On Dan Patrick: The Farewell Tour (xi) - Doug Gottlieb, this one is for you:
Barb: I’ll bet KO would have fallen out of his chair, too, if he heard that deadball era remark. Double methadones today: Gottlieb and Kusilias. Two for the price of one? DP beats them all.
CP: I didn’t think they were bad, but the two of them together gets loud. Not as loud as Smith, though. I’d give them a chance, but you’re right about the shoes.
Gottlieb may have corrected himself on that deadball era gaffe, but I couldn’t bear to listen to the show after he said it so I turned the radio off.
So far DP’s replacements have been adequate, but that’s about it. They give me the sports news, but lack the side dish of oomph that DP and KO regularly brought to the table. (I can’t believe I’ve been writing about them in the past tense; I think this is a good sign re The Stages of Grief.) I still haven’t found a new lunchtime/early afternoon routine, although spending a solid hour reading a book has been rewarding and maybe it’s something I should do instead of filling my head with sports chatter.
That being said, Karl Ravech and John Kruk were very good on Wednesday’s show. Of course, I’m biased towards baseball talk, and they are two of the mainstays on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight. (The other being Peter Gammons, who qualifies as a Holy Man as far as most baseball fans are concerned.) Their discussion was thick with baseball and many of their guests were baseball guys. They discussed the Big Three topics that have been dominating the sports news: Michael Vick, Tim Donaghy (the NBA referee accused of gambling on games), and Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the career home run record. But they did it without all the wailing and whining and hand-wringing that has colored the discussion by other hosts.
I’m not sure if the high muckety-mucks at ESPN will put Ravech and Kruk in DP’s time slot, but their stint on yesterday’s show gives me hope that Good Things are possible for the 1-4pm ET time period.
Video - .ram file requires RealPlayer (Basic RealPlayer available here.)
Agreed, they were good. But I don’t think two baseball analysts can fill the time-slot; they’ll lose the people who want to hear about NFL, NBA. Gottlieb and Eliott (??) today; not bad but nothing to write home about. I hope DP’s new show will be on in the same time-slot so my afternoon routine can be the same.
Comment by Karl — 26 July 2007, Thursday @ 17:24:10