Tank McNamara by Bill Hinds for June 10, 2018

I would want it made explicitly clear that the concept was for donkeys playing baseball.

I don’t watch much of ESPN’s lineup, mostly just Wilbon & Kornheiser on PTI. I’d love to see them chew up donkey baseball. Especially if Kornheiser did the Penguin Dance, he hasn’t done that in quite a while.

Those of us that remember the beginning of ESPN, it was news and any sport they could broadcast – like Australian Rule Football. I only watch college football and PTI.

… I left ESPN when everything became about gambling. Point spreads to every game were every show’s main talking point. Gambling advertisements on every break. ESPN was no longer any fun, but a big gambling sight. And if the big propaganda sight to the NFL was about nothing but gambling, what was the NFL about? It didn’t call itself a sports league, but sports entertainment for nothing. It made me wonder what I ever saw in ESPN in the first place…

I follow the Eagles and the Phillies. Their games are covered on local stations with sportscasters who do favor the hometown team. I like it that way.

Here’s an idea. Let’s take the stuff we’re giving away on ESPN3 and charge $5/month for it. We’ll call it ESPN+.

Oh wait……

More poker and chess.

I never had cable TV until about 20 years ago that I never watched because I worked midnights and slept in the late afternoon early evening, then had DISH, finally DirecTV. Where I get to watch really good sports on the International Channels. Like England’s premier soccer league. Or, Baseball in Japan and Korea.

I have both all of the ESPN and FOXSports channels in HDTV, on my cable package, here in Ecuador. They are Spanish language broadcasts ( for the most part ) but I still get good coverage of all the major U.S. sports. Between the two, I think ESPN’s broadcast coverage of MLB nightly baseball and NFL football – including NFL Red Zone ( in English ) – is slightly better. Fox & ESPN often share feeds, so a lot of international football matches ( soccer ) are the same cameras but with different booth announcers.

I don’t watch sports talk shows, so it doesn’t matter if I don’t get PTI or any of the other myriad of sports programs used to fill the day’s broadcast calendar.

In these sessions the good ideas start coming in around #17, you still have to write them down though.

Early ESPN was half monster trucks and fishing shows IIRC. Plus Outlaw Sprints, pool, motocross (in the days before it got bigger), powerboat racing, third tier sports and sport-like events everywhere. It was all they could get the rights to. And it was just popular enough to finance getting more popular stuff. What they built out of that early stuff is incredible when you consider where they started. It’s kind of a pity there’s not much exposure for that stuff they started with any more though.

Better coverage of the Canadian Football League.

They could get out of politics and return to being a sports network.

my drill sergeant: “There’s not such thing as a stupid question, just stupid people who ask questions”