"We report. You decide."
- The Fox News slogan

"Fair and Balanced"
- Fox's modern day myth

May 28th, 2005

A couple of years back, I made a statement that Fox Sports really sucks. It's nice to know some things never change.

As a borderline Buddhist who grounds himself in the beliefs of impermanence, this is sometimes very disturbing. Things change. It is a rule of nature to go from order to chaos to order to chaos and on again. Fox is consistent in its galactic level of suckiness and is showing no signs of ever leaving the dark side of the force. This is the Fox way of doing things.

Now that the Yankees have the majority of their games on the YES network, owned by George Steinbrenner, Yankee Fans can enjoy impartial commentating, albeit the attention is focused on the Yankee News, instead of the verbal diarrhea that typically comes from the mouths of Fox commentators, Joe Buck and Tim McCarver.

The formerly last place Yankees have clawed their way to 2nd place in the American League while the former 2nd place Boston Red Sox have dropped to 4th place behind the Toronto Blue Jays and are now five games out of first.* The mathematical odds of the Yanks winning today are against them as they have won 16 out of their last 18 games.

That is no small feat.

Yet this hasn't stopped Fox Sports from gushing all over the Sox today. The commentators have creatively tried to come up with excuses on why Boston is not doing well against the Yanks this time. Fox has reasoned that in a combination of events involving the phase of the moon, the tides, biorhythms, George Steinbrenner's shoe size and the excuse that the Sox lost Pédro Martinez and Derek Lowe this year the Yanks are naturally coming up on top.

This is a load of crap.

The short term memory Fox commentators have forgotten the Yankee chants of "Who's your daddy?" for Pédro Martinez who has always had inexplicable bad luck against Boston's arch rivals. They have also forgotten how Derek Lowe normally folds like overdone pasta after the Yanks hit their first homer off of him. This is a matter of history. Martinez and Lowe were more assets to Yankee victory rather than hindrances. Although I'm sure Martinez and Lowe did well against the rest of the American League, currently, they are on teams that are doing less than stellar in the standings. Martinez, who is on the Mets, enjoys a 3rd place rank as of today and Lowe, on the Dodgers, is also on a 3rd place ranked team on the west coast.

But this kind of commentary is to be expected from Fox. Fox: Startlingly like the news... but not quite. They distort, you decry.**

Fox relies on a plethora of techniques that will piss off the average Yankee fan. Incidentally, these subliminal tactics are also used on their Fox News Channel to support their right wing agenda. Yankee fans, who are intimate with the technique of lowering the volume on their television to watch a Fox produced baseball game so they can listen to John Sterling on radio 880 AM, are particularly sensitive to Fox's nonverbal commentary. In addition to the commentator blathering, we get to enjoy negative, yet obscure, Yankee statistics as well as positive, and equally obscure, opposing team factoids. They want to ensure that if you can't hear them they'll still get their message across.

If the Yanks screw up, believe me, you won't miss it. If you didn't catch it in real time, Fox Sports will make sure that the offending play is repeated ad nauseum. If the Yanks make a great play, if they repeat it once, they are doing you a favor. Normally, Yankee accomplishments are swept under the rug until someone else who is watching the highlights on a different network decides to show them.

And speaking of repeating things ad nauseum, when do you suppose Fox will stop showing the footage of Roger Clemmens throwing Mike Piazza's broken bat piece onto the ground? This is used to keep a burned out feud between the two players as being an issue. Wait until the next all star game, I guarantee they'll show it again. Trust me. If you want to see a rivalry, start looking to the Armando Benitez/Tino Martinez rivalry. Tino still hasn't forgiven him. You won't ever see that on Fox.

I can't prove this next one but Fox has found another way to keep the Yankee fans from enjoying the show. They have put a 10 second delay on their broadcast. While this does not seem like much, this is out of sync from the real time Yankee broadcast that John Sterling is making. John Sterling will be broadcasting the play before the ball has left the pitcher's glove.

As I said, Fox blows.

In keeping with the spirit of their idiocy of babbling during major playoffs, Fox unleashes their secret weapon of annoying whoredom. They come up with a themed intro. As they usually get the rights to the World Series games they get someone in the PR department to sync that baseball game with whatever movie may (or may not) need a boost in revenue. I still remember the year they decided that the box office bomb, Wild Wild West, was to be the theme of the World Series and they integrated little cuts of the movie with their analysis of the baseball players. It was stupid and while one attempts to rationalize why any sane individual would enjoy something like this, I'm sure it was clear in Fox's vision of dementia.

Don't even get me started about Fox's coverage of the Yankee Old Timer's games. Part of the fun is listening to 85 year old Phil Rizzuto do a broadcast. Fox does its best to block that out on every occasion. It's enough to make you buy a ticket to the game.

Fox enjoys a very totalitarian worldview when it comes to its baseball broadcasts. Fox has The Game of the Week features up to four regionalized telecasts, with exclusivity from 1-4 PM in each time zone. No one else can play at that time because Fox owns that time slot exclusively. Nice, huh? How they got this Godlike power is a secret between the Fox overlords, Bud Selig, and Satan (as the negotiator).

As I started writing this rant, I stopped watching the game on TV. I am now listening to the radio broadcast alone. It seems that the math today is favoring the Red Sox. I said it before, it was a matter of odds and the Yanks can't win em all.

Oh well.

I wanted to actually watch the game, but as it is on Fox and as I just ate, all I want now is to keep this meal down.

*- I started this rant before the Yankee loss today. So, the Yanks are actually one half game ahead of the Sox - not one and a half.

**- Paraphrased from Al Franken's Book - Lies! And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right