Joe Morgan and Jon Miller

I have to say - I hate Joe Morgan and his sidekick Jon Miller. Then again, each one is really the little Grover Dill sidekick to the other one, and if you're like me, you hope that Ralphie comes in and kicks both of their asses across Indiana's small town set and makes my Christmas Story wish complete.

That said, neither one is particularly bright, and yet, until this year, both were seasoned ESPN Sunday Night Baseball announcers. For 21 years, we've had to hear Joe Morgan pretend to be intelligent (while actually just playing the voice of race) and Jon Miller feign being reasonably competent (while wearing some of the worst suits in history), but alas, they both just suck, and for what a website couldn't do... ESPN finally did.

Orel Hershiser is at least an articulate and fair voice of the game. Bobby Valentine played the game with passion and fire, and if nothing else, for one night in 1999, he made getting ejected into a comedic artwork as he came back to the dugout with a pair of sunglasses and a fake mustache. Baseball players have gotta do something when their fans are having to endure the drudgery of the Mets and the Blue Jays labor through the grueling schedule of interleague play.

But yes... for years, there wasn't much opportunity to watch baseball - until MLBTV came along and made that different. Sure, Fox has the game of the week - if your team is one of the first place teams or the perennial favorites. And sure, there are local team games, but I'm not a Phillies fan, so I can only handle baseball so long with them LET ALONE the Pirates. And while TBS used to be good for Braves games... uh, enough said.

The good news is we're free of them ONCE AND FOR ALL, which is a good thing unless we're going to Cooperstown and we have to see that Jon Miller is in the same place as guys like Harry Caray, Harry Kalas, Ernie Harwell, Bob Uecker, Vin Scully, Red Barber, and Mell Allen. He even gets to be in the Veterans Committee to decide future HOF inductees... talk about travesties.

But nevertheless, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and all is better because he is going to vanish into obscurity - save that vote for or against the steroids guys that he cheered for so long - and isn't that the biggest kicker of them all? How long until Joe gets in that auxillary feature of the Hall of Fame (the Ford C Frick Award for writers and broadcasters) with him?