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10/27/2004: Gem o'the Day, World Series bonus bonus edition:
I shouldn't, but we've been getting a lot of good Series writing. From King Kaufman in Salon:
I've been laying off of Fox for most of this month because Fox has been playing it pretty conservatively on the cliché-ridden, bloated rhetoric front.
But the network reached a new low Tuesday night in Game 3 when Chris Myers interviewed "Leon," the character from a line of beer commercials, during an at-bat in the eighth inning. Leon stayed in character throughout the brief "interview," from which Fox cut away just long enough to show Mark Bellhorn taking a pitch, and then again to show him flying out to right.
Arrayed behind Leon and Myers were a gaggle of young women in T-shirts with a slogan from one of the beer commercials.
The Leon ads, some of which also feature Fox announcer Joe Buck, are pretty funny, but this wasn't funny at all. A commercial masquerading as an interview, even though Myers was clearly trying to play it for laughs, is inexcusable even under whatever lax ethical code the sports broadcasting industry operates under.
And to pull this crap during an at-bat in the late innings of a World Series game? I guess it's easier and cheaper than knocking on the door of every single baseball fan in the world and slapping them in the face, but it amounts to the same thing.
Len on 10.27.04 @ 01:22 PM CST
