American Hooligans

Last year, I bought MLB’s Game Day Audio package and it was the best $15 I ever spent. For background noise at work and at home, it’s fantastic, but baseball is also a natural radio game. It’s something in the sport’s DNA. However, radio feeds are inherently hilarious. From last year alone, I remember:

• J-Bla and I shouting obscenities at Schilling’s no hitter and jinxing it with the help of Shannon Stewart, much to the consternation of everyone in the office.

• Suzyn Waldman going on and on about some damn thing she saw on Youtube and being greeted by stone silence from John Sterling until he finally got sick of it and deadpanned “Not a big fan of Youtube,” before launching right back into calling the game without missing a beat. It was like watching an assassin at work.
• Listening to the laid-back Padres announcers riffing on various goings-on in the park in full on “Who gives a fuck?” mode and giggling to themselves like hippies on a pound of weed.
• Listening to the Cubs announcers drop rap slang in hilarious, impossibly square white guy fashion.
• If you get the right webcast, you get hilarious low-budget local AM radio commercials.

I literally just purchased my subscription for the year, tuned into Giants-Rockies right now and they had the mic open, so I got to hear the techs having a hilarious conversation similar to those “wild feeds” you can sometimes pick up on satellite TV. They were bitching about having to get up at 6:30 to go to Phoenix. Now I’m listening to some B-lister sing the national anthem.

Plus, I have a high power, high quality PC and something in me finds it deeply hilarious to have a $2000 PC playing radio streams in 5.1 surround while I chill on my laptop.

I could take or leave MLB.tv (watching TV on my PC doesn’t quite work for me), but the Gameday Audio feeds are worth it. $15 for nightly entertainment for an entire season is almost ridiculously low. And, seriously, if the crack of a bat over crackly radio doesn’t stir your blood a little, I have to wonder how human you are.

Edit: Helton took the pitcher to 3-1 and they started playing “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” which is precisely why baseball on radio is awesome.

Edit 2: Random announcer observation: “It’s Saint Patrick’s Day here today. And, uh, I don’t know how popular baseball is in Ireland, but lots of fans here are wearing green.”