Wednesday, June 4, 2008

God, I Love Baseball

Back in the 80s, when TBS cameramen would focus on a comely lass in the stands, Skip Caray would say something like "well, hello ladies!" and make little effort to hide the fact that he enjoyed gawking. These days, as ShysterBall reader and Halos fan extraordinaire Daniel Flude, notes, broadcasters are conditioned to reign that sort of thing in. Well, at least they try to:

You may be familiar with the broadcast stylings of Rex Hudler, the Wonder Dog, who does color commentary for the Angels and Fox's Saturday games. If you're not familiar with him, his commentary is similar to his playing style: fun and passionate, but all over the place and without much substance. He's known best for coining Hudlerisms, which are his silly way of describing normal baseball occurrences (e.g. he called Francisco Rodriguez K-riffic tonight after a strikeout, and one of his favorites is "John Lackey, keepin' it on tracky").

Well, he and Steve Physioc, the play-by-play guy, were promoting an upcoming Angels giveaway. They were describing this woven beach mat, which was being demonstrated by an attractive young woman in a tight shirt and short shorts. The woman proceeds to show us how the mat should be used, lying down on it in a rather suggestive pose, upon which Rex remarks loudly, "Wow, would you look at that!" There's a moment of hesitation before Rex adds, "...MAT. Look at that MAT. And that surfboard, isn't that surfboard great?"

Physioc is laughing hysterically and Rex is backpedaling at the speed of light, even commenting on how dirty the surfboard is, trying desperately to divert our attention from his ogling of the young woman. I can't remember the last time I laughed that hard during a baseball game.

God, I love baseball.

I need to watch more west coast games.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

APBA Guy-

More Los Angeles games. You won't see that from the Bay Area, unfortunately.

Craig Calcaterra said...

Yeah, I know. My buddy emailed me this morning to tell me that he took a date to the Giants-Mets game last night but that they had to leave in the fifth because their teeth were chattering.

Still beats Cincinnati in August, though.

Anonymous said...

Can we find out which game this was? Id like to find the video... sounds hilarious.

Anonymous said...

This was last night's game between the Angels and Mariners. Hudler was in rare form, even for him. He talked earlier in the game about how parents should start taking their kids to the games as a reward for being done with the school year.

If he would have left it there, it would have been fine, but he went on to say that you should take your kids even if they didn't do well scholastically because baseball is for all types of people, even those not as gifted (or something to that effect).

I think the Angels have realized that Rex is a little over the top, because they've been rotating him in and out of the booth this year. But I can guarantee you that if you watch an entire Angel game with him there, you will laugh at something Rex says at least 4 times. Although with this crowd, it might be more head-shaking, since he's not exactly someone who's brushed up on his sabrmetrics.

Anyway, check it out if you can. The incident in question happened later in the game, I want to say the 6th or 7th inning.