West Coast Dominance, East Coast Irrelevance
It’s going to be really interesting to see how ESPN keeps the spotlight focused on New York and Boston in this upcoming baseball season. The balance of power in baseball, almost any way you choose to look at it, has swung directly into the state of California.
1) The Giants have won the world series 2 out of the last 3 years and are nicely positioned to win it again next year.
2) The Dodgers has soared past the Yankees in terms of spending as the new ownership group has gone out and acquired some of the biggest names in the game.
3) The Angels have now got three of the game’s biggest names in the game in the same line up for 162 games. Their approach to building a world series team can be questioned, but Trout, Hamilton and Pujols as 3 or your first 4 hitters is about as imposing of a start to a line up as their has ever been in the history of baseball…..
How is ESPN going to ignore these teams from California and continue to talk about the Yankees and the Red Sox 24/7? Are they going to just pretend that the biggest names in the game don’t exist? It’s going to really test the patience of baseball fans who tune in to ESPN to watch Peter Gammons blather on endlessly about the aged and declining Yankees and the not-very-good Red Sox.
Honestly, they should just break the network up like they do on their website. Instead of one channel devoted to covering the Yankees and Red Sox 24/7 with sound bites and clips scattered to the other 28 teams, they should have four different channels: ESPN WEST, ESPN EAST, ESPN SOUTH and ESPN NORTH— they all come in your cable package and you choose which one you want to watch—different broadcasters for each channel. I’d watch all four but at least I’d have the choice to avoid the east broadcast if I chose to……
A Place To Talk About Giants Baseball 
Good points. I see it like Bill Walsh and the “west coast offence” they will not be able to ignore these teams and producers will have meetings on “PDT time management” and “west coast game updates”.
There may be a lot more coverage of LA/SF and LAA/TX games. With a lot of east coast views tivo or just watching hi-lights.
Snarkk made a heartfelt and powerful post about yesterday’s events. I do take exception that discussing the disastrous consequences of the assault weapon in these rampages is an excercise for “idiots”. This was my response:
“We are not “idiots” for arguing about the relative lethality of these weapons. The fact that these weapons can fire hundreds of rounds per minute, giving the victims no time to escape, is part of what drives these rampages- and it absolutely does make a differeence whether 5 lay dead or 28. Or NONE, without the fact that an assault weapon can do it’s “work”: quickiy, maximizing the dead, many of these tragedies ( yes, they are murders, but tragic as well- ‘a shocking or sad event”) might never have occurred- we don’t know. But we do know that “whether more might have lived if this and that” is not a fucking “game” , it’s a reality that scores of people with wilted flowers on their graves would be alive today but for the “relative lethality” of assault weapons.”
I don’t think anyone is dismissing the enormity of what happened yesterday by callling it a “tragedy”. It most certainly is that for the families and friends of the dead. And for a small town. No one is sugar coating that it was mass murder that brought about a tragedy for countless people.
I wasn’t speaking of your post. I saw many blogs where caliber of weapon were discussed, I wasn’t referring to weapon type. I know the diff in lethality of assault weapons compared to single shot and semis. I am for the banning of assault weapons, among other things. They can be defined properly, if the legislators have the spine. They did once. Not now, not yet…
2nd Amendment rights… I get it….. but there’s something to think about here..
Global gun ownership
Pakistan 11.8 per 100 people
Yemen 54.8 per 100 people
US 88.8 per 100 people
As much as I don;t really like a lot of the folks on Comcast Sports Net I find myself watching that a lot more than ESPN. Kozimor is good as are some of the others, and you get a lot more obviously about the local teams. The ESPN LA offers little difference from the COnn guys.
I can’t stand Kozimor, I do like the women there- they should toss the whole male crew. And not just for looks- Mindi Bach in particular is better than any of the men, IMO.
I’m a huge Kozimor fan— he sits in for the KNBR radio guys now and again and his shows are always the best I hear that week…..
Different strokes and all that.I like Dave Feldman a lot more.
there are times when kozimor is WAY over the top but sometimes he gets to a place where most broadcasters won’t go, which is good. I don’t watch espn much at all anymore. their love affair with favre several years ago, and the incredible emphasis on ny/boston just got old. a lot of the time it seems like they are just interviewing themselves and passing it off as news. As for chronicle live, i can’t stand skelator the lawyer (nice hair job!) and i turn the channel when they get into MMA and other assorted weird endeavors.
I still enjoy around the horn and pti though. when i was living in NJ, it started at five which became my cocktail hour before i started making dinner. i rarely get to watch it anymore.
I watch very little ESPN anymore. I tend to just click in for a few moments on the three specialized networks- MLB, NFL, and NBA. I tend to only watch the Comcast report during baseball season. MLB network, in particular, I tend to leave on as a kind of wallpaper while I’m reading. I’ll glance up once in a while to see what’s going on, then get back to reading. I currently have two books going. One is a 1,000 page novel I’m still working on, “A Moment In The Sun,” and a baseball book, “Summer of ’68.”
Both are very good, and are contenders to make it into the “Goodreads” box at the side of the blog. (grin)
ESPN has some very good people, unfortunately they’re not used much. Bob Ley is as good as anybody anywhere.
“Outside the Lines” is outstanding.Typical of sports “journalism” today is that ESPN chose Berman( get back, back, back outta here, Chris) to be the head talking head instead of Ley…
One of the bigger 2013 series for us East Coast Giants fans who have to constantly hear about the Yankee dynasty is Sept 21-23 …. Giants vs Yankees… It will bring much joy to see a Giants rampage upon the Bronx Bombers….My guess is that hometown advantage won’t mean a thing.
I’ll see if I can save up enough of my Soc Security check to afford a couple of tickets.
Man, it will be something to leave that stadium with my simple Giants hat and shirt, smirking at all those wanna be d-bag Yankee fans with all their pinstripe uniforms.
In 2008 or 2009, the Yankees came to the Giants ballpark for a three-game series, and the Giants won two of the games. In hindsight, those types of things were probably more significant than we realized, in the way the team was building confidence and the ability to compete. The pieces were slowly coming together.
“The pieces were slowly coming [back] together.”
just like me, the day after a night out with the boys . . .
It happened back in 2007 and the holdovers from that team were pitchers Cain, Zito Lincecum and Wilson. I guess with Barry it was very slooooowly coming together.
Kozimore is not my cup of tea. A yapper, seems vacuous and shallow in his questions and comments. I agree Mindi Bach is very good. Articulate, concise, to the point, good sense of the big picture…
ESPN is really the only choice I have as CSBA video doesn’t work on my computer.
a 15 minute radio interview with Brian Sabean in his home town where he played on the HS baseball team.
http://concordnewsradio.com/?p=1436
Your best female announcer? Not the hottest, but hell, you can go that way, too. Michelle Tafoya is good, Shelly Smith is very good, Beth Mowins is better than most male football play-by-play announcers.For hot, Kate Longworth does it for me. She has a way of signing off that sounds like an invitation.
I’ll second Kate. aie carumba!
I actually pay very little attention to the personalities or the looks of announcers, especially sideline announcers. They all look the same to me. Except Siragusa., He looks different to me. 🙂
Maybe I should have restricted it to reporters. BTW my Dad quit CBS when they first went with sideline reporters. After one year they did away with them and he returnned. Of course, so did they after a couple of years.
Mowins is very good, Mary Carillo is/was the best analyst on any sport, male or female.There are many very good female announcers, forgetting looks.
I know the Nats romped the league during reg season last year, but I have a feeling Philly overtakes them and they wind up scrambling for a WC spot. Phils dumped off Vic and Pence but kept all the pitching intact; sticks can be found, esp to light up that bandbox yard of theirs. I just don’t think Nats mgmt knows what they are doing, and Braves are still going to be tough with that bullpen.
So the east coast bias will just shift slightly is my guess; I think it would be great if NY and Boston slid to irrelevancy as far as pennant race goes.
Speaking of relevancy/irrelevancy, the Warriors are more on the relevancy side of things lately. Nice dismantling of the Hawks tonight.
I will say that Amy G has gotten infinitely better over the last couple of years. Who was the chick who preceded her? She was the worst……
That would be everybody’s favorite Girl From the Bubbly Country, Cammy Blackstone…
Similar to what Homer Simpson would say about donuts, “mmmmmmmmm . . . Cammy Blackstone.”
lol. You mean because we haven’t actually had to listen to her for the last two months?
Cammy just had a birthday party the other night.
*Cammy*— goddamn, if you’d have given me 1000 guesses I doubt I woulda come up with *Cammy*— I did, however, recognize her on a google search
I mean come on. Any station that leads into its gamecast with Papa and Bip obviously is telling you they aren’t bothering to look for intelligent life on the planet.
Andruw Jones must really dig Asian chicks. He’s made a 107 million in his career and now he’s off to Japan to play for the Rakuten Eagles….I’m gonna throw a Niner thread up in a few minutes if there’s any of you that get tired of scrolling through Denny’s posts at Chuck’s blog.