Hating Fox Sports Part 6: Scooter

If you've been able to stomach Fox's MLB telecasts over the last few years you've probably had the misfortune of seeing "Scooter," Fox's attempt to make their game broadcasts more appealing, and apparently informative, to kids. According to Wikipedia, Scooter was designed "to explain different types of pitches with the education of children in mind." As is the case with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver, the guys behind MLB on Fox apparently don't know a bad thing when they find it. Despite quite a few negative reactions to Scooter, Fox has kept him around.

If you've never seen Scooter, consider yourself lucky. He looks something like this, although apparently pictures of him don't exist on the internet. He whooshes on screen and in an annoying voice butchers explanations of different types of pitches. He typically says something like "a curveball is a ball that curves on its way to the plate." Enlightening.

Last night Scooter made what we believe to be his first appearance of the 2006 postseason, and his schtick was taken to a new low. This time they had Jeff Suppan's head floating on the screen next to Scooter, and in an irritating, condescending tone of voice, Suppan explained that a change-up is a fastball that goes really really slow. Of course, if it goes slowly, it's not a fastball at all, is it? This explanation is insulting. If they're trying to educate children they should have said that a change-up is a pitch that looks like a fastball, but is much slower, so it fools the hitter. They could have demonstrated the various grips used to throw changeups, or shown footage of pitchers with really good ones (e.g. Johan Santana). Instead they probably went to an extra commercial break so we could have the pleasure of hearing "Our Country" for the 12,000th time of the night.

They might as well just change to name from "The World Series on Fox" to "The World's Largest Crappy Baseball Broadcasting Party."

Read more about how Fox Sports sucks here here, here, here and here, as well as here, here, and here.

In other news: Much to our chagrin, the "great fans" in St. Louis are continuing to imitate this.