Last night, at one point, I saw that the 2009 ALCS was being shown on the MLB Network. I decided to turn it on...it was game 3 between the Angels and the Yankees.
After about 5-10 minutes, I had to turn it off. Tim McCarver's incessant slobbering over Derek Jeter, treating basic plays by him as being the epitome of what winning baseball is all about, irritated me to the point that I couldn't listen any more, and I turned it on something else.
Now...one of the things I've talked about before is that MLB could give a rat's ass about hard-core fans like us, when it comes to nationally televised games. Bud Selig & Company figure that we're going to watch the playoffs no matter what happens, so we have McCarver and his incessant Jeter manlove, paired with a guy whose sole credential for being a play-by-play guy is that his daddy was good at calling games, and the fact that the die hards don't like those guys is irrelevant to MLB.
But it does lead me to wonder...I don't think I'm the only one turned off when a Yankee game is treated as a Jeter lovefest, or a Florida football game is dominated by talk of how wonderful Tim Tebow is, or when a Monday Night Football game is treated by Ron Jaworski as secondary to talking about Brett Favre.
Do the announcers just not care that a good chunk of their audience is turned off by this?
Do they think that Jeter, or Tebow, or Favre, is so transcendent that they must be treated as above and more important than the game?
Or do they think that this is what fans -- casual fans, in particular -- want? Do the networks really think that fawning over a media favorite increases ratings?