As a woman about town who loves baseball, I have followed a good deal of these playoffs with my trusty wired headphones, moving from place to place while listening to the games' radio streams on the MLB app. This is fine while there's action on the field, because I appreciate having the local announcers instead of national guys, and I can wax romantic about conjuring up a ballpark in your mind without being able to see it. But the commercial breaks have exacerbated a problem that has dogged these streams for years. Thanks to a deal with the radio megacorp Audacy, MLB substitutes different ads over the ones you'd hear on the local broadcast if you were listening on actual radio. These spots are both poorly executed and repetitive: the commercials are timed to start and end based on the breaks on the TV broadcast, so they are never inserted smoothly, and moreover, there simply aren't enough sponsors, so you end up hearing the same irritating 30-second bits again and again and again.
This annoyance has continued into the playoffs, with one major difference: It appears that MLB/Audacy didn't sell any inventory for these games, but they insist on substituting their own breaks nonetheless. So in listening to baseball this October, I am hearing a constant parade of MLB in-house ads—a few for things like MLB Network programming but mostly just filler spots that give you some sort of trivia question. About 80 percent of them start within a standard deviation of "Hey baseball fans, step up to the plate and try this!" and then they'll ask if you know the meaning of "high cheese."
The key thing here is that MLB has enough of these things to fill about two commercial breaks, max, so you'll hear each of them at least a dozen times over the course of a single game. It's this ad, specifically, that is driving me crazy.
I'll transcribe for those of you without your trusty wired headphones:
Woman's Voice: Take a hack at guessing which baseball player or manager said the following.
Man's Voice: I really don't know what to say. I'm just so happy I gave something for these people to cheer. We all did, I mean it was a great game. Both teams played incredible. It was a great game.
Woman's Voice: THAT'S ... Mike Piazza. After he hit an eighth-inning go-ahead home run in the FIRST New York Mets home game after 9/11. Hear moments like this and more on the MLB app—and! MLB.com.
Writing it out doesn't do justice to the choices of emphasis in the read of that copy. This woman is doing the whole thing in the Perd Hapley voice—that fluffy, oblivious newscaster tone you'd hear for a story that ends like "The bear finished his snack, took a nap, and then ... went back into the woods." Except in this case, the end of the story is a terrorist attack that killed 3,000 people.
Bill Hader has talked about an SNL sketch that flopped in dress where he played Casey Kasem's estranged son, and he and Dana Carvey had a deathly serious back-and-forth conversation in that Casey Kasem voice. That is basically what this bit is to me. Additionally, I am now thinking about September 11th roughly every single half-inning of every game. All things considered, I'd rather be thinking about saving money on my car insurance, even though I do not have a car.
For you to get the full effect, I'd ask you to listen to this ad 20 times in a row, and see how it hits on the 21st. I'll wait. In the same way that Samer was pushed off the deep end by Dane Cook, I now have these few seconds running through my head at all times. I prepare myself for the 9/11 ad every third out. I can identify it from the very first syllable. I keep testing out increasingly exaggerated ways to emphasize "That's ... Mike Piazza" and more uncannily cheerful ways to say "after 9/11."
Give me ads for hospitals. Give me banks. Give me law firms, for god's sake. I would even take a Kars4Kids jingle. I do not need to hear Mike Piazza again. But the damage has already been done. Even if MLB produces some new house ads, I will never forget this one.
