NOTHING is what it is anymore. It’s something else, something entirely different. Tune to just about any telecast – baseball, football, it no longer matters – and there’s someone telling you that what you just saw, what just happened, actually was something else.
Little games, big games; it doesn’t matter. What passes as expertise now sounds more like an assortment of faith-based lunch meats.
Monday, Bernie Williams scored to make it 1-0 when, with one out and running from second, he beat the throw from right fielder Vladimir Guerrero. On the play, Jorge Posada went from first to third. And on Fox, Tim McCarver began praising Posada for a fabulous job of base-running. And he was serious.
But Guerrero, who has a strong arm but made a bad throw, clearly had a good shot to throw out Williams at the plate. There would have been no good reason for Posada to have stopped at second. But it’s too late to make sense, and now McCarver’s gonna continue his guided tour of Fantasy Land . . .
“Had Guerrero thrown to third,” he declares, “he would have gotten Posada easily.”
How does he know that? Why would Guerrero have gotten Posada any more easily at third than he’d have gotten Williams at the plate? How did McCarver know that Guerrero would make a bad throw to home but a good one to third?
And, seeing how a good throw would have gotten the runner at the plate, why would McCarver advocate throwing to third, where a good throw also was needed to tag out the runner?
Had Williams been tagged out at the plate, would McCarver have said that Guerrero got away with a bad decision – he should have instead thrown to third?
Meanwhile, there was an issue within the play well worth exploring: Bubba Crosby, who had singled to right, was still on first. The Angels’ catcher, Bengie Molina, was sprawled, having unsuccessfully tried to tag Williams. Yet, Crosby didn’t go to second. Why? McCarver didn’t say a word about it.
The day before, McCarver’s baseball partner, Joe Buck, Fox’s lead MLB and NFL play-by-player, worked the Eagles-Cowboys. At 24-3, Buck kept stating that the Cowboys scored on four of their first five possessions – and would have been five-for-five had they kicked a field goal instead of going for it on fourth-and-goal from the 1.
Buck kept saying that, as if it were an indisputable fact. He kept saying that the Cowboys would have scored on their first five possessions had they only kicked that short field goal on their second possession.
And, hey, look! There’s the Fox graphic to back Buck up: Dallas scored on its first, third, fourth and fifth possession but gave it up on downs in its second possession.
But isn’t Buck there, watching the game? Doesn’t he see that every play is connected, that after the Eagles stopped Dallas on fourth down, they took over at their own goal line, then, three plays later, they punted? Did he not then see the Cowboys start from the Eagles’ 38, from where the Cowboys then scored a TD?
Didn’t Buck see that not kicking that field goal minutes later helped Dallas score a TD? Did he really think that if Dallas kicked that field goal, every play that followed would have been the same as it had been?
Every day, these days, it’s the same message, delivered by experts, fellas employed to tell you that what you just saw is really something else, something entirely different, something, no matter how hard you look, only they can see.
Phil Mushnick’s column will return in Sunday’s Post.
