Sunday, October 07, 2007
Although I really am not a fan of TBS's broadcasting, I do have to say that I appreciated their blatant Jonathan Papelbon fangirling on Friday night. Jonathan Papelbon, more than almost anyone on the Sox, seems to regularly reduce grown men and women to squealing 12 year old fangirls. This is pretty par for the course when it comes to Sox fans, but it's remarkable when people who are NOT Red Sox fans do it.
I can't keep track of who's broadcasting what game for TBS, because so long as it's not Don Orsillo I don't actually give a flying goat liver about it, but the whole crew on Friday night was complicit in this. Jonathan Papelbon was on the mound. As every good Red Sox fan knows, Jonathan Papelbon has a crazy, insane stare that he uses before every pitch to reduce the opposing batter to a quivering mass of protoplasm.
The TBS guys were obviously captivated by this patented Papelbonian stare. The video guys zoomed in on his face, multiple times-- close enough for everyone watching the broadcast to get a little protoplasmic quiver themselves. The broadcasters waxed poetic about the intensity of his gaze, the power of his stare, the cool level-headedness of his eyes, and all manner of hideously intangible things that most of us admire as incidentals but that they seemed to treat as skills on a par with his ability to throw a baseball 97 mph while nicking an inside corner of the plate.
Between the audio problems and things like the way they cut away from a Manny/Papi hug just before it started, I have not had much reason to be happy with TBS. But as they zoomed in on Papelbon's deranged pre-pitch face for the third time on Friday, I found myself for the very first time praising the TBS staff.Labels: baseball, Jonathan Papelbon, MLB, TBS
12:14 PM
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