If you pay attention to ESPN, you may not realize that the World Series begins tomorrow night.
If you rely on the four letter network for your baseball news, you have learned more about clubhouse rituals in Boston and the alleged role video games, Popeye’s fried chicken and ice cold Bud Light played in September’s historic Red Sox collapse than you know about any St. Louis Cardinals player not named Pujols or Holliday.
If you watch Baseball Tonight, you are more apt to be enlightened on the benefits of embarking upon the John Kruk Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast diet than you are to see a highlight reel featuring an actual grand slam home run.
In fact, if you watch ESPN at all, you probably think that baseball is played only by the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and less frequently by the Philadelphia Phillies and everybody’s favorite loser, the New York Mets.
Just when you think the world of sports cannot sink to a lower common denominator, Fox swoops into the rescue and provides exclusive coverage of the World Series, thereby forcing sports fans to indirectly fill the overflowing coffers of pure evil and vicariously fund News Corp’s future telephone hacking schemes.
Everything else aside, the Texas Rangers will face the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2011 World Series in a clash between two clubs that feature sizzling white-hot lineups and promise to provide plenty of home run action. Rather than waste my precious and ever-narrowing attention span writing about the action on the field, let us prepare to witness the dumbing down of America’s pastime that appears center stage each and every autumn in our great land.
During the series, we will be subjected to a host of atrocities that includes material relevant to the actual games themselves and an avalanche of tangential drivel that will spew forth from, Joe, Tim and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s army of evil.