Rays Baseball thought ESPN was biased during the Rays/Rangers game Sunday night. Justin Upton agreed, tweeting to defend his brother, B.J. Upton:
1) Amazing that my brother has made two good baseball plays tonight and the #ESPN so called analysts have bashed him for both of them.
2) For the kids out there, when your coach gives you the safety squeeze you don’t have to bunt the ball if its not a strike.
3) And when you’re on second base with no outs your job is to tag on a fly ball and make sure you can advance to third base #ESPN.
I don’t quite see why story lines would favor Texas over Tampa Bay. The Rangers are right up with the Red Sox, Yankees, and Angels in terms of monetary power. Tampa is still the David fighting the Goliaths. I would think the latter would be the better story.
Well, this is a switch. For years Rangers fans complained that ESPN gave their team no respect. What goes around…
Anyhoo, I didn’t watch the game on ESPN. Don’t have much use for the network, really. When it comes to baseball, they only cover three teams: the Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Steroids (old joke, I know).
My thought is that, rather than bias, the more likely explanation for the comments by ESPN analysts is simple incompetence.
By the way, just watched the play (on mlb.com) in the second inning when Upton was on second base and misjudged Scott’s double off the right field wall.
For some reason Upton thought Cruz had a chance to catch the ball, though the rightfielder showed immediately that he was playing the ball off the wall. So Upton went back to tag for some reason.
Upton clearly shouldn’t have tagged on the play. ESPN was right to criticize him for not scoring as a result. He just misjudged the ball.
the real problem with the broadcast is the three broadcasters were all so anxious to talk they often left plays completely to the viewers’ eyes only with no play by play or commentary. Instead we got lots and lots of discussions about Maddon, Washington, Holland’s goofiness, or various other “insights”.