Oh good: A.J. Pierzynski to be a part of Fox’s World Series coverage

By Craig CalcaterraOct 3, 2011, 8:25 AM EDT
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Sometimes I wonder if Fox is involved in a grand experiment to drive baseball fans into insanity. The latest reason: they’re going to announce today that A.J. Pierzynski will part of their World Series coverage, helping host the studio shows with Chris Rose and Eric Karros.

Maybe he’ll be good. I don’t know.  But with Pierzynski, you’re starting with a player that fans around the game widely loathe and who was recently named other players’ least-favorite player in all of baseball.  I suppose a sports broadcast could be improved with a heel, but it strikes me that people should, you know, like the people who bring the baseball into their living rooms each night.

Alex Bregman shows how easy it is to manufacture “controversy” in baseball

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By Craig CalcaterraOct 16, 2018, 7:26 AM EDT
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In most sports it takes legitimate trash talk to create off-day “controversy.” In baseball, it takes the weakest sauce. We saw how weak that sauce was yesterday.

Alex Bregman and the Houston Astros are going to face off against Nate Eovaldi and the Boston Red Sox in Game 3 of the ALCS tonight. It’s worth noting that earlier this season, they hit back-to-back-to-back home runs off of Eovaldi when he was pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Yesterday, in an act which was likely somewhat inspired by self-motivation, somewhat inspired by getting in Eovaldi’s head and somewhat inspired by a simple interest in having fun, Bregman took the video of those back-to-back-to-back homers off of Eovaldi and posted it to his Instagram:

Of course, since this is baseball, where even farting off-key can be construed as “showing up” the opposition or somehow disrespecting the game, it became a thing. Or at least people tried to make it become a thing.

Indeed, it took them a bit to find someone who would help them make it a thing, because Eovaldi himself didn’t care about it a bit, nor did Astros manager A.J. Hinch or Red Sox manager Alex Cora. Eventually, however, they hit pay dirt. Here’s Sox infielder Steve Pearce talking to WEEI.com:

“Wow. I don’t know why he would do that. We do our talking on the field. If he wants to run his mouth now we’ll see who is talking at the end of the series.”

My guess is that almost no one on the planet, Steve Pearce included, would care about this in a vacuum or if they allowed themselves to think through it for more than a second. Baseball culture, though — and let’s be clear about it, baseball media culture — has conditioned most of its players and participants to think that stuff like this is supposed to be controversial, so it actually takes effort not to start dancing to this kind of tune on auto-pilot.

Kudos to Hinch, Cora and Eolvaldi for exerting that effort and not dancing to it. To the press that automatically sought out comment on this and Pearce who dutifully gave it: hey, I get it. It’s hard to resist one’s conditioning. Maybe you’ll be able to resist it next time.