Overkill on a simple story
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by user BigPPup
On Tuesday June 6, Roger Clemens made his return to Single A baseball. Yeah that’s right the future first ballot Hall of Famer was playing Single A ball down in Lexington Kentucky with the Lexington Legends. The starting assignment would be the first of what should be three warm ups Clemens will go through before making his return to the big leagues at the end of June.
Now baseball players going down to play minor league ball while working on rehab assignments, or in Clemens case getting in their spring pitching is completely normal. What is not normal is LIVE coverage of the game courtesy of ESPN. This is slightly excessive coverage to put it mildly.
From about 7 pm to 8 pm ESPN stopped all other sports coverage and placed four members of their Baseball Tonight Crew. Granted the programming scheduled for that time slot was Poker, so we did not miss out on too much, but there are still more important stories than a typical pitching appearance by Roger Clemens that needs to be discussed. More often than not, it is becoming evident that ESPN is wielding their power as the World Wide Leader of Sports to dictate to the viewer and the rest of the media what are the important stories that need to be covered.
The Lexington Legends are a Single A team that probably averages between 5-7,000 fans a night. I’d venture out and guess there may be one video camera there from the local news station to get a few shots for the evening news. Last night ESPN brought in their crew to bring live coverage to the rest of the known world. I am pretty sure that was the first time in Legends team history that a production truck was sitting out in the parking lot.
Perhaps the worse part of the live coverage was the quality of it. I know that the Lexington park is not equipped for live coverage, but watching the video coverage of Tuesday night’s game was enough to make me motion sick. The video looked like someone was filming it with a hand held camera while they were kneeling on the third baseline. The poor quality of the production alone was yet another sign that the game should not have been covered.
Yes we are talking about Roger Clemens, and he will be a Hall of Famer, but what did he really do yesterday? Has he been out of baseball for an extremely long time? No. He missed the first two months of the season. Remember he did pitch 2 games in the World Baseball Championships. So, it’s not like he has been gone from the sport that long. Clemens is not returning from an injury. His legs wore out on him last year in the World Series, but that was a fatigue factor, it is not as though he is coming back from Tommy John surgery. So why all the focus on his first game back?
Granted, the Baseball Tonight crew brought their expertise opinion in analyzing Clemens pitching performance. Yet, we have to remember a Big Leaguer who goes down to pitch a minor league game is almost always a lose-lose for the Big Leaguer. Yesterday for Clemens he was working on his location and his control. The guys he was facing were working on getting a hit off Clemens. Meaning, these kids don’t have the discipline of the average big leaguer. They are willing to chase, and hack away at pitches even if it is not a good one. This means they will strike out more often, but on the converse side it means there is a good chance they can get lucky and slap a shot into the outfield.
So Roger Clemens survived his stint in Single A and only gave up 1 homer. Now it’s on to Double A. My only hope is that the World Wide Leader keeps his second appearance in the realm of reality. Meaning, talk about it for a segment or two on SportsCenter but not for the full show.
Date
Thu 06/08/06, 2:36 pm EST
