I was wrong.
Major League Baseball announcers apparently don’t have to be at Sahlen Field to praise Sahlen Field.
That was clear Tuesday night by the performance of Sportsnet play-by-play announcer Dan Shulman and analyst Buck Martinez during the Toronto Blue Jays win over Miami carried by the MLB Network.
So perhaps the Fox Sports Florida crew of Dewayne Staats, Brian Anderson and Tricia Whitaker calling the Blue Jays game with Tampa Bay carried nationally on Fox Sports 1 Friday night from Florida will praise Sahlen Field even without being at the facility.
Shulman and Martinez profusely praised the Sahlen extreme makeover even though they weren’t hiding the fact they were watching the game on television from a Toronto studio.
“Buffalo is a major league city … it’s just not a major league ballpark,” noted Martinez at one point during the game.
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“It was a nice minor league facility,” said Shulman. “It has become an extremely nice minor league facility.”
Shulman also gave MLB Network viewers a nice Buffalo baseball history lesson while an old photo of 19th century players was shown.
That led Martinez to note that Roy Hobbs, the character played by Robert Redford in “The Natural” filmed at War Memorial Stadium, played in Buffalo.
“No wonder they had to get new lightning,” said Shulman, who previously explained how lighting at Sahlen was upgraded to meet major league standards.
It was a good, well, natural line.
As any fan of “The Natural” knows, Hobbs, bleeding on one side of his uniform, hit a home run set to a memorable musical score by Randy Newman that shattered the lights in right field, causing sparks to fly all over the field.
The scene still gives me chills every time I see the movie.
Shulman and Martinez also speculated during the game that the Jays may have a big advantage over visiting teams to Sahlen because several of Toronto’s players played here while members of the Buffalo Bisons and the Jays know things about the ballpark that visiting teams won’t learn quickly in three-game series.
If Shulman and Martinez keep up all the praise during their run calling games from Sahlen this season, they probably will deserve a key to the city. And they can use it to eventually tour the city if they ever get here.
The late Roone Arledge must be rolling over in his grave.
ESPN hasn’t made it official, but there have been multiple reports that it has settled on its new “Monday Night Football” team. And “settled” appears to be the operative word.
Steve Levy is reportedly on play-by-play, with Louis Riddick and Brian Griese as analysts.
Arledge’s goal when he ran ABC Sports and created "MNF" was to have an entertaining broadcast team that made watching the game an event.
The new team is pretty bland by comparison to most "MNF" teams and suggests ESPN has just come to the realization that the game is the thing to pay attention to more than the announcers these days.
Riddick, the brother of former Buffalo Bill Robb Riddick, is my favorite member of the new trio because of his expertise. He has been an exceptional studio analyst who knows the players and the game as well as anybody.
I like Levy more as a SportsCenter host than a play-by-play announcer but his sense of humor should be a plus in that "MNF" role.
Griese has been a decent college football analyst, but is as bland as the Miami Dolphins offense that his father, Bob, ran in the team’s glory days.
I expect the new team will be an improvement on the "MNF" team of Joe Tessitore and Booger McFarland. How could it not be?
But I also suspect Griese is just a placeholder for a year before some big NFL names who are still playing retire to the booth.
And Riddick is annually being considered for a front office job in the NFL and it wouldn’t be surprising if he eventually gets one.
The Bills have two "MNF" scheduled games – Dec. 7 at San Francisco and Dec. 28 at New England.
I don’t want to read any stories comparing sports ratings to ratings in seasons past. The NBA, NHL and MLB are all having asterisk seasons. Many of their games are competing against each other in a low viewing summer period and the need to get so many in a compressed amount of time has resulted in more games than usual being played in the afternoons. Adding in the presidential race as a factor once the NFL season starts, this is not a season where any ratings comparisons make any sense.
I received a hockey lesson – from at all places – a Zoom news conference for the upcoming Hulu comedy “Woke” from Keith Knight, the Black co-creator of the show.
He ended the “Woke” session by noting something some Buffalo hockey fans might not have been aware of concerning the invention of the slap shot.
“If you even scrape the surface of the history of this country, you will see that Black people have had a part in everything, not just music,” said Knight. “I just recently found out that – like, I'm a big hockey fan, and that's one of the things people always make fun of me of, and I just found out … modern hockey was like – transformed by the grandkids of slaves that emigrated up to Canada. And they took up the game of hockey, and Black people invented the slap shot, they invented the modern version of hockey as we know it.”
Most Canadians and Americans probably would say Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion invented the slap shot.
But if you Google who invented the slap shot? This will pop up. “Edwin Martin of the Halifax Eurekas of The Negro Hockey League took the first slap shot in 1903. It is documented in the Halifax Newspaper.”
Now do you feel woke?
email: apergament@buffnews.com
