you're right, kauf. all live-sports broadcasts today are just over-produced, over-researched, drowning in producer's notes on players/news that the hosts feel compelled to read and discuss endlessly, usually while ignoring the "real" action on the field. there's an obvious attempt in every sports broadcast on every network to "tell a story" to us. frankly, it's ruining live sports broadcasts for me. trying to watch the eagles/packers monday nite game was painful, listening to the whole broadcast team (theisman, kornheiser, sideline gals, etc.) tell endless backstories with footage on farve from the 90's. on one play an eagle was basically knocked out cold and the game was stopped, but none of the announcers even mentioned it until about a minute later, despite the camera focusing on the injured player. so to fox, cbs etc. -- i don't need a "story", so just call the game on the field and leave the storytelling to disney. c-span figured this out for politics, so perhaps let's apply it to your sports broadcasts too.

...but the commercials weren't that bad, and Tim McCarver was still under lock and key.

This particular column is a perfect example of why I read and recommend you.

For even considering the fact that a pre-game show...ANY pre-game show...would be worth watching. Also disappointed that you were surprised that it was a terrible, commercial-filled waste of time. The only thing worth watching is the game, always. And if people don't like McCarver & Buck they should turn down the volume and listen to the game on radio.

PS I agree that the Hockey season starts way too early. I am as big a hockey fan as anyone who reads this column, but early October to early June is just too long of a season. It should start in November and end in April or May. Doesn't it feel like just yesterday that the 'Caines were skating around with the Cup? Make it a 50- to 60-game season at the most. Eliminate a few teams while you're at it. The NHL must be saved, and that might be the only way to do it.

As King points out, Kennedy has never shown any reason why he should be taken seriously about anything, but hearing his bluster on performance enhancing drugs is especially grating. As manager of one of the dirtiest clubhouses in the league in the 90's, he's a central figure in the whole debate. The few times that fact is brought up he says if it was happening in his clubhouse he didn't see it. Juan Gonzales packs on 30 pounds of muscle in a single offseason and he doesn't wonder why? He's the one who's gutless, refusing to admit what Canseco has embraced: when it came down to it, tacitly or explicitly he accepted that the drugs were worth it. Not that the Rangers won all that much under him, of course, but they hit a lot of home runs.

And I forgot, who was Kennedy's boss at the time?

Fox pre-game coverage in any sport worthless.

Bush cabal of liars in 'State of Denial'

Dennis Miller is BARKING MAD.

HocKey season is at least 33% too long. Just thinK if the NFL decided to expand to 24 games and let 20 teams into the playoffs. Goodbye regular season.

Do they just not understand restricing supply to increase demand?

I think that the bloat of American sports coverage chock full of dumb anecdotes, graphics, and revealing interviews that clue in the viewer to Chone Figgins's favorite movie (Rocky V--seriously) derives from the sports themselves, which have quite a lot of down time as compared to a sport like soccer, for example. Watch a soccer match and note how so much of the commentary directly relates to the game at hand or at least directly to the teams involved. The game itself fills the time, so the announcers don't need to mine the depths of esoteric and contrived stats or to engage in the same celebrity pimping that gives us an in-game interview with Jamie Foxx or Leon the beer commercial character.

All that said, I still can barely tolerate how sports broadcasts, and Fox's broadcasts in particular, include so much pre-game coverage. Soccer matches have their share, largely to set aside a few minutes for commercials since the game has so few, but I have no idea why a baseball game, with at least 17 commercial breaks, can't just start two minutes after coverage begins.

Interesting article in the current issue of Editor & Publisher, which covers the newsaper industry--the article is called "Sportswriters Say They Dropped the Ball on Steroids in Major League Sports" Here's a quote from Ken Rosenthal: "That is our greatest sin, extolling these guys as something more than they were. Some of us had a feeling that something was amiss. We are more guilty of making McGwire and Sosa into heroes when they weren't." Jeff Pearlman said, "I think we just blew it." (The article is on their website: http://www.editorandpublisher.com)

The tide has turned and the media is now reporting more aggressively on steroids. The LA Times was reporting on Grimsley's affidavit, a sworn statement. Obviously, no one wants innocent parties to be implicated, but I'm not clear what the inaccuracies are. Hopefully, journalists will continue to report on this story as the facts come out.

King might also have mentioned that the pointless 20-minute pre-game show also pushes the end of the game back even further. Regular season games have long given up the Broadway Show 8 p.m. start time in favor of 7 p.m. With three-hours now the normal game length, this still gets the customers our of the ballpark around ten.

The 8 p.m. start, designed to preserve the local stations' reruns of "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons", compounded by the 20-minutes of stupefaction, moves the end of the game to closer to midnight. Almost all post-season games run to midnight, Eastern Time, which is where about half of the viewers live.

Staying up late to watch the odd playoff game can work once or twice an October, but most people have to be at work or at school the next morning. It is absurd to expect that people will watch past midnight night after night for a solid month. Even worse, for MLB and its sponsors, if you know you can't be around for the end of the game, why be around for the start?

Many of these games fewer and fewer people are watching have been superb games, filled with action and exciting rallies. But expecting people in the East to stay up past midnight through three round of playoffs followed by a World Series is simply too much. No doubt the local affiliates are worried about the steady decline in audience. If they decided to give up the Syndication Hour during the post-season, they might find their prime time audience growing once again.