David Roth's Weak In Review: The Stories We Tell

There is no identifiable switch-flipping moment, no instant when I first believed, but at some point I saw something new and my life changed. At some point, somewhere back there, I realized that Joe Buck is actually fine. Not lyrical, not virtuosic, how to put this, not necessarily un-smug. But also totally fine. He talks when he's supposed to and mostly doesn't when he isn't, in a voice that is clear and pleasant to listen to. Don't @ me.

Yes from certain angles there's this uncanny thing going on where he appears to be made of felt, just an enormous puppet with jarringly lifelike eyes. And also yes Buck reaches for Indelible Sports Moments with all the grace and timing of the would-you-please-pass-the-jelly guy. But mostly Joe Buck is fine, and more than that Joe Buck—who talks about sports on television for a living and is possibly making the World Series unpleasant for those who have not yet been enlightened as I have—has an impossible job.

Which is strange, because talking about sports is one of the things that more or less anyone is qualified to do, and which millions of people do at varying volumes, in public and private, at every hour of every day. There is no credentialing process for any of this, or mandated continuing sports-talk education program at which veteran columnists receive instruction in state-of-the-art multi-sentence paragraph construction. People just do it, and Joe Buck does it, and he does it on television, and in my new state of Buckian enlightenment I have come to believe that this was always something like 85 percent of what people disliked about Joe Buck to begin with—that they were just trying to enjoy a baseball game, and suddenly here's the sometimes-appears-to-be-made-of-felt guy cannonballing into the action to ensure that you understand and appreciate the extreme significance of every extremely significant moment.

Part of where the Joe Buck Experience has improved is that Buck has gotten a little bit better about discerning these moments, and a little bit more secure and understated in his underlining of them. Where once he used a firehose as a highlighter—a firehose that blasted hot tears with enough intensity to leave bruises even on people watching through cathode-ray televisions—Buck now uses, like, a regular old highlighter. The impossibility of his job remains that he either is obligated or feels obligated to do this sort of underlining in the first place. When he is simply describing what is happening as it happens, or facilitating conversation, Buck is, yes, fine. It's in the other stuff, the part where he (and certainly it is not only him) tries to tell the story of a thing that is still happening as if he knows both what the end is and what it truly means—to clean up the mess while it is still being made—that everything goes south.

Sticking To Sports, for lack of a better term, requires both authentically engaged interest and the relative humility to talk about games on their own terms, as those terms reveal themselves from moment to moment. This does not require a monastic diet of nuts-and-bolts and unsalted statistics so much as it does a willingness to be surprised by the surprising things that occur. The attempt to fit a story that is so unfinished into a pre-existing narrative is irritating and even a little insulting. It is not necessary to know the end of a story to tell it well, really; you just have to be more interested in the events of the story as they are taking place than in making it appear that those events will always lead, inevitably, to some Significant Place.

It's here that the interests of the corporations broadcasting these games—and broadcasting the pre- and post-game shows and the between-games commentary and the counter-commentary and the stagy shouted debates about those games—diverge most frustratingly from those of the people watching them. A game is a discrete thing, if not necessarily a small one. It begins and ends; things happen that fill it up over time, until it is full, and finished. During this relatively brief period of time the game is not just ungovernable, but in a broader way independent. It is effectively free of the honking and complex apparatus that exists to sell it, and the only thing that this massive apparatus can do, for those few hours, is show and tell. (This is probably a good place to note that Fox literally stopped Game 1 of the World Series because it briefly lost the ability to televise it due to a technical problem.) The same is true, incidentally, of the best stories that appeared on a site like Grantland, which ESPN shut down just hours ago. There is a wildness in both, a sense of giving chase to something that will not listen to reason and cannot be caught.

This chase is the happiest time, if you like watching and thinking about sports more than you like hearing men shout. It is what makes it so jarring when FOX—or ESPN, or anyone—cuts from the game to the studio. The artifice is suddenly so heavy and so apparent, and there's a sinking feeling that comes with once again being back in the world of personal brands and big energy and ancient reeking storylines. That stuff is not good, exactly, but it is a good deal easier to pull together beforehand, and a good deal more predictable. Games can go any number of ways, but Pete Rose is never going to tell a story that doesn't make its way back to How Pete Rose Did It In His Day. This might be why the still-active players that pop up on broadcasts from time to time can seem so adrift—Alex Rodriguez, who has been fantastic as a part of FOX's postseason coverage, doesn't appear to have noticed that he spends a lot more time talking about baseball than the people seated around him.

There is nothing that I can tell you about the corporations that broadcast sports things that you do not already know, and which those corporations are not insistently re-reminding us about, anyway. The games are the only thing these corporations have that anyone really wants, their moments of beauty and surprise are the only beautiful or surprising things that these networks have. So much is leveraged on this, and so much of what is leveraged on it is trash. That trash reveals a great deal about the businesses showing us these games. It reveals how little they think of us, sure, but it also reveals the small, sad way that they misunderstand the valuable thing they have. It reveals how afraid they are to tell a story whose ending they don't know and can't control, when that is the only thing we want from them.