I hate Sunday Night Baseball. I know that ESPN has enough clout with MLB to negotiate at least one game a week for Sunday night ‘ball, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it… ESPN: You suck and you proved it tonight.

See, being a Yankees fan for the last 30 years means that I’m sorta used to having most of the sports media hating the team I cheer for. As much as Americans love a winner, they hate winners that win too much and like to see the underdogs win – not the reigning champion. This is normal in sports – look at how many people hate the Dallas Cowboys! I’m thousands of miles away from Dallas and I hate the Cowboys even though I don’t follow football much. Why? They won too much in the 70’s; there was too much success for most people to like them.

After watching the Yankees win four out of the last seven World Series championships, they became qualified as a team that won too much. Everyone [not in Boston] liked them winning in 1996 because they hadn’t won the Series since 1978. They had a dark 80’s and early 90’s and they came into the championship in 1996 as the underdog: people loved that. After they took the 98, 99, and 00 titles, people began to hate them again.

This is “hatred” is often seen during games on Fox Sports, on Saturday afternoon broadcasts. Because Fox isn’t, well, the YES Network, they try to be non-biased and they do this by trashing the Yankees. OK, fine, it’s a regional game, whatever. I don’t like their broadcasters, but fine, I’m willing to overlook them for now. ESPN however, takes this bit to the next level.

What’s worse than the whiny announcers of ESPN is the fact that they force this asinine 8pm game start time for Sunday nights. That just fucks the whole baseball schedule, in my opinion. Most night games start at 7:05. ESPN usually gets the first pitch off at 8:25. That’s just shitty. It’s late for the teams and was schedule strictly for prime-time viewing and ratings. Now take a game like this week’s Yankees-Red Sox game. This is a problem. See, ESPN announcers hate the Yankees. It’s been proven over countless games over the last few years. But they also hate the Red Sox because they haven’t won a title since 1918. You’ve got two men in a press booth, with your ears as their hostage, and they have nothing good to say about either team. That is annoying.

A couple of weeks ago, they spent like five minutes talking about how Boomer (Wells, NYY-#33) had a terrible pick off move to first. He has no moves, he’s too slow, it’s sad that a lefty can’t have a better move, blah blah blah. Boomer stops them both, mid-sentence, because he picked off the guy at first. “Duh, uh” is all they recovered with. This week, the bases are loaded with Yankees, Lowe (BOS-#32) goes into his motion and *bzzt*, black screen. Then the “technical difficulties logo” shows up. Then four commercials in a row. Four fuckin’ commercials! They snatched the game away and they have the balls to show me commercials?! This is just as criminal as charging $8 for a movie that has five minutes worth of commercials before the previews or the DVD that you bought that has a Pepsi mini-movie-mercial on it. Unacceptable!

What was funny when they were showing Brian Cashman (Yankess GM [I think]) during the Boomer game. They had him on the screen while he was on the phone and they were talking about some moves he might be making soon. They also mentioned that “we know he doesn’t listen to us – he listens to the local radio guys when we broadcast” and they sounded insulted by it. Um, guys? You trash his team whenever they’re on your network – the local radio guys are a Yankees station. Why wouldn’t he listen to them? Simply put: Duh.

Anyway, ESPN came back to the anchordesk after the commercials, citing a power outage as the problem. After recapping the National League day’s highlights – even though it’s an American League game – they cut back to the game. At first there was no sound and then “mira Nomar aqui” cracked through a speaker and viola! the SAP network took over. A little while after that it went to English as they switch the audio feed to the ESPN Radio broadcast. No offense to those guys, but they musta creamed in their pants when they heard that they suddenly had the TV broadcast – if I was in their position, I would have too! Shortly after that, the regular broadcasters came back and knocked the SAP network off – tonight’s game was only available in English after the 3rd inning… I’m sure this means that there will be some sorta of “ESPN is Anti-Spanish” protest all week or some shit. Fuck the lot of them too! This is America and our citizens have the right to speak whatever language they choose – if that excludes you because you are too lazy to learn the language spoken by the majority of people in the country, you don’t get to whine about equality. You are asking for special treatment because you don’t want to be treated equally. You people need to piss off too, right after ESPN pisses off.

If it wasn’t for K-Zone, they’d be totally worthless – at least they have that going for them…