Tag Archives: baseball

Baseball, Pointless Nostalgia Video

21 Seasons of Joe Buck’s Fox Promos

Friday night brings us the start of the American League Championship Series. This means Friday night also brings us the return of Joe Buck to the airwaves.

Since 1996, Buck has been the voice of MLB’s postseason on Fox. When I think of Buck—and I think of him often—I don’t hear him calling a game-winning home run or series-clinching strikeout. For my money, the most indelible audio memory of Joe Buck is him being forced to read promos for Fox programming. And I do mean forced, because his android-like delivery of said promos suggests there is someone offscreen with a gun pointed at his head.

As baseball’s playoffs coincide with TV’s traditional season premiere season, Fox has always used its coverage of those playoffs as a vehicle to promote its brand new or soon-to-return shows. Each year Joe Buck has led these broadcasts as their lead play-by-play man—which he has since the last time Ross Perot ran for president—he has had to break away from the exciting playoff action to tell us all about these impending debuts. He knows as well as the anxious baseball fan watching at home that the vast majority of these shows will disappear without a trace three weeks after their birth. He also knows that even the “hits” he’s had to flog are either depressing monuments to fabricated culture (American Idol) or testaments of America’s disturbing flirtation with fascism (24). At least I like to believe Buck recognizes this task as the joyless death march it is, since he reads these announcements in tones that make Mike Francesa’s ad recitations sound like Marlon Brando.

In tribute to this autumn tradition, I’ve assembled a supercut containing Joe Buck promos from every postseason he’s been on the air so far, 1996-2016. You will hear and see him flog programs that I guarantee you have no memory of unless you personally apeared in them (and even then, you might struggle to come up with a name). You will also hear him blame Fred Savage for a power outage and linger a little too long on the charms of Zooey Deschanel. It is a testament to Buck’s dedication that, even when mooning over a pretty young actress, he still sounds as if he gobbled a fistful of Xanax.

Enjoy?

Pointless Nostalgia

Jean Shepherd on New York Baseball Fans, 1963

On the way to work this morning, I listened to a Jean Shepherd radio show from April 1963 in which he discussed the attitude of New York baseball fans in general and Yankees fans in particular. The reason I listen to 50-year-old radio shows is because of how amazingly prescient Shep was, especially when discussing philosophy or commenting on media and show biz. He was no less insightful on the “lesser” topic of sports and fandom.

In this clip, you’ll hear Shep (a Chicago native and lifelong White Sox fan) talk about how nutty the WIN NOW! attitude of New York fans looks to outsiders. He relates the grumbles of a Yankee fan friend who couldn’t stand the thought of his team not winning a pennant in 1959. He also shares memories of a trip to Yankee Stadium with his old pal and fellow Chicagoan Shel Silverstein, when the two of them witnessed Mickey Mantle get booed for the audacity of not hitting a home run that afternoon. Shep provides a passable Shel Silverstein impression to boot.

Shep tops things off with some thoughts on the then-fledgling Mets, the real reason the Dodgers’ and Giants’ move to California was lamented by the press (their gravy train stopped running), and how the New York WIN NOW idea extends to all sports.

I find this fascinating because it is a contemporary account of what fan attitudes and fan experiences were like during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In our cemented memories, this era is rendered in Ken Burns-ian sepiatone nostalgia. But when Shep was speaking, the era was still The Present, and thus could be discussed in an unvarnished way.

When studying most aspects of history we accept that, in order to really understand a time, you have to get as close to contemporary accounts as humanly possible. When it comes to sports, however, we often let ourselves be swayed by myth-making. That makes this Shep clip even more rare, and valuable. I hope you enjoy it.

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1963-04-Baseball-Fans-excerpt.mp3]
Literary Endeavors

Contested

I may have mentioned this before several thousand times, but I’ve written a novel. It’s called Hang A Crooked Number. Here is what I say about the novel to people who may wish to represent or publish it:

Backstop lives a double life, and both are crumbling. To the outside world, Backstop appears to be a minor league catcher of rapidly diminishing skills. In truth, he is an operative in training for The Moe Berg Society, a secret intelligence group that uses baseball as a front for its spy work. The mysterious disappearance of his fellow trainee, Mark, has plunged him into a career-threatening slump. Backstop gets one last chance at proving his worth when his handler asks him to investigate a connection between rumors of a mole and The Scouts, a faction of old-school spies hell-bent on seizing leadership of The Society. His mission is complicated by his new roommate, The Swing, an aging slugger working on a major league comeback, and by Brooke, a tenacious reporter who suspects Backstop holds the key to her investigation into Mark’s disappearance. With one eye on his plummeting batting average and the other on the mounting casualties of his mission, Backstop attempts to unravel a conspiracy that could change the game forever before he unravels himself.

This is the logline (industry terms!). Out of necessity, this omits a lot of what the book is. At the risk of explaining a thing that should serve to explain itself (like art is supposed to do), I can say that Hang a Crooked Number is about a lot of things that have almost nothing to do with spies, or baseball, or an imaginary world that has spies in baseball. A friend of mine who read it described it as “very New York,” which I took as a compliment. What I’m saying is, if you don’t dig baseball and/or spy novels in the slightest, I think you might still enjoy it.

The reason I’m going on about this is because I would like you to know Hang a Crooked Number is currently in the running for something called the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The novel has made it to the quarterfinals, in fact, and is one of about 100 titles under consideration in the General Fiction category. I entered the novel in the general fiction category because despite the novel’s genre shell, I think it’s closer to literary fiction than anything else. (See: defensive overexplaining above.) I’m normally suspicious of any contest that would allow me to advance this far, but they haven’t asked me for any money or to crash on my couch yet, so I think I’m safe.

If you want a tiny glimpse of the novel, Amazon is offering free ebook excerpts of all the quarterfinalists; mine can be found here. If this were in print form, what you get would only be the first 10-15 pages or so. But hey, it’s free, innit? I don’t think people downloading and/or reviewing this excerpt on Amazon will have any bearing whatsoever on whether or not Hang a Crooked Number progresses to the next rung on the contest ladder. But I don’t think it will hurt its chances either, if you catch my drift.

This novel will see the light of day, one way or another. If it’s via this contest, great. If it’s via the more old school method of agent pitching to editor over a three-martini lunch, great. If I have to make and distribute an ebook myself, great. If I have to tattoo it on my back and walk down the beach, great. My primary interest is to see it available to as many people as possible. That probably eliminates the tattooing option, but never say never.

Alright, as you were.