As it is the slowest time of the year in sports, with only the MLB, MLS, and WNBA playing regular season games right now, I thought it would be a good time to nitpick about a few things that have bothered me of late. The first topic I want to address is President Barack Obama's ceremonial first pitch at the MLB All-star game in St. Louis last Tuesday, or at least Fox's coverage of the pitch. You see, the problem was that Fox never showed where Obama's pitch went. The station only showed Obama releasing the pitch, but never used the conventional center field camera to show where the pitch ended up.
While I don't know who is to blame for this gaffe, I have concluded there are two possible reasons why it occurred. Either Fox didn't want to highlight the president's pitch (in case it was a strike) due to the station's conservative bias, or, the more likely reason in my mind, the Obama camp didn't want to show where the pitch ended up in case it wasn't a strike. I believe the Obama camp was being extra cautious after the recent first pitch fiasco for Mark Whalberg before a Red Sox game at Fenway Park last month. Or, the Obama camp didn't want the possibility of the same type of negative press that followed the president's bowling blunder during his campaign last year. As it turns out, the Obama camp had nothing to fear since the president's pitch turned out to be a pretty decent one with a little help from Albert Pujols behind the plate.
I do have to commend FOX for the fact that the station doesn't feel the need to add a third broadcaster in the booth for big events. This is one of my pet peeves that most notably ESPN tends to do for all the big events the station broadcasts. I was hopeful that after hearing Tony Kornheiser would not be back in the booth for a third season of Monday Night Football (which I think was a good decision by the network) there might be a shift to a two-man booth consisting of only Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski. Unfortunately that is not to be, as former Bucs and Raiders coach Jon Gruden has signed on to be the third man in the booth. While I think "chucky" will be great on television as an analyst, I don't think that even his charisma and personality can offset the awkwardness that accompanies a three-man booth.
Finally I want to comment on a trend that has become increasingly apparent in articles written about baseball. I don't pretend to be a grammar expert and I'm sure I make many grammatical mistakes in my writing, but I don't see any reason why writers should choose to use the terms RBIs and HRs as opposed to the simple abbreviations RBI and HR, even when writing about multiple numbers of each category.
The term RBI stands for both "Run Batted In" and "Runs Batted In" depending on how many runs crossed the plate. Similarly the term HR stands for "Homerun" and "Homeruns", so adding the extra (s) at the end of term HR(s) is really stating that multiple Homeruns(s) were hit, and Homerunss is not a word. The same holds true for Runs Batted In(s) because Ins is not a word (though according to dictionary.com it does stand for Immigration and Naturalization Service). While there are those who could argue that the terms RBI and HR are entities unto themselves and thus can be made plural, I would say to them that the true meaning of the abbreviation needs to be examined before carelessly throwing on an extra "s".
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