Been sending notes back and forth with Shanghai Bob and a few other friends about the unintentionally funny/bad ways baseball announcers fill time between pitches. Caught an all-time classic exchange last night between bored (and usually very good) Mariner TV play-by-play guy Dave Sims in full-on Bob Uecker “Juuuust a little outside” mode and the world’s most colorless color guy, Mike Blowers, whilst both struggled through another tepid Mariner performance. With game 2-0 in the fourth it went about like this:
Camera shot of waving fans in outfield in sombreros and cheap ponchos hoisting plastic margarita cups.
Sims: Cinco de Mayo here at the ballpark tonight and some fans having a good time out there in centerfield.
Blowers (absolutely more constipated than usual): Strike one on Wilson.
Silence while pitcher fidgets with ball, cap, groin, etc.
Sims: And celebrating the Mexican victory over the French in 1862.
Blowers (yet more monotone still): Ball and a strike now on Wilson.
Loooooong silence. Catcher asks ump for new ball. Batter cleans dirt out of his spikes with bat.
Sims: Battle of Puebla!
Blowers: And Wilson fouls that one behind the backstop.
As usual, Sims carries the show and the anemic Mariner bats only equaled this season by Blowers’ funereal delivery.
Shanghai Bob countered with an even better one between Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall calling games for the old White Sox, but I'm saving that for my next book.
And the show turns out to be ... pretty lousy. Like most people I know, I stopped paying attention right around episode four.
The biggest problem, I think, is that in buying into the fashionable rehabilitation of the Imperial Japanese soldier as hapless victim of forces larger than himself (I think the Clint Eastwood WWII movies started this fiction), and by focusing almost solely on grunts in obscure jungle and island battle locations—Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Iwo—the writers needlessly deprived the audience of much of the epic human drama that consumed the entire namesake region between 1941 and 1945. Had the show interwoven stories from four or five locales—say, Nanjing, Singapore, Manila, Guam or Hiroshima—it could have realistically portrayed the way the war affected men, women and children of dozens of nationalities, and still found space for military strategy and the intense jungle firefights that clearly gave the producers such hard-ons.
That said, WWII was so enormous that it never stops revealing incredible stories. No doubt someone will take another crack at the thing and get it right.
