Deciphering last night's cryptic message
Mar. 15th, 2011 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gridloreIf you follow me on Twitter, or read my Facebook, last night you saw a rather strange post go up.
Gosh, the crickets are lovely tonight. #eastcoastbaseballbias #KOingKO
Among the people I follow on Twitter is Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. I enjoy his work. The left needs a flame-thrower to counter the Bill O'Reilly's of the right. I do think Keith is a lousy newsman, however, as he is too stuck to his own opinions to show any kind of impartiality, and his aggressive nature meant that the only guests he could get on Countdown were the people who already agreed with him. Compare this to Rachel Maddow, who now has for Republican Party Chair Michael Steele almost as a regular guest. She's willing to listen to the other side and ask honest questions.
But I digress. For many people, Keith is best known for his long tenure with ESPN as the co-anchor of SportsCenter with Dan Patrick. This was ESPN's zenith, when SportsCenter featured intelligent hosts with dry senses of humor. It takes a lot of work to make an hour-long highlight show interesting, and Olbermann and Patrick were great at it. As usual, Keith left ESPN under a cloud and moved on, but he never stopped writing and talking about sports, especially baseball.
This is where the East Coast Baseball Bias comes in. Ask the fans of any team west of the Continental Divide about the coverage they get from ESPN and the national media, and prepare for the rant. We don't exist. Fox Sports and ESPN will always run a Yankees-Red Sox game as their featured game, no matter if those two teams suck. Highlight shows start and end with east coast teams, we practically have to throw a perfect game to get noticed.
It got really bad last fall. When the Giants beat the Braves to advance to the NLCS, the east coast media universally predicted a Phillies victory. They treated each Giants victory as an aberration. I actually saw an ESPN analyst trying to blame one of our victories on bad umpiring, in a game we won handily! Same thing in the World Series, all the east coasters picked the Texas Rangers to beat whatever that team is from California. Because you know we have no pitching and Cliff Lee was the Second Coming. (For the record, we beat Cliff Lee. Twice.) Again, when the Giants won, ESPN treated it as a fluke.
Keith Olbermann is among the worst offenders. It's almost impossible to get him to admit that our teams exist. Recently he's been attending Spring Training in Florida. Where the bias just gets worse and worse. He touts a Nationals prospect with a bad attitude while ignoring a Giants prospect who at that point was hitting 100 points higher with a higher slugging %. He talks about how unstoppable the Phillies rotation is going to be while ignoring that the Giants starters had, at that point, thrown more innings with a lower team ERA.
But the breaking point for me came last night.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kshandra pays a lot more attention the Keith than I do (she's fallen into the fan-girl thing again, which is a completely different rant) but pointed where Keith had declared that the Red Sox were the best team in the Majors. Boston is 10-8 in Spring Training games. San Francisco is 14-5, the best record in the majors. The BoSox didn't even make the playoffs last year. We won the World Series and are returning the bulk of that team.
Kirsten called him on it. Accused him of the dreaded East Coast Bias. He replied that his only bias was "the truth." I had had enough.
@KeithOlbermann OK, who holds the MLB record for career home runs? Let's see that truth bias in action here.
Olbermann hates Barry Bonds. Refuses to admit that Bonds holds the records he holds. I've seen him go through contortions to avoid even using the man's name. So I wanted to see how much truth Olbermann could handle. According to Major League Baseball, the record for Career Home Runs is 762, held by Barry Lamar Bonds (San Francisco Giants). No asterisk, no footnotes. Barry Bonds holds a raft of MLB records and Keith Olbermann can't stand that.
So I waited for a reply. And waited. He just stopped replying to anyone. So I made my post. I'm losing more and more respect for that man.
Gosh, the crickets are lovely tonight. #eastcoastbaseballbias #KOingKO
Among the people I follow on Twitter is Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC. I enjoy his work. The left needs a flame-thrower to counter the Bill O'Reilly's of the right. I do think Keith is a lousy newsman, however, as he is too stuck to his own opinions to show any kind of impartiality, and his aggressive nature meant that the only guests he could get on Countdown were the people who already agreed with him. Compare this to Rachel Maddow, who now has for Republican Party Chair Michael Steele almost as a regular guest. She's willing to listen to the other side and ask honest questions.
But I digress. For many people, Keith is best known for his long tenure with ESPN as the co-anchor of SportsCenter with Dan Patrick. This was ESPN's zenith, when SportsCenter featured intelligent hosts with dry senses of humor. It takes a lot of work to make an hour-long highlight show interesting, and Olbermann and Patrick were great at it. As usual, Keith left ESPN under a cloud and moved on, but he never stopped writing and talking about sports, especially baseball.
This is where the East Coast Baseball Bias comes in. Ask the fans of any team west of the Continental Divide about the coverage they get from ESPN and the national media, and prepare for the rant. We don't exist. Fox Sports and ESPN will always run a Yankees-Red Sox game as their featured game, no matter if those two teams suck. Highlight shows start and end with east coast teams, we practically have to throw a perfect game to get noticed.
It got really bad last fall. When the Giants beat the Braves to advance to the NLCS, the east coast media universally predicted a Phillies victory. They treated each Giants victory as an aberration. I actually saw an ESPN analyst trying to blame one of our victories on bad umpiring, in a game we won handily! Same thing in the World Series, all the east coasters picked the Texas Rangers to beat whatever that team is from California. Because you know we have no pitching and Cliff Lee was the Second Coming. (For the record, we beat Cliff Lee. Twice.) Again, when the Giants won, ESPN treated it as a fluke.
Keith Olbermann is among the worst offenders. It's almost impossible to get him to admit that our teams exist. Recently he's been attending Spring Training in Florida. Where the bias just gets worse and worse. He touts a Nationals prospect with a bad attitude while ignoring a Giants prospect who at that point was hitting 100 points higher with a higher slugging %. He talks about how unstoppable the Phillies rotation is going to be while ignoring that the Giants starters had, at that point, thrown more innings with a lower team ERA.
But the breaking point for me came last night.
kshandra pays a lot more attention the Keith than I do (she's fallen into the fan-girl thing again, which is a completely different rant) but pointed where Keith had declared that the Red Sox were the best team in the Majors. Boston is 10-8 in Spring Training games. San Francisco is 14-5, the best record in the majors. The BoSox didn't even make the playoffs last year. We won the World Series and are returning the bulk of that team.Kirsten called him on it. Accused him of the dreaded East Coast Bias. He replied that his only bias was "the truth." I had had enough.
@KeithOlbermann OK, who holds the MLB record for career home runs? Let's see that truth bias in action here.
Olbermann hates Barry Bonds. Refuses to admit that Bonds holds the records he holds. I've seen him go through contortions to avoid even using the man's name. So I wanted to see how much truth Olbermann could handle. According to Major League Baseball, the record for Career Home Runs is 762, held by Barry Lamar Bonds (San Francisco Giants). No asterisk, no footnotes. Barry Bonds holds a raft of MLB records and Keith Olbermann can't stand that.
So I waited for a reply. And waited. He just stopped replying to anyone. So I made my post. I'm losing more and more respect for that man.
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no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2011 16:19 (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2011 16:19 (UTC)I invite you to look at our life for a minute or two, then ask yourself if you can really blame me for a bit of escapism.
no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2011 16:25 (UTC)no subject
Date: 15 Mar 2011 16:34 (UTC)