Seeing ESPN Use The Old Baseball Tonight Studio As A Storage Closet Makes Me So Damn Sad
Anyone else just feel like they got kicked in the stomach? I mean that's a direct shot right to the gut, that's how it felt to watch this video. Gary Striewski from ESPN took to his TikTok account to show the world what remains of everyone's favorite old sports show, Baseball Tonight. You know the names, Karl Ravech, Tim Kurkjian, Peter Gammons, Barry Larkin, Harold Reynolds, Adnan Virk, Brian Kenny, Buck Showalter, John Kruk, Steve Berthiaume, the late, great Pedro Gomez, Eduardo Perez, I mean I could go on and on with guys that sat at that desk. It's still on every Sunday and during the big baseball games during the year but it's not the same old program we all grew up with, it's not even close to be honest. The Web Gems, the horn sound effect for score updates, watching the grossest pitches on "That's Nasty", seeing who went yard that day during "Touch Em All", falling asleep to late night Baseball Tonight was something I probably did hundreds of times. That is how you got baseball stories back in the day, there was nothing like it. Then the show we knew and loved went away in the daily format that we had been watching forever and nothing has been the same since.
I know we all crap on ESPN and what it's turned into now, anchors screaming at the top of their lungs about god knows what, seems to me anything but sports nowadays but they used to actually have incredible network shows. Baseball Tonight really was as the best sports show out there, it was better than any NFL show, better than any NBA show, it was simply the best. MLB Network has done a great job with their daily programing but there was nothing like those early days of Baseball Tonight with the original guys. If you grew up a baseball fan than you either dreamed about growing up to play baseball or growing up to talk baseball at that desk.
They'd bring you all the highlights in real time, they'd show you the great plays, they'd show you the homers, you'd see the bloopers, you'd hear a funky stat from Timmy K, Gammons could break down some storyline in only the way he did, Buster would keep us up to date on the newest stories, they had all the bases covered. But now you see Gary rounding the bases in a studio filled with crap when it should have been turned into a museum or something. The amount of seam ball that was talked in that room, it's a baseball memory all of us have. Would be neat to at least see some of those artifacts auctioned off. Reopen the ESPN Zones and put that desk in one so I can pound wings at it. They could do some cool stuff with that room, instead they just left it to rot like it's a wet basement or something. Sad to see what has happened to the room where we watched so many web gems, just doesn't feel right to watch it go down like this.