A Few Non-Phillies Baseball Thoughts

While we wait to see if Roy II (Oswalt) can live up to the performance of Roy I (Halladay) in Game 2 of the NL Division Series tomorrow, here are some comments on some of the other series...

Both Tampa Bay and Minnesota are on the brink of elimination already, both losing twice at home to fall behind 2-0 in the best-of-five series. And today, both teams' managers were ejected under similar circumstances.

At Tampa Bay, the Texas Rangers' Michael Young tried to check his swing on a 2-2 pitch in the 5th inning. The umpires ruled he did. On the next pitch he hit a 3-run homer to give the Rangers a 5-0 lead. Rays manager Joe Maddon (who was just shown in a vitamin commercial saying it's important he keep his focus, or something) went out to talk to his pitcher, yelled at the first-base ump who made the checked-swing ruling, and was thrown out of the game.

At Minnesota, Twins pitcher Carl Pavano thought he had the Yankees' Lance Berkman struck out looking in the 7th, but the pitch was called a ball, and Berkman then doubled in the go-ahead run. Twins manager Ron Gardenhire came out to talk to Pavano, and stayed until the home plate umpire came out to break up the gathering at the mound, and Gardenhire then said something that led to his ejection.

Just a strange coincidence, but both the Rays and Twins are struggling and the loss of composure needs to be solved if either team wants to make a miraculous comeback and prevent a Yankees-Rangers AL championship series.
The Rays are surprising, but they're just not hitting. The Twins are disappointing (choking, really) -- how many years are they going to lose to the Yankees in the postseason? They had CC Sabathia on the ropes and couldn't finish him off.

All of these first-round games are on TBS. This means it's time for the annual TBS bombardment of awful ads for one of their shows. Remember the horrendous "Frank TV" ads? This year it's for the new Conan O'Brien show. Many of the spots feature a "Conan blimp," one of which was flying over Citizens Bank Park last night. One of the spots includes a ridiculous product placement. The ad seems to want to make fun of product placement, but at the end the same product is touted by the voiceover announcer. I'm back off the Conan bandwagon.

As for TBS' baseball coverage, it continues to be mediocre, especially in the area of play-by-play announcers. They took Ernie Johnson out of the studio to work the Yankees-Twins series and he is just awful. Last night he announced excitedly after a Yankee hit that the game was tied, while at that very second another runner crossed the plate to give the Yanks the lead. The Phils-Reds series is being called by Brewers' play-by-play man Brian Anderson, who is not much better, and the Braves-Giants series has Dick Stockton, who should have retired years ago. The only one I can listen to is Don Orsillo of the Red Sox, working the Rays-Rangers series.