Best of Dave's World Part I

So, I've decided I'm doing a couple things over the next week or so as Dave's World continues its going out of business sale. For one, we're going to hand out the 2005 Dave's World Awards. We were going to do this at the end of the year anyway, so we'll just push them up a couple months.

These will be modeled after the types of awards you see in various alt-weeklies and monthly magazines in major cities across the country. The difference being, in your average (Insert city here) Weekly or (Insert city here) magazine, they insist on collecting reader ballots, but somehow, without fail, the awards always magically end up in the hands of their advertisers. Here at Dave's World we're going to cut through the pretense, cut out the middlemen, and be upfront about the fact we're flagrantly handing out awards to our friends and colleagues. For example, here's my first award: The 2005 Dave's World Fitchburg Sentinel Sports Staffer of the Year -- Chris Forsberg. Hands down, no contest.

The other thing I'm going to do is re-broadcast some of my favorite things that have appeared on this site over the past six months. If that's self-serving, well, this is my blog. And besides, astute observers have no doubt noted that most of the stuff worth reading here has been contributed by others, while I mainly blab gibberish about things like Mexican wrestling.

One of the first things that found a big audience on the site was this Chile's Corner piece, first published on July 3. Given the way things panned out with the Red Sox over the past couple weeks, in hindsight this looks like it was about three months ahead of the curve:

THE DAVE'S WORLD PRE-GAME REPORT PRESENTS DAVE'S WORLD'S CHILE'S CORNER LOOKING AT WHY NESN RED SOX BROADCASTS ARE UNWATCHABLE SPONSORED BY DAVE'S WORLD AND FOLLOWED BY DAVE'S WORLD EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA INNINGS AND THE DAVE'S WORLD THIRD-RATE KNOCKOFF POKER CHALLENGE AND DID WE MENTION YOU'RE READING DAVE'S WORLD?

By Chile Hidalgo

I haven't been enjoying the Red Sox season as much this year as I have in the past, and I think I've figured out why. At first I attributed it to some sort of World Series malaise -- after all, any number of famous national commentators had speculated that Red Sox fans wouldn't know how to react to winning the World Series.

But the results definitely mattered to me, as friends and family can attest, based on the language I chose to describe any number of Keith Foulke/Alan Embree implosions or Edgar Renteria's 2-for-98 start to the season. It wasn't because the games weren't exciting: three months into the season, the Sox have had more memorable comebacks and running subplots than the 1992, 1993, and 1994 seasons combined (you may recall that Scott Cooper's back-to-back All-Star appearances were probably the most exciting things that happened during those years).

It took me awhile to figure it out, but a couple weeks ago, sometime between an update from Hazel Mae in the NESN SportsDesk Studio and an inside joke between Don Orsillo and some NESN production team member about the size of said team member's biceps, it occurred to me that the reason I haven't been as interested in the Sox has been the quality of the broadcasts. This is the first time that they've consistently bored me. This isn't a knock on Jerry Remy, one of the best color announcers in baseball and a New England institution, or Don Orsillo (well, it's a bit of a knock on Don Orsillo), but has more to do with the disappearance of Sean McDonough and the fact that NESN broadcasts almost every Sox game.

McDonough, the son of legendary Boston Globe columnist Will McDonough, called Red Sox games from 1988-2004, and was pushed out of the Sox broadcast booth after last season. He now occasionally resurfaces on the 3rd or 4th string ESPN team with Tony Gwynn. The best thing I can say about McDonough is that he's the kind of broadcaster who makes you want to keep watching a mid-June 11-0 game after the 7th inning. His combination of dry sarcasm, occasional bouts of homer-ism, and willingness to voice his opinions regardless of the consequences (I'm guessing this had to do with his booth removal) meant that every Sox broadcast he did had something notable about it, whether it was a great one-liner, a new nickname for a marginal player (Hall of Famer Einar Diaz), or increasing concern about whether a specific comment would lead to him losing his job.

One of my favorite Sean McDonough quotes came during one of those late-season games that was roughly 11-0 after the 7th inning. The Phillies were awful that year and had been out of the race (behind the Braves, of course) since May, but on that night they were leading by a couple of runs late in the game. McDonough conveyed this information, then paused for a beat before adding, "if they can hang on and win, the Phillies have a chance to pull within 33 1/2 of idle Atlanta." And then he kept reading the rest of the scores.

Another McDonough highlight: one night while Dan Duquette was the GM, McDonough was laying into him. I forget the exact circumstances, but they probably involved Rudy Pemberton, Dwayne Franchise Hosey, and Robinson Checo. McDonough's tirade had been going on for awhile when McDonough announced -- live -- that he'd just been passed a memo from the Sox that ordered him to stop bashing the GM. And then he proceeded to bash the fact that he received a memo to that effect for about 20 minutes.

Granted, McDonough was a tough act to follow, but I've been watching broadcasts with Don Orsillo for what, three seasons now, and can't remember a single notable thing he's said, other than the fact that every time there's a foul ball that hits the stands somewhere between first base and the Pesky Pole he says "down by Canvas Alley." It's not that his presence takes that much away from the game or that he's a lousy announcer, but he adds nothing to the broadcast. Nothing distinguishes each game from the game before or the game after.

Of course, a lot of this has to do with NESN. Watching a game on NESN is kind of like being at K-Mart and hearing the canned announcements encourage you to check out any number of sensational K-Mart product lines such as K-Gro lawn products, K-nol pain reliever, and K-9 dog food (I spent two years in high school working at K-Mart -- trust me, I know). I watch a lot of baseball and a lot of sports on TV, and no other network, not even ESPN, is as relentlessly self-promotional as NESN. I'm tired of having to hear about WB Mason's Extra Innings with TC and Gary DiSarcina every half-inning. I'm not interested in watching "The Fun Before The Game" on the Olympia Sports Boston Red Sox Pre-game Show. I don't want to submit a recording of my friends doing kooky things related to the Red Sox to NESN's Fenway Fan Film Fest. I don't care who's still alive in the Partypoker.net Boston/NY Poker Challenge. I'm interested in Ford's Road Ahead, but would rather read about it in tomorrow's edition of the Boston Globe. (Incidentally, is it just me or is it kind of creepy that NESN, the Globe, and the Sox have overlapping ownerships?). I don't care what's On Tap, even if it's Red Sox Rewind immediately following SportsDesk and Granite City Extra Innings Extra. I don't need a Musical Montage featuring Hot Stuff when Terry Francona gets thrown out of the game. I certainly don't need to see a Very Special Presentation of a replica World Series trophy to the stuffed Wally the Green Monster that hangs out in the booth.

What I want is to be able to watch a baseball game without being reminded every three minutes of what network I'm watching and how else I can help that network rake in revenues. I guess I'm going to have to wait until the next time I get ESPN's 3rd or 4th-string broadcast crew for that.

(Dave's World is going to add a concurring postscript. As I've mentioned on the site several times, I have the DirecTV MLB baseball package. I've been watching a ton of baseball this year. At first, I remember watching a Yankees game on YES and thinking "hmm ... these announcers aren't half-bad." Then I watched a Dodgers game and listened to Vin Scully. An absolute pleasure. Then I watched the entire Sox-Indians series in Cleveland off the Fox Sports Ohio feed, and thought, "hey, these guys are great."

And it finally dawned on me -- they actually talk about baseball during baseball games in other cities; and they actually let baseball unfold at its natural pace, rather than cram every last second of the broadcast with some sort of visual or noise pollution. Even the Yankees have figured this out. They force Steinbrenner propaganda down your throat, but they don't hawk more products than the Home Shopping Network between pitches. Is NESN afraid that baseball games played by the defending world champions in a baseball-mad region that lives and dies with their team isn't interesting enough?

So in case you're wondering if baseball broadcasts around the country have been turned into a cacophony of bad jokes, nonstop carnival barking, and general annoying dreck, the answer is, no, they haven't, its just NESN).