Watchdog

What's wrong with Sports Illustrated? Plenty.

Josh Levin didn't cover the topic quite that succinctly in this piece for Slate, but he did so far more insightfully.

The piece is made more devastating by how sober and thorough it is. He even offers constructive suggestions.

Only once does he resort to a naughty word synonymous with "tush'' that rhymes with "sass'' in describing the frequent kicking done to SI by ESPN.

At ESPN's current rate of hiring editors and reporters from other media outlets, soon I will be the only veteran sports journalist in America without an ID card to get me past the ornery security guards in Bristol.

Sorry so few posts today. I attended a screening in the big city of HBO's latest documentary, on the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry. Plus, it's Halloween.

I will review the HBO show closer to the Nov. 13 debut, but here is a sneak preview, exclusively for WatchDog readers: I thought it was good.

Have a nice night. Enjoy David Wright's appearance with Jon Stewart on the "Daily Show.'' It consistently is the second funniest show on television, after "Curb Your Enthusiam.''

A WatchDog post Tuesday reporting that Nets radio play-by-play man Chris Carrino had signed a contract extension misspelled Carrino's name.

Why? I have no idea.

There is no excuse or explanation, so I won't offer one. Maybe in the future I shouldn't do 20 posts in one day.

My apologies to a solidly professional local basketball voice.

Here is an interesting piece from The Star-Ledger of Newark about the Nets' makeover of the Izod Center - formerly known as Continental Airlines Arena - now that those smelly, dentally-challenged hockey players finally have vacated the premises.

Tell me again why they can't just move into Newark with the Devils, level the old arena and leave Brooklyn available for cool ethnic restaurants and relatively sane traffic flow . . .

Sorry. Did I just write that? Please don't call or e-mail me about this, friends in the Nets public relations office. I know you are WatchDog fans.

I'm just kidding. Sort of.

Someday when I'm long retired and sitting on the back porch catching up on old "Simpsons'' episodes, my grandchildren will ask me what I used to do for a living.

Here is what I will tell them:

"I wrote stories in the newspaper - I'll tell you what those were later - about ESPN annoying the Yankees with how they handled conference calls about baseball managers. Sure, I could have been a hedge fund manager instead, but I did what I had to do to serve the public. Be proud, even if you won't get much of an inheritance from me.''

Here is my latest effort.

Enjoy.

Here's a picture of Pat Priest, who played the freakishly normal Marilyn Munster on a long-ago TV series. This is one of the more tame pictures of her in her prime available on the Web.

What does this have to do with sports . . . or sports media?

Tiki Barber of NBC's "Today'' show this morning is dressed up in a dragon costume, in honor of Spot, the Munsters' family pet. He lived under the staircase at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

When I was in college in Ithaca there was a persistent rumor that a particular house downtown was the model for 1313 Mockingbird Lane. But I'm pretty sure it was an urban legend. If you can use the word "urban'' for Ithaca.

Never mind. Happy Halloween.

Yankees fans just want to know whether Joe Girardi will win games, er, championships.

That's not my job! I want to know how he is going to handle the big, bad New York media.

Holding his successor to the lofty standard of Joe Torre isn't realistic, but there are some ominous signs that Girardi might not buy into the warm, cuddly media approach.

Check out Jim Baumbach's Newsday.com column for today, in which he interviews three reporters who covered Girardi as members of the big, bad South Florida media.

Everyone knows how intense the coverage of the Marlins can get!

(Glauber was right. This day had 20 posts written all over it from the start. Sick.)

Sports Business Journal has a story this week reporting that Turner Sports was happy with the popularity of its inaugural "TBS Hot Corner'' broadband service.

It logged more than 1 million live video streams during TBS's playoff coverage.

More than half the on-demand views were for features involving actress Alyssa Milano, topped by her tour of the Green Monster at Fenway Park.

Shocking!

Remember the Mets?

Orange and blue unis? Mascot with a really big head? Two championships in 46 seasons?

Well, one of their star players, David Wright, will be on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show'' on Comedy Central at 11 p.m. Wednesday. He is scheduled to appear in the third segment.

Stewart is a big Mets fan. But he'll probably ask him about A-Rod.

Sigh.

It's a new era for the Yankees, with fresh starts all around. Apparently that includes ESPN.

After banning the network's TV, radio, print and Internet reporters from its conference calls with managerial candidates Joe Girardi, Don Mattingly and Tony Pena, the team is expected to lift the restriction and allow ESPN to participate this afternoon as Girardi officially takes the reins.

The Yankees had retaliated against ESPN for the network's decision to televise live on ESPN2 the conference call on which it was announced Joe Torre was leaving.

The NFL Network has decided to low-key its programming related to Sunday's big Pats-Colts tilt.

The will be offering a modest, um, 36 1/2 hours of stuff.

It would have been only 35 1/2, but fortunately for fans anticipating the game the switch to Standard Time Sunday will allow for two separate cracks at the 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. hour that night.

"This is what separates NFL Network,” Charles Coplin, VP of programming, said in a news release.

The release made no mention of programming plans related to the 49ers-Falcons game.

The Nets announced a multi-year contract extension for radio play-by-play man Chris Carrino, a member of the long, proud list of WFUV alums from Fordham populating the local and national sports airwaves.

Carinno is entering his seventh season with the future Brooklyns.

The picture to the right is of Laura Torres, a Dix Hills dental assistant who on May 9 had the honor of being the first person ever to have his or her picture on WatchDog. Keep that in mind when the first edition of WatchDog Trivial Pursuit comes out, just in time for the holidays.

On Monday I waged a silent protest against living and working in Baseball City:

I temporarily sought shelter from the Torre/Girardi/Donnie Baseball/A-Rod/Boras/Hank Steinbrenner Wars at a luncheon in the big city with TNT studio analysts Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith.

Sir Charles' mouth was in fine working order, about 30 hours before TNT's much-praised NBA studio show debuted for 2007-08.

Click below for some thoughts from Barkley on a variety of topics.

Continue reading "Charles Barkley's mouth in midseason form" »

John Feinstein, an occasional panelist on ESPN's "The Sports Reporters,'' takes an entertaining shot at the network's magazine branch in an interview posted today by The Big Lead.

Here is Feinstein on the topic of Rick Reilly leaving SI for ESPN:

"I understand the money - and give Rick credit for being honest about it - but to me, as a writer, leaving SI for ESPN the so-called mag is like leaving The Four Seasons to check into a Hampton Inn."

Touche!

Sunday's Giants-Dolphins tilt was a mostly positive experience, helped by the fact form held, with a pretty good team dispatching an awful one in a blah game.

(Imagine how the event would have gone over with American fans if the Pats and Colts had been playing on a disintegrating pitch on a misty afternoon thousands of miles from downtown Indy!)

Given the harmless novelty of it all, it was surprising how many Sunday TV blabbers hammered the concept.

Fox's Terry Bradshaw: "I just don’t see the point of taking one of our NFL games away from the cities in the United States that count on them week in and week out. Why don’t we try to grow the sport here in Los Angeles where we don’t have a team?''

Fox's Jimmy Johnson: "If I had to coach a regular season game or a Super Bowl in London I would be a basket case.”

Fox's Howie Long: “It is a major distraction. We played preseason games in Tokyo and we also played in London. There are a lot of obligatory functions you have to go to. It’s a vacation for everyone except the players.”

ESPN's Tom Jackson: “It’s a bad idea if you’re a player. I played in Denver, Colorado. I didn’t even want to travel to Kansas City to play the Chiefs.''

ESPN's Mike Ditka: "This is not the time. This is not the place."

NBC's Keith Olbermann: "In England this week, Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga said global expansion may be the only way to grow the NFL - neglecting the fact that there are still plenty of untapped opportunities here in the States. It might be nice, for instance, if the league had a pro team in Miami.''

On the other side was ESPN's Keyshawn Johnson, the best new NFL studio analyst this season: "I don’t think it’s a problem at all. I think the one thing the National Football League is trying to do is promote this game.”

Say what you want about ESPN, but there is no disputing that the Worldwide Leader shows us a lot of stuff, and when it can, it adds extra stuff, as it did with Barry Bonds' home run saga over the summer.

The latest is the addition of Saturday's Arizona State vs. Oregon tilt through an agreement with the Pac-10 and Fox Sports Net.

The game originally was to be televised only in Oregon, Arizona and Southern California. Now you can see it on Long Island, too.

Uh, oh. Glauber is back from London and obsessing over my blog again.

This is getting almost as disturbing as the man-crush every pro football announcer has on Brett Favre.

Glauber works hard on his blog and might yet make a run at me in page views late in the football season, especially if Big Blue doesn't do its traditional November swan dive.

Let's see what happens in May, though.

There's no offseason on my beat, Bob.

I know all loyal WatchDog readers read my Tuesday newspaper column, but you might have missed a sidebar I did talking to Michael Kay about the new Yankees manager.

For that conversation with Kay I asked him to don his YES play-by-play man hat. Then I asked him to switch to his sports talk radio hat and give me his take on the hiring of Joe Girardi:

"I think he’s going to be outstanding, but I also think Mattingly would have been outstanding. I think people mistook class for quiet and maybe being non-aggressive. I know this really hurts him. But I'm thrilled for Joe.''

Kay added it "made me laugh" to hear concerns about how Mattingly would have handled the spotlight, including media demands:

"He was a superstar and the only good player on the team for years and had the media around him all the time. This is bittersweet for me. I knew one of them would get hurt.''

Don't worry, I'll get around to boring you with an NFL Network vs. cable industry update in my column sometime in November.

In the meantime, here is a thorough piece from Sports Business Journal to keep you informed.

(I hope this link works for everyone. I'm a subscriber so it comes up on my computer. Let me know if it doesn't on yours.)

The most amusing/infuriating thing about these disputes is when a cable goliath such as Comcast says it does not want subscribers to have to pay for channels such as the NFL Network that not all subscribers want.

Left unsaid is that customers often do pay for stuff they might not want on basic cable, such as the Golf Channel and Versus, each of which is owned by . . . Comcast!

Sigh.

Jonathan Vilma currently having a pretty good argument with Joe Benigno on WFAN's mid-day show.

This is even better than Boomer and Carton kibitzing with Thomas Jones.

Seething Vilma apparently quite unhappy with speculation about how injured he is - or not. And not shy about confronting Benigno about it.

This reminds me a little of Benigno and Evan Roberts getting into shouting matches with Paul Lo Duca during the baseball season. But they're doing it respectfully, so it's fine with me.

This probably will be archived on WFAN's Web site later this afternoon.

I'm off next week. I'm going to unplug the radio and hide it in the attic just to protect me from myself.

I'n the past we've covered landmark sports appearances on Sesame Street by both Jackie Robinson and Eric Mangini.

Here's one from in between those two, circa 1988, featuring numerous non-sports luminaries but also Keith Hernandez, Mookie Wilson and several of Bill Parcells' Giants.

How did the world function before YouTube was invented?

Newsday's Jim Baumbach tipped me off to this amazing video from the day Joe Torre was fired by the Mets in 1981.

The quality is horrendous, but it is worth enduring for treats such as an old Sasson jeans ad reminiscent of the classic Rangers version, an interview with an impossibly young Lee Mazzilli and some hilarious man-and-woman-on-the-street stuff toward the end.

(YouTube has the Rangers Sasson commercial, too. Because YouTube has everything.)

This is much more fun than Torre's appearance with Letterman Monday night.

Here is a story from our friends at Ad Age that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the Taco Bell promotion during the World Series . . . and much more.

Bottom line: It was a brilliant, low-risk, low-cost stunt for the fast foodies.

(Maybe Taco Bell should have offered free tacos for everyone in England if Eli Manning completed 10 passes Sunday.)

Anyway, don't forget to pick up your free taco from 2 to 5 p.m. today. And don't fall for their tricks by buying a soda or a second taco or some sort of other gooey, beany treat while there.

Discipline, people! Discipline!

The worse the Jets get the more I enjoy listening to Thomas Jones' weekly Tuesday morning visit to the dentist's chair on WFAN.

On this week's episode, Craig Carton prefaced a question by saying something like, "No one cares because you guys are so bad, but . . . "

Later, Carton and Boomer Esiason discussed with Jones his schedule for errands and such on his off day.

Maybe in private Jones is cursing out his agent for arranging this gig, but on the air he is doggedly patient and respectful.

When it was over Carton wondered on the air what I would say about this week's session. I defer to Boomer, who summed it up better than I can. I think his words were "morbidly fascinating.''

ESPN 1050 has spent the past day promoting Andrew Marchand's report at 11:40 a.m. Monday that Joe Girardi would be named the Yankees' new manager.

I have no reason to doubt Andrew was first, and I've written recently in my newspaper column that the station has made a commitment to its news operation, headed by Marchand.

So why didn't I mention this in my newspaper column today, in which I recount in detail the evolution of the A-Rod opt-out saga Sunday night?

Because I made the bold decision that I would not be dragged into the role of New York sports media referee, trying to figure out who got what first and then bestowing official props.

Marchand did a good job, but by the end of the day the newspapers that cover this stuff doggedly presumably would have had the story regardless.

Maybe the best and most responsible way to handle this new media world is for everyone to focus on accurate information and reasoned analysis and stop worrying so much about who beats who by 10 minutes or 10 seconds.

Sigh.

One of the occupational hazards of this beat is that it generally involves covering the coverage of events, rather than the events themselves.

That can create a rather unhealthy point of view for someone who at his or her core still is supposed to be a sports fan.

And that is why it is important to be reminded every once in a while of what the point of all this really is.

So after a long Monday of talking to TV analysts about the NBA, talking to reporters and TV executives about the A-Rod saga, wondering what Vince Vaughn was going in the "Monday Night Football'' booth in the fourth quarter and nearly gagging on the inevitable Brett Favre worship that comes with any telecast of one of his games . . .

Well, I just wanted to thank you, Brett, for that game-winning overtime chuck late Monday night. That was really, really cool.

I really hate to do this two days before the end of the month, what with trying to wrap up another trouncing of Glauber in the monthly page views race and all of the developments going on in Baseball City.

But I'm going to have to take most of the day off from blogging, as I have a previously scheduled lunch with a famously edgy NBA studio analyst. (I thought once the World Series was over, we get to talk/write about football and basketball. Naive!)

See ya later. Enjoy the A-Rod talk. (Girardi? Big Papi? Eli? Mangenius? Who are they? It's all about the guy Peter Gammons last night said had shown "total disrespect'' for the game with his agent's late-in-a-World Series-game bombshell.)

If you don't know the guy in the picture, ask your great-grandfather. Have a nice day.

Well played, Master Boras. Well played.

Announcing an hour before the end of the World Series that A-Rod would opt out of his contract? As if doing that sort of thing at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night is . . . normal? The fact the Red Sox were about to be re-named champs only made it more deliciously sinister.)

This was the agent equivalent of the Yankees holding a news conference in the seventh inning of the World Series finale to announce they were hiring Don Zimmer as their new manager.

Only unlike Yankees management, there is nothing Bud Selig can do to punish Scott Boras for upstaging the Fall Classic. Brilliant!

I'm having this guy do my next deal with Newsday management for blog compensation. I'll bet he gets me a nice raise from my current . . . um, zero.

(Update: The time on the original A-Rod post by SI.com's Jon Heyman is 10:14 p.m., so I assume he was the first to report the news. Heyman has dominated the Boras beat for years, and broke the original A-Rod-coming-to-the-Yanks story when he was at Newsday.)

Is Gus Johnson still yelling at me, or is the Jets game finally over?

No way I'm turning my TV back on until someone confirms this for me.

The game's not, like, in overtime or anything, is it?

A couple of SNY loyalists, reacting to a followup blog post I did after my column Friday, defended the local channel's approach to covering sports news relative to ESPN's, and pointed to other blogs and message boards that felt the same way.

Back-and-forth dialogue about issues of the day is healthy, and a nice thing about this whole Internet fad.

But this discussion is going in circles now. Here is the deal:

ESPN generally does a fine job covering national sports news, and has the money for snappy production values, expensive plane tickets and experienced reporters, many of whom learned the trade at newspapers, of course.

SNY does the most thorough job outside daily newspapers of documenting local sports news, surely when it comes to sending out camera crews to record events in and around the city.

Each has its attributes. I'm through with this topic. Enjoy the Pep Boys 500 on ABC later.

Here is a picture of the late, great George Best, doing what he did back in the day, when he was a big-time player - on and off the field.

Why? I like his name, of course, but the idea also is to get you in the mood for today's Giants-Dolphins tilt at Wembley.

Here's another thing: Check out Bob Glauber's tale of his visit to a real football game Saturday night.

Naturally, a former Newsday paper boy plays a key role. If we have learned nothing else in our SportsWatch/WatchDog journey together over the past two years, it is this: Former Newsday paper boys run the world.

My newspaper column on Ray Lucas almost had a sidebar, but then Kellen Clemens did not get the nod and the tale of Lucas taking over the Jets at 1-6 in 1999 became less timely.

No worries. That's why blogs were created.

Click below to read Lucas talking early last week (before Eric Mangini announced he was sticking with Chad Pennington) about the day he got the job, which led to the team rallying late that season to an 8-8 finish.

Continue reading "Bill Parcells gives Ray Lucas the job, then adult diapers" »

I wrote a Sunday column about Ray Lucas, SNY's unpredictable Jets analyst, whose work has gotten more entertaining the worse the team has gotten on the field.

Alas, as sometimes happens in the newspaper business, breaking news took up more space than anticipated, causing our able Sunday edition staff to cut off a chunk of the column.

No worries. I sent too many words anyway. Through the magic of cyberspace, watch this trick:

You can read the part of the column that appeared in Newsday here, and read the rest of it by clicking below. What will they think of next, electric can openers?

Continue reading "Here is the rest of my Ray Lucas column" »

Korbel sponsors the last out on ESPN Radio's World Series coverage - no, really - which in this case is the perfect tie-in.

Let us all raise a glass and toast the Sox and Rocks for the greatest achievement yet in the Year of the Endless Playoff Game.

They just set a World Series record by taking 4:19 to compete a nine-inning game.

Now comes the real challenge: Sunday night the teams will try to extend their streak of consecutively longer games, from 3:30 to 3:39 to 4:19 to . . . ?

Good night, North America. Glauber probably is awake already in London.

So what if it came on a very slow Friday night in the sports world . . . and in a loss!

It still was cool to see Cornell football, of all things, featured at No. 1 on the top 10 plays list on ESPN's "SportsCenter'' Friday night.

(Some guy from Princeton ran a long way thanks to the Big Red's failure to grasp the basics of tackling.)

While we're on the subject of Cornell football, it's time for one of those periodic reminders to Pat Sullivan to give back that 1971 Heisman he stole from Ed Marinaro.

C'mon, Pat, you know you should.

I'm no expert on TV technology, but . . . couldn't ESPN have gotten someone to stand with a big umbrella over the camera at the Breeder's Cup finish line Friday?

The last time I saw that many raindrops on a lens at a major sports event was when CBS forgot the squeegees for Super Bowl XLI.

I've only bet on two horse races in my life:

$10 to win on Alydar in the 1978 Belmont Stakes. (Loss. Barely.)
$10 to win on Funny Cide in the 2003 Kentucky Derby. (Win. Big win.)

Congratulations, Dennis J. Droogan!

You have correctly identified Bobby Plump in the picture at right and won the respect and admiration of WatchDog readers throughout North America . . . and probably this week in England as well.

At my first Final Four in 1991, the media party was held at Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler, where Plump made his famous shot. A black-and-white film of the play ran on a continuous loop on screens in each corner of the court during the bash.

At one point I was having a drink a few feet away from Oscar Robertson, another pretty good high school basketball player.

It used to be fun leaving my basement sometimes.

Oh, man, this is really embarrassing.

I just realized I accidentally deleted the movie in question from the list of films on "Yogi and a Movie'' on which the photo contest referenced below and further below is based.

Yikes. No wonder no one has gotten the answer so far. Sorry. So, so sorry. The movie now is included in the list.

Good luck.

I'm disappointed no one has taken a stab at the high-degree-of-difficulty photo contest from earlier today. I hope it's that you're stumped, not that you're indifferent.

Regardless, here's another picture that should be a big hint.

Try again.

The first person to get the identity of the original photo subject correct wins the ultimate prize: the respect of all WatchDog readers.

Sigh. Three thoughtful readers have written polite notes today to suggest that in my newspaper column I was a tad too kind to SNY's news operation - particularly relative to that of ESPN.

Maybe so. It's true that in addition to its vastly greater resources for covering national news, ESPN has slicker production values and more experienced reporters than does SNY - which you'd expect from a national network with vast riches. (Two million bucks per annum for Rick Reilly!)

The two main points of the piece were that, a) SNY is making an honest effort to present a complete TV news report unlike any other in the market, and, b) it's interesting that in spite of that ESPN's SportsCenter continues to hammer SNY's SportsNite in the ratings when the Mets aren't playing.

That's all. There's room for everyone in our big sports media tent - including the newspapers and their Web sites that still provide the most comprehensive news and analysis of local teams.

For all you ratings-heads out there . . . The results are in for Game 2 of the World Series/Taco Bell infomercial.

Not terrible. Up to 11.1 percent of U.S. households from 10.5 for Game 1. The key, as always, is going to be getting a long series that engages viewers. It's up to you, Rockies.

The rating in New York was 11.9. Baseball is one of the very few major sports events that rates better here than it does nationally.

Thank you to the several blogs that tipped WatchDog off to this, including Home Run Derby, and especially to Jimmy Kimmel, who in this mock PSA nails the unbearable annoyingness of Red Sox fans.

The media went so overboard in chronicling their delivery from the baseball desert in 2004, the rest of us were ruined for life when it comes to hearing another word out of their long-suffering mouths.

Leave us alone, already! You're just Yankees North, with even narrower concourses and longer bathroom lines.

Someone at The Tennis Channel worked really hard on the very cute - OK, too cute - news release below explaining the fact that "The'' no longer is part of the channel's name.

It's just "Tennis Channel.'' Got that?

I'm sharing it here because, well, because I can. It's just the Internet.

Read all about it below, if you have some time to kill.

Continue reading "'The' Tennis Channel is no more" »

YES seems to have upgraded its lineup for "Yogi and a Movie'' this Yankees offseason, which is a good thing, except for being deprived of the morbid curiosity of watching the gloriously awful "Babe Ruth Story,'' starring William Bendix.

Here's the schedule of debuts, the first of which already has happened. (Bonus points for the first commenter to identify the guy in the picture and his connection to one of the flicks.)

A.K.A. Cassius Clay - Oct. 25
Pistol: The Birth of a Legend - Nov. 1
Johnny Be Good - Nov. 15
The Jackie Robinson Story - Dec. 6
It’s Good to Be Alive - Dec. 13
Raging Bull - Jan. 3
Rocky IV - Jan. 10
Pride Against Prejudice: The Larry Doby Story Jan. 17
The Joe Louis Story - Jan. 31
Hoosiers - March 13

Since I gave ESPN 1050 a plug for its Yankees coverage in an earlier post, I might as well add this:

XM Radio is providing daily Yankees updates from Tampa at 7:15 a.m., through the end of the manager search and major free agent signings . . . or re-signings.

The title of the reports (on channel 144) is a tad melodramatic: "Yankee Watch – An Off-Season on the Brink.”

Somehow the Yanks will muddle through, won't they?

XM also will offer Yankees news on it "MLB Post Season" show from noon to 1 p.m. weekdays.

A couple of years ago Sirius gave me a radio to check out its service. But after three months my boss at the time made me give it back.

As we wind down another wacky WatchDog week, it is time to honor the blogs' most important people: you, the loyal readers.

John Philips has been kind of quiet on the commenting front since I barred him from winning the Friday contest again, but rushing in with a strong entry was a commenter named Peter.

Here is what he had to say Tuesday in response to the news the start of the NFL Draft would be moving from noon to 3 p.m. next spring:

"Looks like the Jets will be drafting at about the same time as they did last year."

Ouch. I'm going to write my Sunday newspaper column now. It's about the Jets!

Presumably due to some sort of production glitch, an updated version of an item about ESPN 1050's news operation in my SportsWatch column today did not appear in the newspaper. So I guess I'll take care of that with a couple of notes here.

1) Although ESPN 1050 outdoes WFAN in reporting in some areas, unlike its competitor WFAN does have a reporter with both the Yankees and Mets for all road trips.

2) Reporter/editor Andrew Marchand of ESPN 1050 was the only TV or radio reporter on the scene of the Yankees vigil in Tampa Thursday, along with an AP reporter and three New York tabloid scribes, including Newsday's own Kat O'Brien.

Now you know.

Three hours and 39 minutes. For a 2-1 game. Yo, Bob DuPuy, I think you might be on to something with your concern over the length of post-season games!

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict at least one game in the 2007 World Series will come in under 3:30. But I'm not willing to make a bet on that or anything.

I did make it to the end of Game 2, because no sacrifice is too great for you, the reader. At least it was close, which should make for a much better rating than the not-bad 10.5 for Game 1.

It was another sponsor-heavy night for Fox, lowlighted by Chris Myers' interview with some Taco Bell exec in the stands. I mentioned the Taco Bell promotion in my newspaper column today, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Enjoy!