Opening Day, April 6 2015, Mets and Yankees

They are trying to shorten games this year by not letting batters step out of the batter's box so often and by shortening the time between half-innings to two and a half minutes, from three minutes or more.  The result of this, at least with the Yankees so far, is that we simply get more virtual ads behind the catcher and few views of the field; it becomes a non-stop flattened view of the pitcher and the batter.  Not only don't we get to see the shifts that are more commonly being deployed, but the bombastic Michael Kay usually doesn't even tell us when they are in effect!.  Announcers David Cone and Ken Singleton get an intelligent word in occasionally and there were new shots down the foul lines, though only used twice in the entire Yankees/Blue Jays game.  Did anyone stop to think that perhaps one of the reasons for the decline in TV viewing of baseball is because they show you so little of the game?  As I have advocated previously, we should go back to the style of the fifties, when two cameras were used and one could see the entire game on the entire field!

Things were a little better with the Mets broadcast, though possibly because the Nationals could not sell as many virtual ads; we will see what happens when the Mets return to New York.  Announcer Gary Cohen is effectively low-key and not afflicted with the ugly toupees of his colleagues Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez, who do a good job with the details (though Hernandez has a tendency to talk about his own career too much).   Of course the Mets announcers, like most baseball announcers, do not understand exactly what an unearned run is (it requires one to reconstruct the inning) but whether or not the Mets runs were earned against starter Max Scherzer they won 3-1 behind elderly starter Bartolo Colon, who "looks like a sack of potatoes out there" (as someone once said of David Wells).

The Yankees used starter Masahiro Tanaka, who they are hoping will be their ace; he gave up five runs in the third inning and only lasted four, contributing to a crucial Chase Headley error.  New shortstop Didi Gregorious was thrown out trying to steal third with two out, though I give him credit for trying to stir things up in a rather sluggish line-up.  The best news for both the Mets and the Yankees was the effectiveness of their bullpens:  Martin, Shreve, Carpenter, Wilson, Rogers for the Yankees and Torres, Familia, Blevins and Carlyle for the Mets; only Shreve gave up a run.  In spite of all the pitchers used both the Mets game and the Yankees game ended in under three hours!

Note:  I recommend Ben McGrath's Dream Teams article in the April 13th New Yorker for an intelligent analysis of how the numbers in baseball are overwhelming the beauty of the game itself.  When Daniel Okrent is asked how he feels about having invented fantasy baseball he says. "I feel the same way J. Robert Oppenheimer felt about having invented the atomic bomb.  I really do.  I mean, pretty terrible."