Baseball Prospectus’ Will Carroll ‘fesses up to glancing at preseason football instead of watching Chris Woodward’s star turn in “Entourage”.
Okay, so shoot me, but I was watching the Colts-Seahawks game tonight while the Sox and Yanks were in rain delay, and something in particular caught my eye. One of the things that NBC is doing to promote its new Sunday night game is a modified fantasy contest, with the winner getting a trip to New York to meet the studio team of Bob Costas (above), Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis, and AL-Kings leader Peter King. Costas immediately bemoaned this prize, sarcastically saying œmy fantasy is to spend every week hanging out with some fantasy geek who’ll badger us with questions about the next week. Somebody should probably point out that he’s got one of those so-called geeks in studio with him already, and King’s not that much of a geek. The rest of us œgeeks are out here, watching the ads that pay your salary. I’d suggest that the least you can do is at least pretend to not loathe the people who watch you each week. Fantasy players and statheads have always been ghettoized by journalism geeks, and that despite the passionate interest and open wallet that they bring to sports. It’s time that everyone realized it, got over whatever bias they have against fantasy players, and realized that they’re the audience, not the enemy.
Solid stuff, as always, from Will, and an incident not unlike the time last year that ABC crammed some non-yuck worthy slurs against fantasists from Jimmy Kimmel into their MNF telecast, or the endless spate of nerd-defamation delivered by ESPN’s Colin Cowherd.
That said, I have no problem with Costas loathing his audience because I like having at least one thing in common with him. Well, that and having hung out with Lydia Zamm.