I've always hated Keith Olbermann. As an ESPN analyst, I always found him to be a smug piece of crap, and that was only listening to him and Dan Patrick, another smug and annoying piece of crap. I was glad when he left the radio because I hated to be in the car for drive time and to have to hear those two spazzes tell me about sports news. Maybe it was the self righteous approach to the steroids era where all of a sudden all of these analysts who had formerly swooned over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were cursing their souls to hell - kind of like Bob Costas on the 10th Inning of Ken Burns baseball.
The 10th Inning was meant to be so many things, but in the end, it was what it wasn't. I saw Albert Pujols, the greatest player of the generation for a few seconds, but I never heard his name mentioned. Hell, I saw Chris Rock more than I saw Phat Albert. Sure, there were some good parts, but in the end to reduce every single World Series victory (after the Sox in 2004) to a closer throwing a final pitch after sitting through the long version of the Bobby Bonds story in a transition into Barry Bonds... yeah. That was worth the wait.
So today when Keith Olbermann, who pretty much spent more time in the documentary on the history of the last 15-20 years of baseball than Larry Walker, Albert Pujols, and the curse breaking teams from Philadelphia into 2008 and from Chicago in 2005 COMBINED, was dropped from his show, I had to give a little bit of a smug self-righteous piece of crap smile to think that somewhere between pathetic ratings on MSNBC and good ol' Bill O' Reilly beating the man from Countdown, who had the "Worst Person in the World" on every night is now gone from his spot on cable news. If he could take Rachel Maddow with him, life would be complete, but this is about sports and those who tell the story of them, and for that, we turn back to Ken Burns and ask him to give us the fan version of Baseball, the way it was meant to be... sans Keith Olbermann. It could be like those fan edited versions of The Phantom Menace where fans cut Jar Jar Binks from the footage and leave the film all the more entertaining for it (I'd cut out the kiddie narrated scenes from the pod racing as well and just stick to the racing and not the announcer as well, but that's just me).
Give me the section on Pujols... a little more talking about those victories and some discussion on those two World Series wins, if only for the history in them. Please note Mr. Burns that I'm not asking for that much more on Mark McGwire... even though he deserves more footage than your self-appointed savior of the Latino race that is Sammy Sosa, but I'll accept that as a discussion on the Latino culture's inclusion in modern baseball and your catering to Cubs fans as opposed to anything dastardly like the exclusion of the other sections was.
Nobody will mind. It's clear to see that the last hope for Olbermann was his angry political rant show on ultra liberal cable news network MSNBC, and now that it's over... you can re-edit your 10th Inning for true baseball fans like myself.
I'm sure that Doris Kearns Goodwin won't mind.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Ken Burns
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