Opening a Can of Wanda Baucus

The Red Sox are in first place …

Bill:
Can we get Mirabelli in the lineup every day? [Laughs]

 

---

Mike:
The Belli owns Ted Lilly. Did you see that Wall Street Journal piece? The Red Sox have won the public-relations battle with the Yankees.

 

---

Bill:
But it's still a love letter to George. All he wants to do is win and all that hackneyed crap. Like he's somehow got an extra dose of Y chromosome or something making him Mr. Big.

 

---

Mike:
Yeah, he's Mr. Risk Taker with his own money. Puh-leeze.

 

---

Bill:
Yeah, on the other hand, nothing worse than people whining about all the pro Yankee bias in the media.

 

---

Mike:
[In a sarcastic whiny voice] Oh, oh, Fox just showed a clip of Aaron Boone's homer. Boo hoo. Oh, and now they're mentioning how the Sox haven't won since 1918. Mommy! Make Fox stop saying those things.

 

---

Bill:
Buck up. For fucks sake that's embarrassing to read. And people wonder why Red Sox fans are perceived as cry babies? Someone ought to go all Wanda Baucus on their chicken shit whiny asses.

 

---

Comments

[michele]

These crack me up. They should be in some daring Boston paper.

[h.b.]

Thanks so much, Michele! Cracking up an "A-List" blogger who's also a Yankee fan is saying something.

[beth]

come on. mccarver's a joke. just because we don't like it doesn't make us whiny crybabies. he's a bad broadcaster, he displays disgusting ass-kissing bias when calling a game, despite the fact that it's being shown nationally to fans of both teams. even on local broadcasts on NESN and WEEI you'll hear things like, "that really was an excellent play by jeter".

mccarver? at the end of the first game of the yanks-sox series, he says, "well, not the best played game, but a victory for the red sox nonetheless".

that's disgusting, immature, petty, and most of all, pointless. it's not about whether they show boone's homer--i for one know full well that's going to be shown no matter what network it is. It's the comments mccarver makes in the course of calling the game that bother me. he takes a factual event and makes it into either another jab at the red sox ("he just barely made it to base there" for a red sox runner vs. "a good hustle down to the bag" for a yankees runner) or unecessary and completely irrelevant praise for the yankees. he got his panties in a total twist about manny's homer hitting the top of the wall, despite the fact that the outfielder bobbled the ball so badly it might have been a home run inside the park.

Bottom line is, he's supposed to be there to call the game, not root for one of the teams, i don't care who it is. there's no other sports broadcaster who does this, and saying it's not right doesn't make you any more of a petty whiner than mccarver is himself when he shows a 1912 world series banner at fenway park and gloats, "there's been a big shift since then."

what are we supposed to do? like it?

[h.b.]

Your point is valid.

If only I'd have been able to channel your thoughts into one of the characters. I'm still developing their personalities/characteristics. Realize in hindsight it'd been better to have one of them take your position.

On the good side, at least I got you riled up enough to leave a comment.

Meanwhile, as bad as McCarver/Buck are, wouldn't you prefer them to Joe Morgan?

[beth]

true enough about getting me riled up.

as for joe morgan, i have to plead ignorance there.

[h.b.]

http://www.aeispeakers.com/Morgan-Joe.jpg

[AJM]

Have to agree with Beth…McCarver’s pro-MFY (and, in particular, pro-Jeter) bias has been over-the-top for years now, and I don’t think pointing out that fact (along with the fact that every Sox game shown on Fox comes off like it was produced by the Curly Haired Boyfriend) makes one a ‘whiny Sox fan’. I assume that a lot of knowledgeable baseball fans who don’t root for or against either team watched that broadcast wondering when Fox was going to get all the Curse/Bucky/Buckner/Boone nonsense out of their systems and actually focus on showing us the game.

As for Allen Barra, he just needs to be called out for being an MFY shill/Sox hater on par with Michael Kay and Suzyn Waldman; the difference being that his WSJ/NYT/Slate/Salon free-lance gigs have somehow given him legitimacy despite his obvious bias. I’ve seen him launch ad-hominem attacks on Theo, Bill James, and the entire city of Boston on-line recently.

[h.b.]

On the other hand, we can't really deny our own history. If you get riled every time someone trots out "1918" well, that's being a sissy IMO.

[AJM]

Okay, but getting riled up about '1918' is beside the point that I was trying to make above. Regardless of whether it annoys Sox fans, isn't the whole curse angle massively overdone and well past its expiration date in general, in the same manner of a Saturday Night Live skit long-ago beaten into the ground? That Fox broadcast really struck me as a parody of itself. No doubt it's just a case of the Fox suits playing it safe by playing up the obvious angle to the casual fan...but I have to think at this point they're turning off a lot of real fans who couldn't care less about the Sox finally winning.

[h.b.]

I hear ya, AJM.

But, if you look at this from Fox's perspective, their baseball Nielsen numbers are quite high, and that Friday night Red Sox v. Yankees broadcast was one of the most watched non postseason games ever.

So if you're a "suit" at Fox are you going to go out on a limb and fix what isn't broken? They could give a mofo about how Red Sox fans feel as long as the overall numbers are up.

Indeed, you may find Paris Hilton annoying, too, but she sells so Fox is going to push her skinny white ass on the screen every chance it gets.

Buck up :)