Experts continue crazy talk
- Last Updated: 4:55 AM, July 16, 2012
- Posted: 1:00 AM, July 16, 2012
EQUAL TIME
What’s that word people use to express total exasperation, you know, when they can’t take it anymore? Oh, yeah:
Aaarghhh!!!
Crazy talk, spoken by professionals — experts — continues to supplant common sense and nullify plain talk. This weekend’s walk-off winner of the Nut Loaf Bake-Off was Fox’s Eric Karros.
On Saturday, top of the second, Mets-Braves. Mets had first and third, one out, a 2-1 count on Josh Thole, who then took a two-thirds swing at a pitch out of the strike zone. Kirk Nieuwenhuis, running from first, was thrown out.
Karros next said he disliked a hit-and-run in such a situation. And even in retrospect, he made some valid points. But then he began to replace reality with hocus and pocus.
Thole next took a curve in the dirt to make it a 3-2 count. Karros then claimed that Thole should be on first with a walk: “Right now, it should be bases loaded.”
Wait a second! The pitcher, Tommy Hanson, would have thrown the same pitch — a curve in the dirt — on a 3-1 count that he just threw on 2-2? Not likely.
Next, Thole doubled to right-center, scoring the runner from third.
“You’re shaking your head,” play-by-player Chris Myers said to Karros. “You think it should be 2-0.”
Karros then went over it again to conclude: “They should be up, 2-0.”
What!? How could Thole have walked then doubled in two runs in the same at-bat? To quote Lou Costello: “How can a mudder eat its fodder?”
Karros asserted that Thole would have walked, regardless of circumstances. Then he asserted that Thole would have doubled, regardless of circumstances! That’s not analysis, that’s sorcery!
Then there’s the spreading rash of play-by-players eager to replace plain talk with slick-speak, those primed to generate a stream of trite nonsense.
On Friday in the fifth inning of a 5-4 game, Mets’ radio man Josh Lewin apparently was unable to say Braves’ pitcher Tim Hudson “is still in there.” He went with: “Tim Hudson will still have at it.”
Moments later, when Hudson was pulled, Lewin told us that “Hudson will yield the right of way to Christhian Martinez.” Nurse!
Lewin knows baseball, why not just speak it?
On Friday’s Angels-Yanks telecast, Michael Kay continued to speak his forced, freshly concocted silly-isms. Of self-evident bloop hits, he now says, “It’s going to find grass” or “It found grass.” Hmmm.
For 15 years Kay never used that expression. Suddenly, perhaps after being up all night to come up with something new to dazzle us, that’s what he came up with.
But how many broadcasters and print folks never before — not for years — said or wrote “walk-off” for game-ending plays until they suddenly confused it with cool? Now all games end in some kind of “walk-off,” no matter how ridiculous it sounds.
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