, thanks to the two home runs hit in the previous half inning, the score was 5-3.  This is what we call a close game.  With one out, the broadcast cut to the Brewers dugout.  Why?  So that some random ESPN person could conduct an interview with Garrett Mitchell, the platoon outfielder who just hit the go-ahead home run.  What did Garrett have to say that was so important?  What did Garrett have to say that couldn’t have waited until after the game?  But ESPN kept the camera on the interview the whole time – not even a split screen – while the final inning of the playoff game was happening!  The camera finally cut to the game action, but it was too late.  The ball had already left the bat and was traveling into the outfield.  It turned out to be an out, so it’s possible that no one will care or remember.  But what if it wasn’t an out?  They literally missed part of the game action so that viewers could watch Garrett Mitchell talk about something that already happened.

Did I mention that this was the playoffs?! 

If you watch closely, the collection of infuriating things that take place during any ESPN baseball game becomes too much for the mind to digest.  Too much for the soul to withstand.  I will have nightmares of T-Mobile commercials playing in an in-screen box, sound on, next to the silent box of the actual game.  My mind will forever retain visceral images of the DQ fried chicken strips descending into those disgusting, vile sauces. 

ESPN doesn’t even pretend to care about which team wins and which team loses, which team’s fans break out into jubilant celebration and which team’s fans descend into suicidal depression.  I suspect that many of the voices that complain about baseball as a game today do so based on the impressions formed during these dreadful national broadcasts like ESPN.  If they watched one inning of a local Mets game on SNY, they might feel differently.  I also somehow suspect that ESPN’s “entertainment product” would be infinitely more entertaining – to everyone – if they tried to tap into the excitement and stakes experienced by the most ardent of fans.  Alas, according to the on-screen graphic, there is a 0% chance of that happening. 

ESPN bills itself as “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” but it is clear that they no longer understand sports at all, if they ever did in the first place.