'Railcats
Challenge' at US Steelyard a hit for HS Baseball
CROWN POINT
(5-1-2005)
- One unintended consequence
of Gary's pro baseball park has been that the number of high school baseball
games on radio each April has multiplied four or five times. In order to draw
fans for the Railcat's Class A pro baseball Northern League games that are
held from late May through August, the ballclub smartly opened up the park in
April to allow high school teams to play there. The deal, which has the
schools sell a mandatory minimum number of tickets, split revenue with the
Railcats, in effect, has the schools paying the salaries of the attendants and
security required to open the park on spring days.
The unintended
consequence is that, with games in a pro park with pro broadcast facilities,
local radio has rushed in to air as many games as possible. The Crown
Point-based Regional Radio Sports Network (RRSN) carried almost all of the 30
games this April. There's no reason not to. Local kids. State of the art
facilities and a roof in case it rains. WJOB (1230)
has also carried several games and the Region Sports Network (RSN) has also
aired some of the catchups.
RSN is limited in
what they can do in the weather-challenged month of April because they must
buy time on WWCA (1270) AM and its hard for them to risk rain
outs. WJOB should do all the games live or on tape delay and, I believe
in the future they probably will. Com Cast Cable's 'Region Sports Extra', for
reasons known only to them, does not attend Steelyard double and
triple-headers to get maximum unobstructed highlights, preferring to shoot bad
video through a screen at girls softball games. But they are the only ones not
taking advantage of the 'Railcats Challenge'.
The bottom line
is, most of the games you hear on the radio would not be aired if they were
being played at the schools involved. Most schools do not have press box
facilities, other than an insect-infested tool shed behind home plate. There
will be far fewer regular season prep games on the air in May than there were
in April because, with the end of April came the end of the prep games in the
pro ballpark. I can't swear that the Railcats get a lot of extra fans in attendance
during the regular season because of the prep games
in the spring. But the Railcats are utilizing a ballpark that otherwise would
sit empty and they are doing something for the community in the process.
Everybody wins here.
Maybe I should
stop whining and make a down payment on one of those wonderful $4 hamburgers
they sell. The High School Sports Publications (HSSP) group that produces
the very fine football and basketball guides that
all local prep sports fans must have, also produced a program for the 30-game
Railcats' challenge. The well produced 52-page program has the schedules,
lineups, enrollments and some statistics and details on every team in Lake and
Porter County. Hopefully the HSSP folks will continue
to sell any leftover programs at prep games across NW Indiana. The cost was
just $1 and they could get $2 or $3 for them easily.
Most high school
baseball and softball programs (LaPorte, KV and
Chesterton are major exceptions) are two pieces of paper stapled together
loaded with misspelled names and blurred print. The
typical high school program is straight out of 'arts and crafts' class. The
result is as lame as lime Coke and as popular as a six-hour 'Veronica Mars'
marathon. The Railcats Challenge program book, on the other hand, is a NW
Indiana version of the other two state wide HSSP publications. If you like
prep baseball, you should get
one. Hopefully, the HSSP people will continue to sell those programs at games
they broadcast.
Local
radio outlets can do what they want. The problem is, they need to do what they
say they will. Talk of covering girls softball did not manifest itself in the
month of April. The problem is, basically, I suspect that local radio doesn't
really want to cover girls softball. The decisions
are made by men who cant relate to softball. Announcers aren't reporters who
have covered the game. It isn't baseball. It isn't like baseball.
Well-intentioned WJOB has put a token Munster contest on the air but the
announcers don't know the game. They don't
know the history. The broadcasts are okay for the home school (usually
Highland or Munster) but they fall flat with any other listeners, who probably
are followers of the sport. Operating from a position of limited knowledge,
it's simply easier to schedule a game at the Steelyard and see baseball, which
the announcers ARE familiar with and knowledgeable
about.
With the softball
regular season almost over now, the only major regular season games remaining
involve teams that WJOB traditionally does not cover. The LC-Chesterton match
for the DAC title and the PCC championship tournament finals at South Central.
WJOB is very Lake Athletic Conference-oriented and
they'd have trouble finding Chesterton. The LAC does
not have a league championship and as much as they brag on the air about their
coverage, WJOB still does not cover Hanover Central. HC is the four-time PCC
champion.
Lake County
broadcast media has a blind spot when it comes to Hanover Central and the rest
of the PCC, although they don't admit it. As Hanover
softball tries for an unprecedented second consecutive state title, they do so
in broadcast anonymity. No one has yet stepped up and made an effort to change
that. The competitive softball sectionals are the 2A
sectional at Bishop Noll (state champ Hanover and challenger
Noll), the 1A Sectional in Whiting (very equally matched) and the 4A
Sectionals at Highland (state top-10s Lowell, Munster and LC) and Chesterton
(arch-rivals Chesterton and Portage). The Girls
sectional begins a week before the boys playoffs begin. Hopefully coverage can
extend beyond the games that involve Munster and Highland.
The best thing
about the new Chicago Cubs broadcasters on WGN is that you don't notice them.
They are no ego-tripping Ivy League comics who grace you with their great wit
and wisdom. Major League baseball, especially at a place like Wrigley Field,
either sells itself to the viewer or they turn off the set. Broadcasters are
reporters first and entertainers second although many do not know that. The
very knowledgeable Steve Stone and the very inaccurate Chip Caray were very
hard to listen to because of their inside comments and condescending
attitudes. Stone's comments are still sharp as he allows himself to be used by
the WSCR (670) AM and the Chicago Sun-Times in a media war with Cub flagship
station WGN and the Chicago tribune newspaper.
For
the record, with screaming negative Cub headlines and columnists using phrases
like 'Team Tribune' and commenting on how baseball decisions are made in
'Tribune Tower' the Sun-Times has always suggested that its' arch-rival, the
Tribune newspaper owns the Cubs. They do not. The Tribune newspaper, the
Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times are three of the 14 newspapers owned
by the Tribune Corporation, a media group which also owns 26 TV stations and certainly
does not have time to get involved in every day decisions for the ball club,
which the Sun-Times insinuates. In big city 'attitude' sports reporting you
are never ever chained to the truth. If the Sun-Times can get readers to
believe that rival Tribune is cheap and incompetent by saying the same thing
about the Cubs and infer that they are giving you more truth, they are going
to sell you that bill of goods. White Sox fans, who often complain about equal
publicity, should count their lucky stars and be glad they don't get trashed
publicly because of their corporate connections.
Crown Point high
school grad and former 17-year major league pitcher Dan Plesac is doing an
equally low-key and informative job on the Cubs post-game shows on Com Cast
Cable Channel 37. A recent on-air poll on who should be the Cubs' late inning
relief specialist, had Plesac, who retired two years ago, finishing in second
place.
Right-wing
conservative howler Steve Fowler, perhaps the only person happier with
President George W. Bush than stockholders in BP Amoco, has gotten a new radio
shift at WJOB (1230) AM. The 'Archie Bunker class' undercover Republican now
hosts the 'Fowler Free For All' weekdays from 2-5 p.m. It's a lively,
entertaining show and a much better spot for Fowler, whose flamethrower style
of Ann Coulter-loving, liberal-bashing was a bit lost in his previous 6-9 a.m.
shift. News pal Jen Fleming and assorted co-hosts on the sunshine shift always
seem to be having a good argument or a good time,
the key to good radio. Plus, and this is one of radio's dirty little secrets,
morning drive radio is brutal on the host. Folks who have to make sense (not
that Steve always does) on the radio from 6-9 a.m. need ten vacations a year
or they lose their mind. Congratulations to Fowler for getting a livable time
slot. He sounds happier.
No relation to
the past few paragraphs, but conservative suck-up media has stopped covering
world affairs largely because President Bush has played them again. Wonder
where the social security issue came form. It came
from the White House. Social Security is a smokescreen when gas is $78 a
gallon. And many in America have forgotten that a marine still dies every day
in 'Iraq-Nam'. Future historians will hold Bush responsible for every US
marine death, because of his fabricated justifications for the war. Present
day media is blind to that fact. Bush can kiss Saudi princes 24-7 but American
caskets are still filling up. TV news? Bored with Iraq and cowed by the powers
that be (or the powers that GOP), media is afraid to investigate record oil
company profits and the connection to the Bush oil dynasty.
All that's left
is Michael Jackson.
Media
was all over the 'Runaway Bride' story in April. The poor little fool in
Atlanta who panicked as her wedding approached and skipped town. Nationwide
cable TV looked like idiots when the woman that they assumed was kidnapped
(and praised as a wonderful human being in her absence),
proved to be a spoiled self-centered child. The
question still stands. Every 'missing innocent' case that 'captures the heart
of America' is always a young woman, a pregnant mom or a little girl. Chandra
Levy. Laci Peterson Jon Benet Ramsey. Why aren't
many (or any) of the lost folks that get their face splashed over cable TV,
unite an entire town to search for them and elicit the country's sympathy, men
or boys? Why are they never black or Hispanic? Set aside for a moment, the
journalistic propriety of a news channel splashing one person's disappearance
coast to coast in a cynical ploy to grab viewers.
Dizzy drama queen
Jennifer Wilbanks' life or death has absolutely no deep meaning to anyone
outside her hometown and when a car bomb kills five Marines in Iraq, news
channel's who do full hours on the 'Runaway Bride' are childish and
highly suspect. But consider the darker question.
Does cable TV select the 'missing person' cases they feel will appeal to the
largest number of Americans and do they feel that young white females are the
prototype? No conscious human believes that no men or boys, blacks or
Hispanics turn up missing every day in America. Hundreds will disappear
tomorrow. But NONE of those victims will make cable TV as national news
stories. Only young white women will.
I don't think it
is a coincidence. Any more so than I believe that the only people on the
planet qualified to read news on cable TV are 20-something ex-models with
two-inch layers of makeup. A recent note that may have been overlooked was
that the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) TV
shows have signed an agreement to go back to the USA Network later this year.
In the 1990s, the then World Wrestling Federation (WWF) rose to prominence
again (the history of wrestling is cyclical) with Monday night shows on the
USA Network, Com Cast Cable Channel 41. In a move they probably requested, the
WWE moved to what is now Spike TV, a 'channel for
men', which has never taken off. Wrestling has plummeted in popularity and,
while the the switch to a virtually unknown cable channel was not the only
reason (some major stars have left the WWE), pro wrestling is now back on a
major station (UPN is not a major channel either) The USA Network, unlike
Spike TV, has a lot of first-run programming like 'Monk' and 'Kojak.'
With Monday night
pro football now off network TV (it's on ESPN this fall), cable TV can grab
the Lion's share of viewers on Monday night. The best reality program on TV is
'The Contender' Sundays (7 p.m.) on NBC. Fighters pair of and fight five round
bouts over a 13-week span (they have all been taped) for an eventual pot of
$1,000,000. The final fight will be carried live in
May sweeps period. The secret to the series' quality is its' positive nature.
Other reality hits require the contestants to back-bite, lie and cheat. The
Contender simply shows you the lives of the boxers, their parents, wives and families.
And then keeps the camera on everyone as the fight eliminates one of them. It
is very dramatic and usually, almost 100% positive. That's why 'The Contender'
consistently has been the 50th or 60th highest rated
program of the week recently while the naughty 'Desperate Housewives' still rivets
25 million to their TV sets every Sunday night.
Maybe if Marcia
Cross went five rounds with Teri Hatcher.
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2005 USA-365.com and Meyer
Multimedia Services, a division of Meyer Broadcasting Corp. All rights
reserved.
Revised: May 02, 2005
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