Slate has a very good piece, by Ben Mathis-Lilley, on why they can't seem to find any actual smart people to analyze baseball games on TV:
During the baseball playoffs, the best place to see comprehensive highlights of all the games is ESPN's Baseball Tonight. Just make sure to watch with the sound off, lest lead analyst John Kruk pulverize the parts of your brain responsible for logical reasoning. Kruk is a champion of the indefensible, the nonsensical, and the utterly pointless who once called Placido Polanco the toughest out in the American League (he isn't) and said that Brett Myers' arrest for hitting his wife in the face would "propel him to stand up and be the ace of [the Phillies'] staff" (it didn't, which is probably a good thing). Last week, Kruk's SportsCenter segment on the Tampa Bay Rays concluded with the meaningful observation that they are "a special team that can do special things."Excellent piece, but it all but ignores the real problem: The #1 announcing teams on Fox and ESPN both suckity, suckity suck (TBS is slightly better.) We all know about Joe Morgan, and we've once again been sucked into the insight vortex that is Joe Buck and Tim McCarver during this NLCS. Even though McCarver has been around the game for something like 40 years, listening to him talk about baseball is like listening to Sarah Palin talk about foreign or domestic policy.