Goodbye Joe
Normally, I try to go out of my way to make sure that whatever I’m blogging about isn’t being blogged about by all the other bloggers…but today I don’t care. It’s absolutely impossible for me to not blog about this since it’s something I have complained about for so long.
ESPN as finally cut ties with Mr. Joe Morgan.
Now let me say this: I’m never happy (well, usually never happy) to see someone lose their job. A lot of people have their entire self-worth wrapped up in what they do for a living (something tells me Morgan is one of them) and I think it’s sad when that gets taken away. So I do not celebrate anyone losing their job today. What I’m celebrating is the fans being given something back.
On the first Sunday of baseball season in 2011, baseball fans everywhere will turn on their televisions in anticipation of something GOOD instead of worrying about how long they can last before they have to hit the mute button. We get a clean slate. Maybe throughout the season we’ll decide we hate the new guys too…but at least we get our chance to find out. “Ken Tremendous” hit the nail on the head (as he often did at Fire Joe Morgan) last night when he tweeted:
Farewell, Joe. You were never my favorite announcer, but at least you were stubborn and unreasonable.
I don’t deny that Joe Morgan loves (loved?) baseball. But his refusal to embrace anything new about the game and to happily acknowledge his ignorance…these are things I won’t miss. His ability to make up a fact on demand while Jon Miller happily laughed along side of him instead of correcting him…this won’t be missed. Joe Morgan was a great ball player and a much less than great baseball analyst and broadcaster (although, I will always marvel at how he could tell you a story about his career that didn’t happen as if there were no way to ever check on it). It took ESPN over 20 years to realize this and while I feel sketchy about being happy that today a man has lost his job, in this case, the needs of the many definitely outweigh the needs of the few.
Godspeed, Joe Morgan.
I feel sketchy about feeling happy someone lost their job under most circumstances, particularly when it is not due to lack of effort or quality of work.
But when longstanding, simple incompetence on the part of an able-bodied and ostensibly able-minded person, who had and ignored many chances to improve his work, is finally, belatedly met with the consequences it so richly deserves, that is another thing entirely. IMO.
Finally I will not do the automatic groan when I see the ESPN symbol on the Red Sox television schedule. Here’s hoping that I won’t have to mute the television when watching those games.
Thank you for a fantastic post. I enjoyed it.
Who’s going to take over?
I’m sort of hoping that Orel H. gets to keep his job in all this. He seems like a smart fellow who never got to get a word in edgewise.