Sports broadcasting's King and saviour

Or as they spell it south of the border, "Savior."

Tyler King is knocking people out with his exuberance, his raw power — and his punctuality.

Calling an AHL game on short notice, well, I guess that's more than most 22-year-olds can handle, but our friend Kinger literally pulled it off with aplomb on Saturday. Tyler did play-by-play of pro hockey for the first time, calling the Syracuse Crunch's 6-3 win over Albany for SportsRadio 620 WHEN. You may take aplomb as a fancy way of saying he slipped his patented "holds it ... holds it" into the broadcast at least once.

Granted, Bob Costas also called minor-league hockey in Syracuse when he was roughly the same age and look what happened to him.

Calling it a professional debut is technically right but seems like a misnomer. Tyler was born professional. Seriously, someone is not doing her/his job if Hockey Night in Canada does not have him on their radar screen.

As an added bonus, former Belleville Bulls star Mike Murphy was in goal for Albany, so Tyler finally got to cover a team which Murphy did not dominate. It's well-deserved reward after a couple frustrating seasons of following the Kingston Frontenacs.

Like another JC, Jamie Campbell is a martyr ... to poor editorial policy

jamiecampbell is going, going, gone, unlike some of the warning track fly balls he initially called as home runs over the past four seasons.

Buck Martinez is coming back to Canadian sports television as, wait for it, the Rogers Jays' new play-by-play announcer. Jamie Campbell, now restored to conventional capitalization and spacing, will become some other fanbase's whipping boy-next-door once he gets re-assigned by Sportsnet.

Having Buck back is in the ballpark with repatriating his old TSN partner Dan Shulman, but it comes pretty close. Anyway, for all of the Campbell-carving that has gone in the past four seasons, it bears reiterating what was said about him two years ago.

Snark aside, don't pile on Campbell. His struggles were the predictable outcome borne out of the Canadian television industry's indifference to helping anyone hone the craft of calling baseball and basketball, the same as with whoever had the Jays gig before him (it's been repressed thanks to a radical reverse therapy). The failure is on the industry's shoulders, so spare the rod for certain blahcasters and mediocrities of the mike who sometimes spoil the fun of watching a game.

Anyway, Buck is back. This is good if the Jays suddenly need to pluck someone out of the broadcast booth to manage again. Of course, such a situation is completely hypothetical, eh, Cito?

Campbell will be calling freestyle skiing at the Olympics, which is good to hear. A full-sized adult flying through the air, he can handle.

(Don't you love how the press release says, "Sportsnet viewers most recently enjoyed Martinez's work on the 2009 National League Championship Series on TBS." Uh, did they ask?)

Blog blast past: It's a mad, mad, mad Madden world, baby

The first Sunday night NFL game is on and it seems weird seeing Cris Collinsworth next to Al Michaels in the NBC booth. It seemed worth re-posting this, from April 16.

It's going to be tougher to enjoy a perfectly good game of football without John Madden.

Gushing over the retirement of the 73-year-old coaching, broadcasting and video game icon, not necessarily in that order, is a bit silly. Celebrating the career of John Madden is akin to a quarterback tossing the ball helplessly into the air before the blitz buries him.

His career was a triumph of commercialism and he probably lingered a little too long. At the end of the day, who cares, though? That's just a truth. A larger one is that, for Gen Xers, Madden or Madden, whether you're talking about the man or the video game, was the conduit for learning football. He's even credited with suggesting the virtual first-down line, so try imagining watching the NFL without that innovation.

The first generation that was weaned on television was occasionally described as McLuhan babies. The point today is that football-obsessives of a certain age could be called Madden babies. In a sense, this is being written by the ultimate Madden baby, since yours truly, no word of a lie, was born on the Tuesday before Madden's Oakland Raiders crushed the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl 11. Minnesota (all together now: "Damn!") has not played in the big game since, except in Madden, "the one place where the Vikings hold roughly a .996 winning percentage all-time," according to Daily Norseman.

Someone had the wisdom to position Madden as the jovial next-door neighbour, a kind of Foghorn Leghorn who knew football backwards and forwards. It helped him become ubiquitous as a commercial pitchman, but no one ever said the high priest of football commentary was required to take a vow of poverty. Please bear in mind, if you take Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football as the baseline, Madden still comes off as pretty good.

The point is Madden wouldn't have become as big as he was if he wasn't, deep-down, the genuine article. He was the perfect guy to bring football to the masses, since he had a special eye for seeing what all 22 players on the field were doing. He demystified a very complex game.

In his prime, he could make an exhibition game in August seem riveting just by talking enthusiastically about some rookie free agent. The player was probably going to get cut the following Thursday, but Madden could make you care about a San Diego Chargers running back named Jo Jo Jones like no one else. He sort of radiated an interest in anyone who stepped on the field (which was why he came up with the All-Madden team), not just the glamour-boy quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers.

That carried over into his style of analysis. He didn't plug the stars, or stick to story lines hammered out by producers. (How many times have you watched a NFL game where some lesser-known player does something good, and the commentator immediately goes into a spiel about his more popular teammates?) He was always good for the stream of consciousness observation, like saying, "No kid wants to grow up to be a catcher or a nosetackle," or employing pants as a verb. He never seemed to get crusty with age, either, or see himself as bigger than the game.

Madden, the ex-coach, made it known that football is the most thoroughly team sport of them all. It's meaningless unless everyone on the team is seen as important, right down to the 53rd man on a NFL roster. He had a human side that made him unique in the cutthroat pro football world, as one of his Raiders players, the defensive lineman turned author Pat Toomay, related years later when recalling how Madden stood by New England Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley after he was paralyzed in a game in 1978.

"It was Madden's first instinct to go to Stingley. At the hospital, Stingley had been found to have fractured vertebrae in his neck and was being fitted with a halo brace to stabilize the injury. Our physicians, thankfully, had risen to the occasion. Having overseen a safe transport, they had summoned the appropriate specialists. Experts were now at hand.

"But even at the hospital something was dissonant, out of sync. Expecting to find himself among concerned New England officials, Madden found himself alone. No one from the Patriots was there. Not the owner. Not the coach. No one.

"Grabbing a phone, Madden called the Oakland airport. Immediately, he was patched through to the New England charter, taxiing out to take off. A more-than-animated discussion followed. The plane returned to the gate. The business manager was put off.

"In the hospital, Stingley was conscious, as doctors worked to fit the halo. Having donned surgeon's garb, Madden appeared beside him, leaning close. 'Everything's going to be all right,' he whispered.

"... In the days and weeks that followed, Madden visited Stingley, if not daily, then as often as he could. During one visit, Madden discovered a malfunction in Stingley's ventilator. In summoning a nurse to fix the problem, Madden might have saved Stingley's life."

Curiously enough, two other coaching icons, Marv Levy and the late Bill Walsh, who are often credited with possessing the same traits, also cut their coaching teeth at colleges in California in the 1960s. As Toomay has written elsewhere, that was a last bastion of football being the players' game, instead a coaches' game.

In one of his books, published during the mid-1980s, Howard Cosell sniffed in one of his books that Madden had "allowed himself to become a caricature of someone bursting through the wall with a beer can in his hands." That was a small price to pay, and it's worth noting that Madden is leaving beloved, while Cosell, not to speak ill of the dead, was bitter at the end.

Madden was as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola, but a lot of people like Coca-Cola. With respect to the video game, the story that he wouldn't allow his name to be put on the game until Electronic Arts (now EA Sports) could offer full 11-on-11 play shows he was bit of an early adapter. He might not be able to articulate or explain it, but it's impossible to understate how Madden's helped a generation of guys and a few girls learn the difference between a 3-4 and a 4-3 defence without having to put on the pads. People speak knowledgeably of I formations, trips right and Ace formations, not entirely because but largely thanks to the man.

In a sense, we're all a bit smarter as football fans thanks to him. It goes without saying that pausing to mull his legacy is a reflection that, as Ray Ratto at CBSSports.com noted, we're reflecting on the end of the sports broadcaster as national institution:

"Madden broke in an era when there were three sports carriers, not hundreds. We have replaced authoritative voices with cacophony because we have democratized the airwaves, at least insofar as we now have access to every broadcast of every baseball, basketball, football, hockey and major college football and basketball game that can be reasonably found. There is not one voice, but hundreds, and most of them are, well, not Madden. They work for the teams, and you can't be a national figure that way."

It's simply different. There can't be another John Madden. He has rubbed off on countless people, and speaking as someone who spent untold hours playing the original John Madden Football on the family's Tandy back in 1990, the gratitude is all on this end.

(It's impossible to resist including a Madden ambulance montage.)



Related:
John Madden retires from broadcasting (Lisa Fernandez, San Jose Mercury News)
Only one Madden, then, now and forever (Ray Ratto, CBSSports.com)
BOOM! Madden Retires (Daily Norseman)

Blue Jays: One comes not to bury Jamie Campbell ...

A reasonable person makes do.

That might explain why it has been four months since last dropping a jamiecampbell. The Blue Jays' radio voices, Jerry Howarth, Alan Ashby and Mike Wilner are among the best in the majors (speaking as a XM Radio subscriber who has access to every team's broadcast). Besides, it would be tough to top Bruce Dowbiggin's denunciation of the team's TV flagship, which puts more on the corporation than the commenter.

"The word that springs to mind when listening to play-by-play guy Jamie Campbell and his rota of analysts would be unsatisfying ... a significant part of the hollow feeling springs from the anodyne tone of the crew.

"Now in his third season, Campbell has staked no claim to the team with either a flair for language or his keen insight into baseball. The genius of Vin Scully is that he tells you from the first pitch that he is the pilot, you are the passenger, and you are to sit back while he guides the ship. Even the lugubrious Chuck Swirsky grabbed the Toronto Raptors' mike like a thirsty man throttling a pump handle."

"... After this many games, (Campbell) still has mighty trouble judging fly balls (watch the outfielders) and a propensity for reading the daily statistical notes as if it were Finnegans Wake. His monotone delivery suits the subway (“Next stop Spadina, Spadina next stop”) more than a pennant race.

"The mark of a pro such as Jon Miller is his ability to bring out more than just inside baseball from his co-workers. Campbell's patter with his analysts is painful, leaving Rance Mulliniks or Darrin Fletcher to grind along unmercifully about arcane points of strategy.

"Part of this is not Campbell's fault. Sportsnet likes to grow its own timber and has thrust several people into key announcing spots before they are ready. The results are mixed. When it doesn't work, the outcome is like a travelling company of High School Musical – you know, 'Just wait till they grow up and move to Broadway.' Except they don't grow up. Campbell still seems stranded on first base. If he's being coached it doesn't show.

" ... When Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers legend Duke Snider broke in on Montreal Expos' telecasts with Dave Van Horne, he was raw and almost impossible to listen to. But Van Horne – a pro's pro – shaped Snider's contributions, drew out the man, not the baseball player, and they soon were a perfect team."

There is a honest reticence to comment on Campbell. He does work hard. Broadcasting baseball is a job where someone is expected to be perfect on Day 1 and then get better, although the mass of people watching really do not care too much who's doing the announcing.

The risk in writing this is someone will take it to as a way to act on frustrations over the Jays or what's going on in one's personal life. It isn't. Everyone knew going in this was clearly a sub-.500 team.

Dowbiggin, almost at long last, is pointing out national broadcasters have the wrong idea when it comes to picking the on-air talent for sports beyond hockey. They create their own mistakes, as previously noted:

"Please don't make this into a Jamie Campbell vs. Rod Black kvetchfest. It's tiresome, for one. It's not about them. It's on the highers-up in Canadian broadcasting who don't invest in bringing along bona fide baseball play-by-play people and just expect to get lucky ... The rest of us are just supposed to believe that there isn't a man or woman in a country of 33 million people who can commentate baseball. That's hard to believe." — March 31, 2008

That post, by the way, led to an e-mail from someone who had worked at one of the national networks. It seemed worth hanging on to and releasing at an appropriate time.

"The top executives of the networks don't mind putting people in positions who will 'learn the on the job' while doing play-by-play for fringe sports such as baseball. If it were hockey, you better damn well have years and years of play-by-play experience and know your stuff before they dare put you in front of a camera or on a microphone."

One can try to make do by following the Jays via radio, investing in Delay Play Radio (a device which syncs up the radio play-by-play with digital cable, which is about eight seconds behind). You can snark off that it's ironic The Score, not Sportsnet, is having a contest where the winner gets a job as a sportscaster. However, at the end of the day, just making sport of Jamie Campbell is useless.

The failure of a country of 33 million people to develop a good baseball broadcaster since Dan Shulman joined ESPN is borderline embarrassing. The Hockey Reflex does not mean it's OK to set the bar lower for other sports; look at how TSN broadcasts the CFL.

The definition of crazy is doing something the exact same way and expecting a different result, and that has happened too often with Sportsnet and baseball. One hopes it is going to change in Canada, for the sake of young broadcasters, people such as Tyler King and Mark Masters, to name a couple personal acquaintances. Jamie Campbell is not a bad guy or necessarily bad at broadcasting, he's just someone who was on the right side of a wrongheaded idea. At the end of the day, baseball fans in Canada honestly deserve better. Raptors fans got it with Swirsky and Matt Devlin; soccer fans get it with Gerry Dobson, even CIS nuts do with The Score's Tim Micallef. Why not for baseball, Sportsnet?

Related:
Something amiss from Blue Jays broadcasts?; Baseball play-by-play requires a raconteur's touch, a statistician's zeal and a sense of which plays matter most but Sportsnet yet to find right mix

Zen Dayley: Angels pitcher, agent die in crash

Nick Adenhart rates more than a bullet point.

The Los Angeles Angels right-hander died in a hit-and-run collision last night, one of three young people killed by an apparent drunk driver. The others, who are bound to get less attention, were a young woman named Courtney Stewart and a young man named Henry Pearson, who as it turned out is a childhood friend of Matt Clapp from Sharapova's Thigh, who wrote a must-read tribute.

The point is the world of sports is not good at dealing with this, not that it necessarily should since grief and overcoming pain and wrong and death is personal. Running over the franchise's history, which seems to include a disproportionate high number of people connected to the Angels who have died young, does no one any good. It doesn't dilute the troubled waters, doesn't moot the unspeakable, a 22-year-old — a teenager, practically — dead. Scott Boras broke down during the press conference, so keep that in mind next time someone complains about him.

It is senseless to evoke Donnie Moore or Lyman Bostock. It probably means the people who were connected to those earlier events have to relive it, so spare a thought for them.

A ball club, like anything else, constantly evolves, on the field, in the front office, even in the stands. At the end of the day, there's a young man's family, his teammates and the people who believed they had a connection because they knew his height, age and jersey number. It's brutal, although statistically speaking, it happens every day.

Adenhart figured to have an excellent chance at a long and productive career, as did Pearson. No doubt this will become a first point of reference with how L.A.'s season plays out, although that's of secondary concern.

(Of all the things to happen the week you finally read Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief, where dying young is a big theme.)

Damn, the Jays

• Ricky Romero was all right, eh? Two earnies across six innings.
• As you probably heard, Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi is no longer making his regular post-game Wednesday radio appearances with Mike Wilner. One wonders if that was Adam Dunn fallout, some corporate edict from Rogers, although the official word is he just didn't want to do it anymore, like someone else who you're reading right now.
  
  For the Jays, It's also more expedient if Ricciardi is no longer so visible.
  
  
• Sports figures can have selective memories. The FAN 590's Alan Ashby touched on his memories of his major-league debut during the Tigers-Jays game today, since it was a matchup of two debutantes, Ricky Romero and Rick Porcello (fortunately for the Jays, they got Porcello in his first start, not his 15th, not unlike a game in 2007 when they hit around some skinny San Fran right-hander named Tim Lincecum).
  
  Ashby said he recalled coming in for defence in a home game and making his first start at Tiger Stadium against a Detroit team that had Al Kaline, Norm Cash and Willie Horton, et al. He didn't mention that his first start came on July 4, 1973, Independence Day in the U.S.
  
  That's the difference between athletes and the civilian population. You would remember if something momentous in your life came on a major holiday. Alan Ashby's focus, back as a 21-year-old catcher, was calling pitches for Milt Wilcox and Tom Hilgendorf, who checked the Tigers on eight hits in a 5-2 win for the Clevelands.

Batter up: Atlanta Braves

It's that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a baseball team who you know fully well won't win. This season, in honour of an popular Internet meme, we'll present 25 things about each team. At bat: The Atlanta Braves.

1. The party line that the Braves are "hard to dismiss" is off the mark. They're pretty easy to dismiss.
   
   
2. The dead giveaway is that rightfielder Jeff Francoeur was not traded after hitting .239/.294/.359 last season. That's bad for a middle infielder, never mind a corner outfielder.
   
   
3. Don't call it a sophomore jinx, but Jair Jurrjens might have plateaued. He's only 23 and sometimes pitchers whose stock-in-trade is command and control don't continue to improve once the league have had a good look at them. Yes, sometimes those baseball announcer cliches have a ring of truth.
   
   
4. The Braves were 43-38 at home and 29-52 on the road. It would be great to find out if there's a correlation between a team's home/road split and whether they are still tuned in to their manager, Bobby Cox.
   
   
5. Minor-league pitching phenom Tommy Hanson's demeanour, dare we say, looks a little Halladayesque (it's either the reddish hair or the No. 32). Don't make the mistake of reading too much into Hanson starting the season in the minors. It's one of those roster-management dealies.
   
   
6. Veteran righty Derek Lowe, who is the nominal ace, gave up close to five runs per game on the road last season. That's a concern.
   
   
7. The Braves seem always be having pitchers develop arm trouble, but that could never have anything to do with how Cox uses his bullpen.
   
   
8. Based on their run differential last season, they should have been 79-83 instead of 72-90, seven wins better. That's part of where all this talk the Braves are a playoff team is coming from.
   
   
9. Catcher Brian McCann, the middle-infield set of shortstop Yunel Escobar and second baseman Kelly Johnson, and rookie centrefielder Jordan Schafer are pretty good Core of Four. Unlike the great Dean Smith, the Braves have trouble with the Four Corners offence. Their leftfielders hit .258/.330/.352 last season and Francouer had his problems, while Casey Kotchman is a bit of a Lyle Overbay clone over at first base.
   
   
10. Veteran pickup Javier Vazquez threw a complete-game six-hitter, struck out 10 (including Mark McGwire three times) the last time I visited Olympic Stadium, as one of a crowd of 7,760 for a Cardinals-Expos game on Aug. 7, 2001. Of course, the Expos lost because the late Darryl Kile threw a four-hitter for St. Louis. There's just something weird about reflecting that a dead guy was the winning pitcher the last time you went to a stadium that's no longer used for baseball.
    
    
11. A good friend participates in a NL-only keeper fantasy league, which for people with non-nerdish leanings, means it's only National League players and you keep the same players from season to season. (How hardcore are they? They can draft a player before he's even eligible for the MLB Draft.)
    
    Schafer was the only player among baseball's top 30 prospects last season who hadn't been claimed. Now he's Atlanta's starting centrefielder.
    
    
12. GM Frank Wren giving noted travel writer Chipper Jones a three-year extension: Great move or his greatest move? Jones is 37 years old in a league that doesn't have a DH.
    
    
13. Braves telecasts used to be a staple of summer in Canada in the days of the Superstation. Now we get Peachtree TV, which means missing out on Chip Caray. Damn.
    
    
14. The opening scene of Eastbound & Down did show Kenny Powers striking out the final batter of the World Series while wearing an Atlanta uniform, so let's take the time to express hope the show gets a second a second season. The first was awesome.
    
    
15. It is disappointing to hear the Braves' Triple-A team in Gwinnett, Georgia, will have the imaginative sobriquet "Braves" instead of "Crackers." Where's their sense of humour? Their new park is apparently a jewel. It includes a grassy berm in the outfield, which all minor-league parks should be required to have because it makes for some great meet-cutes.
    
    


16. Long-time Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Mark Bradley not only blogs, but he responds to the comments. He's got to watch it, he's giving old media a good name.
    
    
17. Greg Maddux's retirement means Tom Glavine (305-203 lifetime) is baseball's winning active pitcher. There's a sneaking suspicion that Glavine and Maddux were locked into a game of chicken when it came to who would retire first. Maddux did, so he wins.
    
    
18. Cox's second stint with the Braves began in 1990, which means he's the first person to manage the same team for 20 straight seasons since Walter Alston with the Dodgers in the '50s, '60s and '70s. He could have been that guy in Toronto (probably not).
    
    
19. The Braves, according to USA Today, have started a baseball camp in Tenerife in order to get into the virtually untapped reservoir of European and African baseball talent. That's pretty cool.
    
    
20. The downside to the Braves' skein of playoff appearances being broken in 2006 was no longer being able to e-mail sportswriters and correct them for referring to it as a "streak of 14 straight NL East titles." Their first three came in the NL West, and everyone remembers 1994.
    
    
21. Minor-league first baseman Freddie Freeman is supposed to be the real deal, so Kotchman is basically a seat-filler.
    
    
22. One hopes Kala Ka'aihue makes it to the majors, just for the name alone (Yes, he's the brother of Royals prospect Kila Ka'aihue).
    
    
23. Henry Aaron's 755 homers is the most of any player with a surname starting with the letter A. But did you know his former Braves teammate Darrell Evans with the all-time leader among players with an E surname, with 414?
    
    
24. The Braves will need to be bad for 10 years before those Bring Baseball To Atlanta bumper stickers (or the Go Braves And Take The Falcons With You alternative) will be trendy again.
    
    
25. Garret Anderson is probably not going to be the answer in left field. The L.A. Angels let him go for a reason.
    

CIS Corner: Ravens Stu-pendous, just for one night

Notes on our athletes/teams of interest from The 613 ... apparently there was a big basketball doubleheader out in the wilds of Kanata tonight.

Capital Hoops Classic

Carleton 87, Ottawa 72: The Ravens' swagger, the kind that could make Stu Turnbull run back upcourt to sink a three-pointer seconds after getting the ball stolen in front of a crowd of 10,523, came straight from the coach's mouth.

You always give any Dave Smart quote a close reading, hoping to glean something that reveals something about the emotional makeup of his team, and his recollection of last year's first matchup of Ottawa fit the bill perfectly.

"We beat a really good team and we felt we were there, and we weren't, and it cost us. So this year, we're just trying to make ourselves better and treat it like a January game." - Sun Media

It's a fair leap to take too much from what you read, but the Ravens, from Turnbull's 29-point, seven-rebound, four-assist night to bit players such as Elliott Thompson, whose only basket of the night was a three with 1:21 left in the third after Ottawa had pulled within a basket, were that mix of knowing they had to win while knowing that as tomorrow morning, pace Crash Davis in Bull Durham, "The moment's over."

Doornekamp and Kevin McCleery each had 21 points on the night from the low post. Concordia coach John Dore, who handled colour commentary for The Score, likened McCleery to a CIS equivalent of Kevin McHale, a big man who can shoot and finish inside. It was apt, since McHale started out as a sixth man and McCleery was actually in that role, since Smart started Cole Hobin at the four-spot to try to match up better with Ottawa's quickness.

It was nip-tuck for much of the night and hopefully it was a good show for people who sought it out. Carleton had a 6-8 point lead from early in the second quarter on, with Ottawa getting within a basket only once after the break, which is a mellow-harsher if you'd like to see another team vying for the national title.

A lot can change between now and March, but Carleton won by 15 with their three best scorers each hitting for at least 20. On their end, though, the sun still comes up at the same time tomorrow and their routine doesn't change.

• From the Gee-Gees perspective: Ottawa, which got 18 points apiece from Josh Gibson-Bascombe and Josh Wright, showed for 30 minutes that it can hang with anybody. Not to presume anything about what goes through players' minds, but it seemed like little irritants became big irritants, starting with JGB getting two quick fouls within the first 6-7 minutes, one after bumping with Mike Kenny while pursuing a loose ball near the sideline. They fought the current pretty well, but eventually it was too tiring, especially since they're not as deep as Carleton (but who is anywhere east of B.C.?).
  
  It's hard to get away from saying whether a team was tight or not; the Gee-Gees were just an inch or two off sometimes, and that can be the difference. Carleton had answers for them. Turnbull answered a three-point play by Dax Dessureault (13 points, nine rebounds) with one at the other end in the first half. Late in the third, Thompson stuck a three to re-open a five-point edge right to answer one by Warren Ward cut the score 54-52.
  
  Midway through the fourth, Wright ripped the ball away from Turnbull and glided in for a layup; Turnbull ended up hitting a three on the ensuing Ravens possession to put them up 70-60. Rob Saunders got to the rim for a lay-in on the next possession and that was game over.
• Women's game — Carleton 62, Ottawa 53: Ravens guard Tayna Perry had 20 points and forward Ines Jelic had 18, including six in a row late in the first half when Carleton began taking over. Going strictly by (faulty) memory, they haven't necessarily been a big comeback team, so that's a change.
  
  Ottawa (10-6) will need some help to wrest away a first-round bye from either Carleton or Toronto (both 11-5).
  
  
• The record crowd: A few commenters on the liveblog questioned the veracity of that 10,523 figure. Details. It was loud, and the atmosphere was conveyed well on TV, especially in the second game.
  
• No. 2 vs. No. 6 doesn't have the same sizzle: Our own Rob Pettapiece calculates the RPI for cisblog.ca, and that's where Carleton and Ottawa respectively were going into last night.
  
  The UBC T-Birds (.613) inched ahead of Carleton (.610) by about half the width of a fingernail last weekend. Beating the Gee-Gees might help Carleton, although their one loss was to Windsor, which last night lost to Guelph, which is 28th in RPI.
  
  
• Knowing The Score: Rookie play-by-play man Jason Thom and Dore, doing colour, got better as the game went along, especially in the men's contest. Thom got off his best line in the first half after a missed-everything shot, "I think someone just opened the door to Scotiabank Place," joking that it had to be the wind that caused the airball.
  
  At this level, enthusiasm counts for a lot in the broadcasters. Thom, a basketball guy, came across as very authentic.
  
• Bottom line: Good games, probably 4½ stars out of five. The 15-point margin for the Ravens men, not that anyone should think this way, gives Carleton a cushion if they end splitting the season series and both teams win out over their final six regular-season games.

HOCKEY

• Golden Gaels: Former Queen's goalie Ryan Gibb was traded in the Central Hockey League yesterday, going from Laredo to the New Mexico Scorpions.
  
  It's a minus-16 point swing in the standings for Gibb, who had put up a 2.96 goals-against average and .900 save percentage for Laredo. The glass-half-full outlook is that perhaps he'll get more ice time on a bad team, and more opportunity to show the whole gamut of his talents, kind of like when he played for Queen's.
  
  Last night's postponed Queen's-Carleton game will be played Tuesday, Feb. 3

Thanks again to everyone who took part in the liveblog. It made it pretty fun to watch the game from home.

No Homers Club: Not Gibson's finest moment

Fun, fun: Showboating, fisticuffs, shameless homerism and its perpetrator losing his gig, maybe over an staggeringly tasteless comment about a coach's ancestry.

The one positive is that out of this, a new term has been born -- getting Averyed, to describe the process in hockey whereby someone is punished for a remark that hits a little too close to home within the game's old boy culture.

Long story short, the other night in a WHL game, noted Sean Avery acolyte Kyle Beach , who plays for the Lethbridge Hurricanes, tweaked the Medicine Hat Tigers by taking his sweet time before scoring a game-icing empty-net goal. A brawl broke out and one of the Lethbridge announcers, Dick Gibson, went a little over-the-top while failing to point out his guy, Beach, kind of set off Medicine Hat.

A couple blogs note that Gibson has been removed from his position. The kicker, at least according to a commenter at YouTube, is that it wasn't entirely for blowing his stack during the brawl.

"As s for the guy commentator that got fired ... it wasn't for his comments during this, it was after when they were interviewing canes assistant coach who is of ethnic background who said he couldn't see see over the players so he didn't know what was going on in which the commentator responded with 'don't use your background as an excuse' in which he replied 'I'm not, I'm just saying I'm short.' "

The Hurricanes have an assistant coach named Matt Kabayama, who is 5-foot-8 and played in Japan professionally for more than a decade. Please bear in mind that is not definitive proof, but the talk is out there and the Hurricanes do have a coach who's short in stature and "ethnic," quote-unquote.

Obviously, this has a serious side, which the WHL broadcasters at After The Whistle and Regan's Rant address quite admirably. There is so much pathos being projected all over the place. Scratch a man who does colour commentary for a major junior hockey broadcast and at heart, you have a fan with broadcasting know-how. Homers tend to be the norm, not the exception. It can be almost endearing, in a way.

You tune into a junior game and you expect to hear the play-by-play man putting a positive spin when everything goes wrong, like when a team blows a three-goal lead in the third period and remains stuck on a Canadian Hockey League-worst total of nine wins, not that that's what happened to the Kingston Frontenacs last night.

That got the better of Dick Gibson. Making a crack about someone's "background," though, is way out of bounds. Hockey coaches have been relying on the standby, "I didn't see it," since the days of Eddie Shore. It's a privilege of the office no matter regardless of the coach's race, colour, creed or vertically-challengedness.

Gibson very well might have got the boot just for his on-air antics. Still, a player did something you might see from Sean Avery, and a grown man might have ended up with the same fate as Sean Avery, punished for saying something that was a little too close for comfort. Avery's banishment from hockey probably just got extended another month.

Related:
We can make this on topic (OregonLive.com)

Snark break ... we have other analogies

The challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many, but if teams called the Bears and Vikings can combine forces, then we can find common ground and prevail. Let us remember these timeless words: "It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter..."

... how much some media folk got carried away with Inauguration Day, save for a certain national newspaper losing its mind with its Jarome Iginla/Barack Obama "Separated at birth?" headline. Laugh it off, regardless of how you swing politically. You shouldn't be riled up over media outlets who demand to be taken seriously yet commit lines to print such as, "Obama isn't the first black politician, either." Thanks, Tips!

Then there was one self-described stereotypical Canadian claiming that we translate everything to hockey: " 'It's like it was a high school team getting beaten around for eight years. Now we got our Gretzky and it's time to go out and kick some (expletive).' "

That might not be the best analogy for an Obama fan, considering the Phoenix Coyotes' finances. Leave awesome enough alone, people.

The chanting has picked up: "It just doesn't matter! It's just doesn't matter!" ...

... that ESPN's erudite Jon Miller will now be tag-teamed on baseball broadcasts by Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips. Do former ESPN staffers own stock in Delay Play Radio?

... that the Vancouver Canucks' Henrik and Daniel Sedin have become the highest-scoring twins in NHL history. It's a useless record (how many sets of twins have played in the NHL?), plus Canucks fans are worried more about the lack of scoring by the Sedins' Swedish grandfather.

(Seriously, congrats to the Sedins. Each of them earned an assist last night, but typical of the Canucks, it came on the same goal in a 2-1 loss. It was against San Jose, granted. Jamie Baker, who does colour for the Sharks' broadcasts, accused Vancouver of not even trying to score in the third period.)

... what happens at the NHL All-Star weekend. Having in on the weekend in between the conference championships games and the Super Bowl might violate the Geneva Convention, though.

... that USC coach Pete Carroll is upset his quarterback, Mark Sanchez, is entering the NFL draft. Returning to USC for his senior season worked out so well for Matt Leinart — he's a Super Bowl quarterback, of sorts.

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting:

• Claude Lemieux's stat line from his first game back in the NHL: Seven minutes and eight seconds of ice time, three shots on goal, no bite marks. Good on him.
• The Milwaukee Bucks' Luc Richard Mbah a Moute is a great defender, and he's actually helped someone's NBA fantasy league team put two wins together (raising its record, sadly, to 2-10).
• Ottawa biathlete Alexandre Dumond, who takes kinesiology at Queen's, had a tough break, though not literally, at the world junior championship out in Alberta. He slipped on some ice and hurt his knee. Wish him well in his recovery.

Lastly, a random How I Meet Your Mother quote that pretty much describes this post: "Barney, for anyone else this would be a new low, but sadly for you, it's just a new middle."

Zen Dayley: Making sense of the Series sacrilege

That World Series half-game turned out to be not half-bad. It wasn't half-good either.

The question after the debaculous World Series -- sorry, but for a purist, Bud Selig making up the rules as he went along was a deal-breaker, even though no one says boo when the NFL plays fast-and-loose with the sport's integrity -- is what could be done to avoid a future recurrence. A shorter, 140-game or so regular season should happen; all the ball-and-stick leagues save the NFL should be playing fewer regular-season games.

The ex-manager Whitey Herzog is getting pilliored for his unearthing his pet idea for a neutral-site World Series (read the rebuttal at It Is About The Money). FOX Sports, to borrow the outgoing commander-in-chief's word, is "addicted" to those 8:37 p.m. Eastern time starts.

This is something where the only sane response seems to be to throw up your hands at the situation. A perfectly reasonable, albeit passive-aggressive recourse: If you really love baseball (and this is not wallowing in a game that never was), you could always just treat the league championship series is the true climax to the season. It's two teams who use the same rules for each game, home-field advantage is determined according to record and not a midseason exhibition game. Chances are, the two opponents might even have a long-standing post-season history, or have built up some enmity toward each other over the course of the season.

The preliminaries are often better than the main bout, anyways, just as in marriage and prizefighting.

Rays redux

• To the tune of John Denver's, "Please, Daddy, don't get drunk this Christimas," Please, Tampa, don't throw a celebration for a team which came second. It would have been amazing if the Rays had won the World Series a year after finishing in last place.
  
  However, throwing a party for a runner-up is a surefire one-way ticket to Lame City; that's just an opinion. Ottawa did that in 2007 for the Senators, enough said.
• Tampa Bay will be back. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

Other thingamabobs

• The big Hot Stove League news today: Ken Macha is going to manage the Brewers (the Jays could have had him in 2007) and the Royals got first baseman Mike Jacobs from the Florida Lorias.
• It looks like the Japanese pitcher Junichi Tawaza is free to come to the majors.
• Brew Crew Ball congratulated ex-Brewer Geoff Jenkins for getting a World Series ring instead of just feeling sorry for themselves -- like you're supposed to, according to Toronto sports logic.
• Apparently jamiecampbell got a little too caught up in Barack Obama's speechifying, because he figured it was OK to bring up the Civil War in reference to the Rays' super southpaw David Price, who is, uh, African-American:

  "David Price is from Mursfreesboro, Tennessee, which in 1862 was the site of a famous Civil War battle that resulted in a narrow Union victory. He's obviously hoping for a Southern victory tonight."

  Are references to 150-year-old wars really appropriate to bring up with any ballplayer? Granted, that is no worse than the attitude parodied in The Simpsons episode when Apu gets his U.S. citizenship: "Finally, last question, what was the cause of the Civil War." ... "Well, there were many factors, economic and ..." ... "Just say slavery." ... "Slavery it is."
• Speaking of the Obama infomercial, a FOX Sports exec said, "we didn’t push back the game, it was really just about suspending the pre-game -- you know, Joe Buck." In other words, Obama-Biden meant America heard less of Joe Buck and, being totally tongue-in-cheek for all you literalists, if that doesn't convince people to vote for them ...
• Via Rattler Radio, comes word that Baseball America has called Brett Lawrie "the best Canadian hitting prospect in a decade."
• FanGraphs is also big on 19-year-old Reds right-handed pitching prospect Kyle Lotzkar, another B.C. ballplayer who was in Single-A ball this season. (Did he play with Lawrie with the Langley Blaze?) Keep his name on file.

(Herzog link via, who else, ShysterBall.)

Zen Dayley: Tampa Bay was never reeeeeling, really; Rays defeat Red Sox, clichés

For probably not the last time, momentum in baseball is the next day's starting pitcher.

There's been some spur here to write a rant about how there should be a moratorium on TV talking heads saying that any team who's lost their last few games is reeeeeling. It's become the insta-cliché of the last couple years, a bit of faux-authoritative, dollar-store psychology used by people who want to pass themselves off like they have been there and know what it's like to be a pro athlete. It's an industry thing. If you have't been there, you should always be Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything: "I know that I don't know." Hey, it worked on the young Ione Skye.

The Rays, as you know, lost Games 5 and 6 before winning the real World Series American League pennant last night behind Matt Garza's two-hit pitching over seven-plus innings and phenom David Price phenomenating to get the final four outs. A truth is Tampa Bay had a much firmer grip on this series than the Cleveland Indians did before blowing a 3-1 lead to Boston in 2007. One can a hazard a guess that a common hallmark of instances when teams have come back from a two-game deficit to win a best-of-7 series is the first few games flattered the other guys. That did not happen here. Tampa Bay was better through the first four games and the first 6½ innings of Game 5, when the Red Sox made that epic eight-run comeback. They had an evenout over 12 innings of baseball, but were good enough to get through it, thanks to Garza showing his worth as a big-game pitcher and Price nailing it down at the end,

Miked Up offered a pretty good window into some of his colleagues who had the mindset. That's not a media-bash; a lot of people no doubt felt that way after the Rays blew it in Game 5 and somnabulated through Saturday's Game 6.

For the Series, the first knee-jerk thought is that the Rays have a huge advantage in starting pitching. The Phillies starters beyond Cole Hamels aren't much to look at and their home stadium is a launching pad.

At times like this, it's good to be reminded of the thin threads the larger glories hang off. Rany Jazayerli pointed out that Price became a Ray by virtue of the Kansas City Royals winning on the final day of 2006 season, giving Tampa Bay the No. 1 overall pick the following season. Ouch.

Anyway, getting back to the main point, there is some momentum in baseball. It's just more subtle.

Related:

• It looks iffy that Canada's own Matt Stairs will DH for the Phillies in either of the first two games at Tropicana Field. The Rays, going by the way they set up their rotation in the ALCS, would start lefty Scott Kazmir on five days' rest in Game 1. Stairs can't hit lefties. He has also hit .213/.303/.331 in 155 career plate appearances in Tampa Bay, not a great omen. It's more likely that their best pinch-hitter, Greg Dobbs, would be the DH.
  
• Rogers Sportsnet, in the future, should consider having Mike Wilner in the studio for its playoff coverage instead of the man who gives new meaning to square peg, jamiecampbell. Goodness knows that he's earnest as heck, shucks, he really tries his darnedest. This probably needs a bit of context, but during the wrapup the last night, he had this stilted moment:

  "Evanka, Jim, how does this sound: The Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series: Are you kidding me?"

  Campbell (or as a journo friend calls him, Captain Obvious) set it up like he had a clever and original line -- only to rip off one of Chuck Swirsky's catchphrases. This really happened.
• The latest on the Seamheads Historical Sim League (name that will seem clever at first but will seem less funny the more you hear to be named later) is that the teams will be grouped by their start date. The Jays will be in a division with the Seattle Mariners, the Rockies/Diamondbacks (Diamond Rox?) and Rays/Marlins (Raelians?). That bodes well for their chances, or it would if their GM was not an idiot.

Playoffs Primer: Dodgers-Phillies; Cheesecake vs. Cheesesteaks, and Manny vs. McCarver

Here's a dozen randomly cherry-picked items you should be aware of about the National League championship series, which opens tomorrow night.

1. Manny Ramírez has the Evil Gene, as evidenced by his insistence in acting like he's playing a game.
   
   Expect Fox Sports, which has the call for the NLCS, to turn this into a morality play on how "That One" can be poised to lead his team to the World Series after what he supposedly did to get banished from Boston.
   
   Tim McCarver seems to have made that pretty clear with his statement to a Philadelphia reporter, "Every sport, there have been people who have held organizations hostage, whether it be Terrell Owens or Randy Moss or Manny Ramírez."
   
   Someone, please, explain why he delicately overlooked Roger Clemens. Or Brett Favre.
   
2. But it's the Dodgers who fear lefties.
   
   It's a small, small sample size, but the two teams the Dodgers pitchers fared the worst against during the regular season were the doomed Nye Mets and the Phillies, whose meanest hitters swing from the left side -- Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, Jimmy Rollins and the flyin' Hawaiian, Shane Victorino. The Cubs had no such beast, and worst of all, knew they had no such beast.
   
   L.A.'s only lefty starter is 20-year-old Clayton Kershaw. He is going to be nails some day, but he started the season in Jacksonville. Granted, if you could live in Jacksonville, Florida for any extended period, nothing should ever scare you, even the fairly potent Phils.
   
3. OK, enough about the 84 wins.
   
   The Dodgers, counting the playoffs, are 20-8 since Sept. 1. The Phillies are 20-9. True, as a Jays fans it is teeth-gnashing times ten that over in the National League, a team can catch lightning in a bottle for one month and have a shot at the World Series. Baseball is supposed to measure a gift for dailiness, not reward the slackasses who were C students all year and somehow pulled an A out of their butts on the final pop quiz of the year.
   
   The Dodgers are analogous to the 2006 Edmonton Oilers -- a team that only had to make the playoffs. Once they arrived, they were dangerious. That might be fine in a hockey, but it's anathema to baseball, the sport of those with more discerning tastes.
   
4. The Ex-Cub factor
   
   In 1987, the Cubs rotation included two second-year pitchers, Jamie Moyer and Greg Maddux, who posted respective 5.10 and 5.61 ERAs and lost 29 of their 47 decisions. Two decades, Moyer is still going strong, while Maddux is more or less delaying his first-ballot Hall of Fame induction.
   
   It's an old saw in baseball that the team with fewer former Cubbies will win. The Phillies have only two, Moyer and fellow older-than-dirtster Matt Stairs, the ex-Jay. Moyer, who will turn 46 years old a couple weeks after the World Series, apparently wants to pitch until he's 50.
   
   The Dodgers have three -- Maddux, Nomar Garciaparra and Juan Pierre. The ex-Cub factor was negated in the first round since L.A. played the current Cubs. Dodgers manager Joe Torre also buried the latter two on the bench.
   
5. The other 2004 Red Sox hero who's on a big salary drive.
   
   Right-hander Derek Lowe could potentially starts games 1, 4 and 7 for the Dodgers, and he's a killer in the playoffs. For what it's worth, he's also beaten the Phillies the last two times he faced them.
   
6. The pen is mightier
   
   Like the Rays, the Phillies' bullpen has been underappreciated, even though its 3.19 ERA was second-best in the majors. (Who was No. 1? Why, it was a certain fourth-place team in the AL East that used to employ Pat Gillick.)
   
   Brad Lidge, as you probably know, has not blown a save all season, which only means he's due to blow one soon. Or not.
   
7. The ball always bounces for the team with the brighter manager.
   
   Speaking as an American League guy, real baseball includes having nine hitters in the lineup, not eight (unless the exception is named McGlovin). The NL has the pinch-hitting, double switches and the pitchers with their .111 batting averages who barely move fast enough to be described as running when they tap out yet another weak grounder to the second baseman. It's kind of like watching two Ivy League schools play football -- for an afternoon, it's kind of cute, but you wouldn't want to watch it for an entire season.
   
   That being said, having a bench and knowing how to use it is huge in the NL. Joe Torre, by almost all accounts, is always credited with having more on the ball than Phillies manager, Charlie Manuel. Torre's bench includes Garciaparra and Jeff Kent, who can no longer play an effective second base but could still be a factor as a hitter.
   
   It used to be fashionable to project anti-Yankees resentment toward Torre, but he's shown before that he can flat-out manage.
   
8. The ball always bounces for the team with the better catcher.
   
   L.A.'s Russell Martin is the best his league has to offer, behind the plate and at bat. His counterpart, Carlos Ruiz, does a decent enough job behind the plate, but is such a terrible hitter that it essentially reduces the Phillies to a seven-man batting order (unless foul-ball machine Brett Myers is the starting pitcher).
   
   Martin is on a tear of late.
   
9. The curse of Gillick?
   
   Phillies GM Pat Gillick gave a generation of Canadian ball fans the gift of enjoying two World Series titles in the '90s. There have been playoff teams in all three of his subsequent stops, but none has managed to win a pennant. Considering what happened to the 1996 Orioles and how the 2001 Seattle Mariners contrived to flame out after a record 116-win season, one has to wonder if someone has a Pat Gillick voodoo doll.
   
10. Why the Phillies might win
    
    They have the big bats, even though none of Howard or Utley did a whole lot in the easy four-game win over the Brewers and Pat Burrell was stymied until the clinching game. They also scored fewer runs than they did in 2007, but no one seems to have noticed.
    
    The Phillies bullpen is also strong.
    
    Martin and Andre Ethier, he of the .507 BAbip (batting average on balls in play) since Sept. 1, might be due for a big-time evenout. Let's face it, the Dodgers were also a bit lucky against the Cubs, whose hitters did sweet FA to adjust to how they were pitched.
    

11. Why the Dodgers are going to win
    
    They have the starting pitching-and-defence equation mastered to a greater extent than the Philadelphians. Their manager has been here before and last but not least, Manny Ramírez seems to be owning the moment.
    
    The Phillies' combo of power and good-enough pitching works over the Long Season. Beyond Game 1 starter Cole Hamels, though, they're largely a bunch of soft tossers, which is a deal-breaker in the playoffs, when games more often turn on one big inning.
    
    Howard was held in check by the Brewers and Chase Utley quite possibly is playing hurt, much like Robbie Alomar did during the Jays' 1992 run. Shorn of their two big boppers, the Phillies can be had.
    
    Notwithstanding that an 84-win team should not be in the playoffs to begin with, there is reason to like the Dodgers. Besides, after McCarver's remarks about Manny, he deseves another Deion Sanders treatment during the locker-room celebration.
    
    Prediction: L.A. in seven.
    
12. Does either of these teams stand a chance in the World Series against the AL East winner?
    
    Only insofar as post-season baseball is pretty random. Consider this The 2008 NLCS: The Race To Avoid Being The Team Which Has Their Ass Handed To Them In The Fall Classic.

Elsewhere ...

• Jays assistant GM Tony LaCava is interviewing for the top job with the Seattle Mariners.
• Canada's own Rich Harden will be back with the Cubs next season.

Dining out on McDonald's moniker (take that, Tother)

Bless you, Cox Bloc -- being the coiner of a colourful nickname for a slick-fielding shortstop might not seem like much of a claim to fame. You take whatever you can get in this life, however:.

Mike Toth's most recent column laments the lack of colourful nicknames in the modern baseball world ... Sure, there are no Wahoos and Catfishes anymore, but Toth is apparently unaware of the brilliant McGlovin, bestowed upon the Blue Jays' Human Highlight Reel (with the glove, not the bat, of course) by Neate Sager."

It figures that acclaim for the splendid sobriquet that was coined in 2007 wouldn't come until near the tailend of an '08 season where McGlovin has been reduced to mostly to pinch-running.

Also, this is a reminder that everyone should go to the Baseball Hall of Fame website and vote for the late, great Tom Cheek for the 2009 Ford C. Frick Award.

With fans and TV friends like these, there's no happy medium

Travis Snider's splendid home debut betrayed everything all that is soulless and wrong about the Rogers Blue Jays, their main TV carrier and Toronto's alleged sports fans.

It was twofold. Sportsnet, as Drunk Jays Fans pointed out, was doing an interview with an ex-Leafs hockey player and thus ignored the super-prospect's first at-bat. Secondly, the lack of a warm welcome when Snider came up was described as "shameful." (Miked Up.)

For a diehard fan, there's only so much you shrug off before you want to get your Billy Jack on: It's only a silly baseball team which hasn't been in the playoffs since I was in Grade 11, and I want you to know, that I try. When well-meaning family members and friends say that "it's only baseball" and tell me that I'm supposed to control my violent temper, and be passive and nonviolent, I try. I really try. Though when I see Travis Snider ... who is so special to us we (ought to) call him 'God's gift of sunshine' ... and I think of the number of years that he's going to have to carry in his memory ... the savagery of this idiotic moment of yours... I just go BERSERK!

No one's asking for the kind of saturation coverage TSN gives to hockey players who roughly the same age as the 20-year-old Snider. However, when the best homegrown hitting prospect the Jays have developed in relevant memory comes up to bat in his home stadium for the first time, pretty please with sugar on top and you can make this a Christmas and birthday present, focus on his at-bat. Don't talk over the play by doing an interview with ex-Leafs goalie Curtis Joseph, which is what happened.

Granted, the broadcasters might not have even noticed Snider was up to bat. As Mike Wilner pointed out on the radio and on his blog, he got roughly, oh, three-one thousandths of the reaction elicited when the "gameday crew" at the world's largest Rogers Video store brings out the T-shirt shooter. It was pathetic.

Perhaps the ignorance and indifference is no surprise, when you consider how little evident fanfare the Rogers-owned network dedicated to the up-and-coming star of the Rogers-owned baseball team.

As someone whom, admittedly, can zone out on baseball for hours on end, it's hard to get wrapped around what is so hard to understand. What are sports consumers in the Centre of the Universe apparently incapable of seeing with their own eyes?

Any 20-year-old who smokes a line-drive single off a 3-and-2 slider from Joe Nathan, Minnesota's lights-out closer, with two out in the ninth inning when it's his first week in the majors pretty much has the baseball world by the tail. Typically, in that situation, most hitters expect a fastball, and if they get anything else, they need a miracle in a worse way than Ricky did in that Trailer Park Boys episode when he couldn't smoke or swear in a courtroom. Experienced major-league hitters, including a few on the Jays, will swing and miss or produce a weak groundball out if Joe Nathan throws them a slider in that two-strike situation. (Not that anyone is naming names, Vernon Wells.)

That's what makes the indifference so galling, as Wilner articulated on air:

I have to say, (I'm) very disappointed in the crowd of 21 and a half thousand people that when Travis Snider came to the plate for his major-league at-bat at home -- nothing. Quiet, polite applause, no different than the applause for Lyle Overbay or Marco Scutaro ... you know what? And I mentioned to somebody before off the air and they said, 'That's what you get in this city. People just don't understand.' And I try my best not to give in to the people who say Toronto's not a baseball-savvy town and the fans don't understand baseball and you know, whatever. But that showed me something. And that was just terrible -- terrible! Everyone who was at the ballpark tonight should be ashamed of themselves for not giving Travis Snider a better welcome to the big leagues."

I can see where it's possible Wilner laid it on a bit thick. It was the Wednesday after Labour Day. The tourist crowd who make a point to come see a game or two each season are gone. Everyone there was probably on freebie tickets.

The newspaper reporters got it right and made Snider the focus of their game stories (although saying that Snider and John McDonald are in any kind of "similar situation" as hitters is more than a stretch. The only similarity between Snider and the .540-OPSin' McGlovin as hitters as that they each use a bat).

Ultimately, though, this is what you get in a market where how baseball is presented and absorbed is affected by Rogers' uninterested ownership (hat tip to Dan Rowe). When you have big corporations that don't care about the stuff they own, is it really any shocker people don't show any love to God's Gift of Sunshine?

Anywho, it's dumbfounding that Sportsnet couldn't save the softball questions for CuJo for the next half-inning. Meantime, for fans, start getting to know Travis Snider, AKA God's Gift of Sunshine. Not next summer, after he does a six-week or so turn at Syracuse Buffalo just to fine-tune his swing and cut down on his strikeouts, but now.

Going to a Jays game and not clueing in about Travis Snider is like going to a hockey game and not knowing it's played on ice. Sorry for the rant, but someone had to say it.

Zen Dayley: Insert picture of upside-down Canadian flag in 3, 2, 1...

Fox Sports cutting to a commercial during O Canada is tacky -- but it's like expecting the class clown not to make armpit noises during a school assembly.

The point is, you almost look forward to it with Fox. One less than endearing Canadian trait is that we often overanalyze American interpretations of us, just to look for the boo-boos. It's kind of like the nerd who adds to the goofs section on the Internet Movie Database. Watching how Fox, the broadcast arm of the hyperbole-industrial complex, utterly ignored this country's baseball fans during the baseball All-Star Game telecast from Yankee Stadium, though, you can't blame us for feeling that way.

It happens too often. We are forced to keep score at home. No one in Canada would have known about this right away, save for the fact globesports.com's Jeff Blair blogged it, but MLB did have O Canada. While Sheryl Crow performed The Star-Spangled Banner, there was a recorded version of our national anthem, with no singer. The only reason it was even seen in Canada, ironically enough, was due to a screwup by the Canadian rights holder.

Think about it. Months of planning and preparation went into this Bronx bonanza, but MLB couldn't find anyone to sing O Canada. Hey, it's not like there were an unprecedented three Canadians in the game. In fairness, New York City isn't swimming in unknown performers who just need a break.

This very well could be the old Canadian insecurity talking. Doesn't it seem like U.S. broadcasters constantly betray a lack of broadcast preparation when it comes anything Canadian? The half-assed treatment of our anthem was just the tip of the iceberg.

What happened was that that chill bump-raising pregame ceremony introducing virtually every living Hall of Famer wrapped up and Fox went to a commercial break. That's not so bothersome. They had a lot of ads to squeeze in and the pregame ceremony was bound to run a little long.

On Sportsnet Pacific, the screen went to black for about 15-20 seconds. Then suddenly the feed came back, somewhere around the "from far and wide," although it was hard to be pinpoint it exactly, since there were no words. What, MLB couldn't spring for the airfare and a hotel room to get this singer down to New York City?

Any Canadian baseball nut who tuned to see a game that had an unprecedented three of our own playing in the Midsummer Classic -- the L.A. Dodgers catcher Russell Martin, Cubs right-hander Ryan Dempster and Twins first baseman Justin Morneau -- saw half of a half-hearted treatment of our anthem.

In the top of the fourth, Roy Halladay came on to pitch. Joe Buck called the four-time All-Star Holliday (no, he plays for the Colorado Rockies -- as Amrit pointed out, he homered an inning later, but not off his AL near-namesake). A few moments later, Tim McCarver, referred to the Jays' home stadium as the "Rogers Dome." (Well, it has only had Rogers' corporate on it since 2005, and it is a dome.)

Hopefully Jays president Paul Godfrey wasn't expecting any quid pro quo for persisting in playing God Bless America during the seventh-inning stretch at the Rogers Centre long after many U.S. teams discontinued the practice.

It was a slap in the face. They skimped on an anthem singer and then Joe and Tim skim over some basic prep work for the broadcast involving a Canadian-based player. It comes off as saying, hey, it's Canada, what does it matter?

This isn't coming from someone who's resolutely anti-American. There's so much they do better than Canada -- sports, movies, politically motivated witchhunts, Trials of the Century, showing celebrities at their worst, subtle political satire. How many Canadians who couldn't get anywhere creatively in this country have made it big down there?

One of the funnier aspects about that line "where else can even paperboy option the film rights to a book?" in that Bruce McCullough Kids In The Hall monologue, In America, is that it has a grain of truth. The U.S is still the country for the dreamers, the lottery players. Canada is where your life is just a job you have to finish, although that's probably just as true for most Americans (that's why country music is so popular in both countries).

Getting back to the point, no Canadian broadcaster would ever think to go to commercial during the American anthem. We're way too eager to ingratiate ourselves with the Americans. Our government even let American fighter pilots do a flyover over the U.S. ambassador's residence in Ottawa on July 4, as well we should have. We would never consider not giving our American friends equal consideration.

Down south, they figure there's no need to bother with acknowledging Canada, but then again, we are kind of boring.

You think Buck and McCarver mentioned that there were three Canadians in the game? Don't be foolish.

(How sweet was it to see the full range of Martin's talents -- hitting, going first-to-third on a single, working the plate -- and to see Morneau score the winning run?)

Forget it, it's the Bronx

• Capping the pregame hoopla by wheeling in George Steinbrenner was lame. Only the Yankees would have the gall to be so obvious about ripping off the scene in Boston in 1999, when the presence of Ted Williams, in evident poor health, turned Fenway Park into a giant kiss-and-cry area at a figure skating competition.
  
  There's no moral high ground in begrudging an 78-year-old plutocrat in his sunset years becoming America's grandpa. That said, you can sub in "baseball owners" into that line from Chinatown about how "politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough" and it fits the scene to a tee. It's no wonder he didn't get a big ovation from the crowd.
  
  Painting Steinbrenner in such a glowing light, giving him more of a spotlight than Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, George Brett, Mike Schmidt and Frank Robinson, et al., is a whitewash. Sorry, but there's no way to be objective about Steinbrenner.
  
  In the back half of his time running the Yankees, he was the best owner in sports. However, you have to remember that for at least as long, probably longer, he was the worst owner in sports. He demeaned players and managers, ran roughshod over people who had no way of fighting back, traded in thinly veiled racism to try and shake down NYC for a new stadium -- remember when he kept saying the area around the Stadium was "too scary" -- and damn near destroyed the Yankee tradition.
  
  A generation ago, Goose Gossage, one of the Yankees legends involved in the first-ball ceremony (four first balls? Really?), said, "George always like to talk about the Yankee tradition. When did he ever play for the Yankees?"
  
  Gossage was right the first time. The Yankees can recognize Steinbrenner on their own time, like before their final home game of the season, rather than shoving it down the throats of fans whose teams don't have $209-million payrolls. The rewriting of history is well underway.
  
  Plus there was the time he invited himself to Costanza's wedding.
• The best hitters in the game (and Jason Varitek) went 3-for-28 with runners in scoring position. Basically, it was like a Jays intrasquad game.
• Everyone will be having a lot of fun with the story about Ichiro Suzuki's not-G-rated Gipper speech.
• Great lines from ShysterBall: "The baseball luminaries are riding in 100 Chevy Silverados. Baseball's carbon footprint is taking a beating this evening.
  
  "This thing reminds me of the Macy's parade. I hope I didn't tune in too late to see the David Wells balloon."
• Dustin McGowan's not out for the season. Even better news: He never watches movies that star Bill Murray.
• Via Uni Watch, here's a great trivia question: Who was the first player to play in an All-Star Game wearing Blue Jays gear? OK, It was Ruppert Jones, an outfielder in the '70s and '80s who never played for the Jays. How did he pull that off?
• Lastly, how much more informal was baseball back in 1967, the only previous time the game went 15 innings? Mickey Mantle was on the American League team that season, but didn't feel like he rated the honour, so he flew from Dallas to Anaheim, arrived after the game had started, pinch-hit for the starting pitcher in the third inning, struck out, and flew back to Dallas. The game was still going when he met up with his buddies at the country club.
  
  It's too bad that OPS+ wasn't around in in 1967. For a guy who was supposedly done, The Mick had an OPS+ of 150. Most players never get close to that in their entire career.

(Digression: Searching for the McCullough monologue turned up the greatest cold opening in television history. Try to work "guilty, but with various good excuses" into conversation whenever possible.)

King of all Internet broadcasts

Our own Tyler King will be on air tonight with Howard Bloom for the Ottawa Rapidz' Internet broadcast, which you can access via ottawarapidz.com.

Billy Packer wanted it this way, now please get off his lawn

"I've never been much of a sports fan" sound likes a perfect epitaph for Billy Packer.

The initial reaction to Packer's ouster as CBS Sports lead analyst for the NCAA Tournament has been about as sympathetic as Javier Bardem's character in No Country For Old Men. Some would even say the blogosphere -- witness the 90.5% disapproval rating he received from Deadspin commenters -- might have forced the network's hand.

Packer, through his words and deeds, more or less brought this on himself. His strengths -- being direct and unafraid of calling it like he saw it, even when he didn't see it -- were also his weaknesses, as so often is the case. A TV sports announcers also has to come off like he/she knows the people watching at home. Packer seldom seemed to relate to anything outside of his very narrow agenda of kissing coach keister.

That's why there won't be many requiems or honestly loving tributes for someone who's after being a TV staple at the Final Four since since 1975. (How long ago was that? John Wooden was still coaching.) Ten years ago, Keith Jackson, who to a generation was to college football announcing what Packer was to basketball announcing, got a season-long send-off when he announced he was retiring.

(Of course, Jackson scotched that by unretiring and working regional games, but he did hang on long enough to get in that "Vince Young has moved beyond the pale" line after the winning touchdown in the Texas-USC BCS title game.)

It probably had to end this way for Packer. CBS' crankypants emeritus, who was about a cuddly as a cactus and as charming as an eel, probably wasn't one for being presented with a gold watch and a rocking chair during his final visit to each stadium. Knowing how it ended with other sports broadcasting institutions who tried to be more than the games they were commentating -- Howard Cosell 25 years ago, Howie Meeker on Hockey Night in Canada around the same time -- a lot of them act like they'd prefer to go out on a sour note. It's proof everyone else is wrong and they're right, and they can live our their days saying "screw you" to everyone when they should be saying "thank you."

It's called the bitter end for a reason. From a fan's point of view, I've never been much of a sports fan are absolutely perfect words to remember Packer by.

Get out the... bologna and lettuce?

The search and speculation is over, and the shadowy figures at MLSE have forgone local and stateside Canucks in favour of a proven NBA voice for the next season of Raps broadcasts.

Matt Devlin (pictured), formerly of the Charlotte Bobnets and the Memphis Vancouvers, takes over as lead play by play man, with a resumé a mile long and soon to be Olympic experience with NBC this summer.

Granted, it's probably best that one of the radio guys wasn't promoted, but it does continue to add to the idea that Canadians can't call anything other than hockey unless their name is Dan Shulman. Still, to see Emelessee at the vanguard of anything would be a shock.

Next we get to start laying bets on who takes Swirsky's 1 - 4 PM slot on the FAN.