As many of you know, I am a diehard Philly Sports fan, but especially the Phillies. However, I am extremely objective when it comes to team and individual performance and quite frankly I spent most of my childhood and adult lifetime watching and listening to my teams lose, sometimes with ignominy.
To continue, on many many occasions I have had the opportunity to watch my teams when covered by the national media, and I am fairly used to the Philadelphia team being the underdog, quite often legitimately. There is no question that the Eagles were underdogs to the Patriots in Super Bowl 2017 and I was well aware that the coverage would be slanted somewhat in the Patriots’ direction. I will say for the most part in pro football and hockey, and much of the time in basketball the national media gives the Philly teams a fair shake. Unfortunately for the Phillies, that is almost never the case. In fact, for the first time ever in postseason play, I would state that the Fox program hosts which include three All-Star players, are really even-handed and appropriately complimentary to both the Astros and the Phillies which they should be. Now I will be the first to admit that the Phillies have exceeded expectations in remarkable style and I am possibly the last person to expect them to have gotten this far during the regular season, but good for them for overcoming a whole host of problems and issues to attain this level.
However, the game announcers which include John Smoltz who at one time pitched for the Atlanta Braves, which are the Phillies’rivals in the Eastern Division of the NL were so overwhelmingly prejudiced towards the Astros that the game was actually difficult to watch. The lesson which I’m trying to get across here however occurred after the Phillies sealed the final out in the game. I texted a good friend of mine that The announcers were so upset that I wondered how much they had bet on the game going the Astros way. This is not uncommon for Phillies baseball for a variety of reasons which I don’t really need to get into at this stage but my point is that media bias for expectations which for whatever reason they perceive to be overriding is present. You see it in sports, you see it in politics, and you see it in certain human interest stories. The last time I heard commentators this upset with the result of a major sporting event was when Roger Staubach was providing color commentary during the Eagles Cowboys NFC championship game in 1980 and the Eagles beat the Cowboys. He was literally crying in the booth. And I mean literally. Pat Summerall had to have the technician cut Staubach’s mike.
What upsets me about seeing it in sports is that it is actually unreasonable to the nth degree. In a playoff which is best-of-five or best-of-seven games then by definition the best team wins and whether that be by skill, luck, or hopefully unbiased officiating, we accept it and say to ourselves “better luck next year” when we lose. I was particularly upset by the two play-by-play hosts tonight because their adulation of the Houston team, it’s management, and its fans was extreme. Now this is the team that cheated its way through the World Series in 2017, and was punished, but not severely enough, for doing so. But of course since this is all about public relations, absolutely no mention of this is made during the pre-game, the game, or the post game shows. Believe me if the Phillies had been found guilty of cheating, it would be story number one prior to every question of every player being asked. I can hear it now: even though your team was found guilty of cheating last year, is your team hongry enough, coach? (The spelling of the word “hungry” in that fashion is the tip of the hat Edwin Newman, who older people will remember quite well as a newscaster who wrote books about the usage and abusage of the English language).
Quite frankly, this is why I have stopped listening to political programs for the most part during this run up to the election. I find the commentators’ biases worse than usual, and for that reason and many others, I fear for our existence as a country, or at least a so-called democratic country. In this case I believe the news division has taken a page from the sports division of the networks.
Meanwhile: GO PHILLIES!
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