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With the NLCS, the TBS clips that are coming up on MLB.com reveal a certain not-greatness to the broadcasts, and if we are going to be straight with one another one of the first things we would have to talk about in that spirit of straightness would be the fact that any station that would employ Buck Martinez in any capacity for any series ever is questionable, so whether he is working any one particular series or not, he casts a long shadow. Fortunately, the sound-down options are pretty good for the NLCS: Jon Sciambi and Bobby Valentine aren't going to do you any harm at all on ESPN Radio (stream it live from espnradio.com! I dare you!), and Bob Uecker is of course relentlessly, almost antagonistically awesome on WTMJ. On a recent episode of FanGraphs Audio, poet, hipster, and baseball ironist Carson Cistulli determined (with the help of Dave Cameron) that while Vin Scully is arguably superior in terms of actually telling you things that are happening during a baseball game, Scully is like a wonderful grandfather, whereas Uecker is like an amazing uncle, which gets it exactly right, and makes me even gladder than ever that they are both still in our lives despite being astoundingly old. Really, it's almost unthinkable to me that anyone would willingly opt for anything but Uecker for this NLCS, but you're entirely OK if you have to go with ESPN (I have no idea about the St. Louis broadcast, because they mostly talk about the Cardinals, which is an understandable but unfortunate situation).
Over in the American League, you can put aside the perfectly fine WXYT Detroit and KESN Dallas local crews because you've got Dan Shulman and Orel Hershiser on ESPN Radio. The secretly Canadian Dan Shulman is by far the best of the guys who are not ancient, and Orel Hershiser is awkward but extremely knowledgeable (also the baseball glove I use to this day is an Orel Hershiser model, though I am considering a new glove for next spring, to be honest). This is basically the sweetest possible relief from the annual Joe Buck horror show on Fox, whether it is with his usual partner Tim McCarver (whom we at Baseball Feelings wish a speedy recovery from heart surgery) or, because he is making news in recent days, I guess, Terry Francona this time around. It doesn't matter who you pair with Joe Buck; he's still the worst. The choice between Dan Shulman and Joe Buck is like if you had a skin condition, or something, and you had to decide between a soothing balm and fire ants: I would literally never take the ants.
Your thoughts?
KS
my thoughts are how do I listen to baseball from the radio thru the interwebs without paying people for such a thing?
ReplyDeleteRaven I fear that the golden age of listening to baseball on the internet without paying anybody any money for it may be, much like the golden age of radio itself, a thing of the past. The way to do it used to be to google up a list of every radio station that was part of the (Your Team) Radio Network and then go to all of their sites and stream until you found the weak link that Bug Selig's goonsquad hadn't gotten to yet, a station that didn't switch their live stream over to replays of gardening shows when the baseball game came on. But in my experience, such stations no longer exist. I am generally pretty savvy in the ways of this internet however I know of no reliable method to get free radio baseball and so I offered a tribute of I believe $20 to the MLB warlords and have been happy I did.
ReplyDeleteThis has been my experience as well, though I was hoping my experience was limited by lack of effort. Well fuck.
ReplyDelete