It’s going well. The Jays are giving the visiting team (Minnesota
Twins) a good thrashing and the fans are having fun because they’re all doing
the wave. They still do that in Toronto. They don’t care that it isn’t
considered cool anymore. They’re just having fun as you should on the weekend since
most of them worked hard during the week and deserve some good entertainment.
The first base umpire just blew two close calls in a row.
Got ‘em both wrong and the fans let him know but it isn’t going to change the
outcome of the game. Major League baseball is still so stuck in their ways. I
would never ever be an umpire and first base calls can at times be extremely
difficult to assess so let them review those on the big screen. The fans get to
see them and the slow motion usually makes it very clear as to the correct
call. I feel for the guy.
I’m reminded that it soon will be time to start up the NFL
season where for years the games were only played on Sunday. I’m not much of a
CFL fan since it gets played starting in early summer and ends in November and
all the teams really have two rosters—the one they start the season with and
the one they field when they pick from the leftovers of the NFL cuts. It’s
really hard to support a team that has a revolving door policy for its players.
The NFL in the last few years has decided that it is going
to take control of presenting the weekly games and since Monday Night Football
was so successful, we are going to dilute it some more by moving that to Sunday
Night bring in ESPN to take over Monday night and then we’re going to play
games on Thursday night and show them on our own network. It’s a can’t miss
plan!!
I don’t think so.
I have spent a lot of years in a marketing role in my work
life and had to listen to a lot of strange ideas. I pride myself in the fact
that my strength was to implement others' ideas in a manner that overcame the
oversights in the original plan. No marketing plan is worth anything unless you
can actually make it work on the production floor and distribution network.
So I could imagine the marketing meeting in the NFL head
office. “Here’s a great idea. We are going to take our worst mismatch of the
week in the schedule and we are going to air it on our own network on Thursday
night and we are going to use announcers that nobody really knows. We’ll make a
killing on all of the additional revenue we get from people just lining up to
sign for our new network”.
(Long Pause)
The smart people in the room are saying to themselves “How
the $%^% are we gonna’ pull that off” and the rah rah yes men are panting like
huskies getting ready for the Iditarod.
If it wasn’t for Gruden on Monday Night Football, I probably
wouldn’t watch because they get the leftovers from the Sunday schedule. NBC
with Michaels and Collingsworth get the “gravy” game at night. Dierdorf and
Gumbel, and Aikman and Buck usually get the good match ups for that afternoon.
The Thursday night game gets aired on a network that very
few US viewers subscribe to so nobody really watches it. We get all of the
Thursday and Monday night games in Canada on our sports cable networks simply
because you can’t play hockey and curling all year round. It’s hard to keep
good ice in the middle of the summer.
And the Jays play in a really tough division so they haven’t
made the post season in years. You can only watch “Touch’ em all Joe” so many
times and it was a while ago. It was nice to see that Tom Cheek is properly
honoured at the Dome for his 27 ½ years of service to the team as their first
announcer. His name is on the honour list that circles the stadium that is
usually reserved for former players with the number 4306—the number of games he
announced without every missing a day!
But back to the NFL, Thursday Night Football gets a big “c’mon
Man!!” from me complete with a Chris Carter-like disrobing down to an
undershirt but I don’t wear one so it doesn’t have the same comic effect as his
did. Not a pretty sight.
When the controlling body of a sport gets too involved in its
day-to-day operation, things don’t work out so well. The NHL still flogs the
dead horse called the Phoenix Coyotes and runs its day to day operation. NASCAR
is forever homogenizing its sport in an “attempt to level the playing field”.
Restrictor-plate racing is just plain boring. It does make for a good afternoon nap though.
Well the party just ended at the Dome and all is well—make the
final, 11-5 for the home guys (no it wasn’t on that network—something that only
Canadian readers would get here).
Now if Sunday just wound up with The Ed Sullivan show then
the weekend would be complete but then I would have to go to school tomorrow,
Sunday Night Football took over that role but it meant that tomorrow was work.
All parties end at some point.
No comments:
Post a Comment