Baseball and the TV Obstacle Course, Part 3

Which includes references to Wade Davis, extended warranties and some good advice on winning the Daytona 500…

Last time I wrote about this it was Opening Day and I was still trying to figure out what streaming TV service I needed so I could watch my hometown baseball team, the Kansas City Royals.

As you may have read in the exciting Part 2 cliffhanger, I tried to sign up for Bally Sports+ and in the process ran into an internet scam which makes you think you’re signing up for Bally Sports+ but then you actually wind up subscribing to something called Spot Prime which seems to specialize in movies you’ve never heard of starring actors you don’t know, with the possible exception of Dolph Lundgren, who has been in way more movies than you think, probably because the people who made those movies didn’t think they were good enough to spend any money on marketing.

Once I realized what happened, I cancelled Spot Prime, but wondered if my credit card information had been stolen somewhere along the way and the answer was yes, which I found out when I tried to book a plane flight and my credit card was declined.

But I’m getting ahead of the story.

So let’s go back to Opening Day when I was still trying to figure out what streaming service I had to give money to in order to see Bally Sports Kansas City and had to do it by 3:10 PM because that’s when they were throwing the first pitch.

After I finished writing Part 2 of this trilogy, I saw an ad for DIRECTV that said their $99.99 per month CHOICE package included the MLB channel and regional sports networks which directly contradicted what I’d been told when I called them. In that Alternate Universe, I would have to add Bally Sports Kansas City from DIRECTV’s ala carte menu for an extra fee and Dr. Strange would be kind of a dick.

(That’s a Marvel movie joke and if you don’t watch those you won’t get it, so feel free to ignore it because in a couple paragraphs I’ve got a visual joke based on an older Gene Hackman movie that might be more to your liking.)

As we discussed in my previous free-range diatribe, sometimes the people selling products aren’t that familiar with the products they’re selling, so I called DIRECTV again with what I thought was a simple question:

“Does your CHOICE package include the MLB channel and Bally Sports Kansas City?”

To which the lady I was talking to answered:

“Do you like movies?”

I said that was irrelevant because all I was interested in was the MLB channel and Bally Sports Kansas City, a statement that was completely ignored because she wanted to ask:

“What kind of movies do you like?”

I kept asking the same question and she kept offering me irrelevant responses like wouldn’t I really rather have their PREMIER package for a lot more money so I could watch all those great movies I kept telling her I didn’t give a flying fuck about.

She was clearly working from a sales script and was sticking to it no matter what and kept asking the questions she wanted to ask no matter what I said.  

Timeout for the secret to being a good conversationalist

In some mostly-forgotten book whose title now escapes me, an older woman asks a younger woman how her relationship with her new boyfriend is going and the younger woman says:

“He doesn’t talk much.”

To which the older woman replies:

“Good talkers are a dime a dozen, good listeners are worth their weight in gold.”

Being a good talker to the point you pretty much can’t get me to shut up unless I’m wearing a ball gag and you’re holding a gun to my head, I know what she means.

Before I started covering the Royals I asked a friend of mine who played in the Big League for 10 years what ballplayers didn’t like about reporters and the list was a long one. He gave me lots of great advice about covering baseball and one of his best pieces of advice about talking to players was:

“Remember; it’s conversations not interviews.”

Conversations go where they will and you can start talking about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and wind up talking about lawn care and snow tires and by keeping an open mind about the topic, players led me into interesting areas I didn’t even know existed, like the time Chris Young and Wade Davis explained how opposing pitchers affect each other’s performance.

If one pitcher is throwing well and getting quick outs he might help the other pitcher do the same thing because they’re both staying in rhythm and not having long waits between innings. But if one pitcher is getting his ass kicked and has long innings while doing it, the other pitcher is sitting in the dugout, cooling off and might get his ass kicked when it’s his turn to pitch.

I don’t remember where the conversation started, but I do remember where we wound up and it gave me a good article that helped explain pitching duels and blowouts.

That’s a conversation.

Interviews are a reporter with a list of questions he or she wants to ask and a player could say, “Yeah, that was a tough game last night…and on the way home I robbed a convenience store” and the reporter doing an interview will ignore what the player just said because he or she isn’t really listening and can’t wait to get to his or her next question.

I’ve often said my ball-playing buddy should be teaching sports journalism and now that I think about it, he could also offer good advice to sales people.

And now back to DIRECTV

Finally admitting defeat in her quest to get me to buy shit I didn’t want, she said yes, the CHOICE package would allow me to see the MLB channel and Bally Sports Kansas City. But unfortunately for her, she spent so much time trying sell me rust proofing, interior sealant, an extended warranty and all that other crap you get offered when you buy a new car, that I had time to poke around the DIRECTV website and found a list of channels that the CHOICE package included and Bally Sports Kansas City wasn’t on it. When I pointed that out to her she said:

“Don’t worry about it.”

Which is just the kind of thing a mobster you owe a large amount of money to might say while you’re duct taped to a chair and he’s cranking up a chain saw after spreading plastic sheeting around his basement and you want to know why he needs a chainsaw.

So I kinda felt like I ought to worry about it at least a little bit because she didn’t seem to be worrying about it at all.

I’m pretty sure she thought she had a fish most of the way into her boat and at that point would have promised me 72 virgins waiting for me in Paradise to close the deal, but by now I had absolutely no faith in her promises, so I said I wasn’t ready to sign up and thought I needed to do some more research, and she asked, “What kind of research are you going to do?”

The real answer was, “The kind where I talk to somebody else” but as politicians have shown us on numerous occasions, just because someone asks you a question, you are not required to answer so I said thanks for your time and hung up on her.

And now a completely unnecessary digression about extended warranties and virgins

If you think about – and I have – offering someone who just bought a brand new car an extended warranty requires some balls and/or ovaries because before you bought the car it was the greatest automobile ever made and you were lucky to get one and won’t ever regret its purchase, but immediately after you bought the car it’s such a piece of shit the normal warranty is never going to cover all the automotive problems you’re sure to have in the very near future.

Also…

I don’t get the attraction some men have for virgins because if you want a really good time, you might want someone who’s been around the track once or twice and is familiar with the home stretch, although if you have a photo finish you want to make sure that photo doesn’t wind up on the internet. (And if you think I’ve used all the horserace = sex similes and metaphors I can think of, you should know we’re not even close.)

But I think I’ve made my point which is: you’re not going to win the Daytona 500 when your car is being driven by someone who just got her learner’s permit.

How to be a good fan  

After giving it some thought I realized I could pay north of $100 a month for a bunch of stuff I didn’t want or $19.99 a month to Bally Sports to watch the Royals.

Feel free to disagree, but I believe in picking a team and following them because otherwise it’s kinda like watching a soap opera where you watch just one episode; you don’t know who’s who and what role they play and why Monica is secretly in love with Cody.

I also believe in sticking with your team through the good and the bad because otherwise you’re just a frontrunner and a fan of winning, not the team.

I also believe that Royals fans who stuck with them through the hard times got way more satisfaction out of the 2014 and 2015 World Series than Royals fans who just showed up when they started winning and just as quickly found something else to do when things went south.

So the end of this 3-part saga is I signed up for Bally Sports and this time made sure I wasn’t unintentionally joining the Dolph Lundgren Fan Club and the Royals rewarded my loyalty by getting swept by the Minnesota Twins, played some sloppy baseball while doing it and have lost five of the first six games. But the great thing about baseball is the play again today and every game is a chance to start a win streak, although from what I’ve seen so far that does not seem likely, but I’ll watch anyway.

P.S.

Thanks for being a good listener even though I didn’t give you any other option.