Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [360]
DAVID BERSON:
From day one, the MLB Network was seen as a greater threat to us than the NFL Network. Baseball has a long season, with games every night, and they’ve got a smart programming approach—live highlights and analysis all night every night—which we viewed as a viable long-term alternative to Baseball Tonight and fan habits of turning to ESPN as the sole source of expansive nightly highlights.
We used to have a lot of baseball on our air—way more than any other network. By 2004, we have five games a week, plus the division series. But we decided to cut back a bit and save some money for NASCAR, which added a lot more hours and got us a different audience and different advertisers. We kept the marquee baseball windows of Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday nights, but we gave up our rights to the division series, which was a tough loss.
TIM KURKJIAN, Baseball Reporter:
I’ve never been at a place like ESPN. What interests me so much about it is there’s an expert here on everything. There’s a guy in our research department here named Mark Simon who could tell you who made the last out of every World Series back into the 1930s. I’m serious. If you ask him who made the last out of the 1936 World Series, he can tell you. We have another guy named Jeff Bennett who can tell you what every baseball card looks like from 1979 to 1985. I challenged him one day and said, “All right. Robin Yount, 1982.” And he said, without hesitation, “Well, he’s got two cards, one he’s looking like this at the third base coach and the second one, he’s running out of the batter’s box.” And then he sent me those pictures just to make sure that I knew that he wasn’t trying to fool me. And he was exactly right. And we have Judson Burch, who knows the number of every umpire in the Major Leagues. I didn’t even know they had numbers, but they have them on their shoulders. The other night, he walked into the room where Buck Showalter and I were watching a whole bunch of baseball games, and I said, “Jud, who’s working third base in Texas tonight?” and he went, “Adrian Johnson.” There were fifteen games on TV that night, and sure enough, he knew who was working third base. He’s also a huge Phillies fan, the biggest in the world. We played a game with him where somebody gave him a random date. “Okay, May the third, 2003. What happened to the Phillies that day?” And he goes, “They played the Cardinals and beat ’em seven to three. St. Louis got two in the first, Philly got three in the bottom of the first…” and—get this—“Charlie Relaford worked the plate.”
BUCK SHOWALTER, Baseball Analyst:
Live TV is tough. There’s no “do-over.” There’s jargon in the dugout that you really can’t use on the air. One of the first shows I did, I was still using the baseball jargon, and they were talking about umpires. What did I think that pitch was? And I said “Obviously, it’s right down the cock.” And it was! That pitch was right down the cock—but you know, I didn’t mean anatomically; that’s just what we say in the dugout. And I’ve learned through the years that how you would describe something in the locker room is not how you would describe something on the air. That one didn’t go over too good.
JOHN KRUK, Baseball Analyst:
I’ll make a comment about “a player shouldn’t be in this position, he should be in that position,” and if the player thinks I’m taking a personal shot at him, he’s wrong. I don’t have personal vendettas. There are players I watch and I wouldn’t want that guy on my team, but you still don’t rip him just for that. I’m going to give my opinions; if players get mad, they get mad. I don’t really care.
OREL HERSHISER:
The biggest challenge for me as a broadcaster is dissecting the seven things I see that I could talk about and getting it down to one, then knowing I’m going to do that one subject the best I can. Because you have to do what the whole crew can do; you can’t just do what you see. But I will tell you, the six others will still haunt me.