There is a reason relatively few people other than passionate fans of the teams involved have been watching baseball’s postseason telecasts.
There is a reason Fox’s commercial campaign addressing that issue, with Tommy Lasorda exhorting baseball fans, “To the TV!” is falling on deaf ears.
The reason is baseball fans are going deaf listening to the mind-numbing, constant chatter of the broadcasters.
Every year it gets worse. Every year I watch fewer postseason games.
(It doesn’t help when a good game like Thursday’s NLCS Game 7, which included just 10 hits and four runs, drags on for 3 hours 23 minutes, giving the babble bubbleheads too much time to fill. My time often is spent screaming at the pitcher to throw the ball or begging the announcers to shut up.)
Baseball fans are baseball fans because they understand the game. Give us pictures of the incredible quality TV provides now, throw in a few on-screen graphics, and we know what is happening without a single word from the broadcasters.
Baseball, I wrote in a profile of Jack Brickhouse two decades ago, is a game of ellipses, most of which are best left blank for the fan to fill in.
Sure, I could mute the sound on the TV, but that also would shut out the bits of stadium atmosphere that Mssrs. Buck and McCarver and Brennaman and Lyons (and, before them, Morgan and Miller on ESPN) allow to get in edgewise.
Baseball, I wrote in a 1985 sentence you can read on the wall of the Hall of Fame, is the only game you can see on the radio. Given that, and given that a picture is worth 1,000 words, what the talking heads on baseball’s telecasts say adds up (sorry, Macbeth) to wasted sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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phersh@tribune.com
