Friday Night Football: With Hurricane Wilma bearing down on Miami, Sunday's scheduled Chiefs-Dolphins game has been moved ahead to tomorrow night at 7 ET. Perhaps somebody with a more extensive knowledge of NFL history than I possess can tell us: is this the first Friday night NFL game ever?

posted by Motown Mike to football at 02:21 PM - 20 comments

Voices of the game: USA Today celebrates the timeless magic that is baseball on radio. With Fox and ESPN dragging the sport's network TV coverage to unprecedented depths of suckitude, such an appreciation has never been more timely.

posted by Motown Mike to baseball at 02:51 PM - 12 comments

Steroidgate, Part II: Now it's the NFL's turn.

posted by Motown Mike to football at 05:16 PM - 7 comments

It cost Fox and CBS a combined $8 billion,: but the networks are retaining their broadcast rights to Sunday-afternoon NFC and AFC games, respectively, through 2011. DirecTV has also renewed its contract, and retains exclusive rights to the "NFL Sunday Ticket" package. And the rich keep getting richer...

posted by Motown Mike to football at 10:50 PM - 7 comments

ESPN.com's Jim Caple borrows a page from Tom Boswell and warms the hearts of Pastime partisans everywhere by listing 37 reasons why the World Series is better than the Super Bowl. This seamhead is still applauding Caple's second-paragraph observation; I'm pretty sure Danielle Steel outsells Faulkner, too.

posted by Motown Mike to baseball at 01:49 PM - 9 comments

Is baseball the ultimate bloggers' sport?: Salon.com columnist King Kaufman seems to think so. He contrasts the plethora of baseball blogs with the dearth of smiliar sites devoted to football, a sport which (we're repeatedly told) enjoys far more numerous and more passionate adherents than the summer game.

posted by Motown Mike to football at 03:40 PM - 2 comments

To liven up its Wednesday night baseball telecasts, ESPN will be giving viewers a blast from the past by having some of the game's legendary play-by-play voices, past and present, serve as guest announcers throughout the summer. Curt Gowdy worked last night's Yanks/Red Sox game for the network, and among the other greats slated to appear in upcoming games are the Reds' Marty Brennaman, the Phillies' Harry Kalas, the Tigers' now-retired Ernie Harwell, and ABC's Keith Jackson (bet you forgot he used to do baseball too, didn'tcha?).

posted by Motown Mike to baseball at 10:51 PM - 19 comments

Pat Summerall has hung up the mike: after 42 years as an NFL broadcaster. The deterioration of his play-by-play skills over the last few years notwithstanding, I'll be sorry to see him go. In the last year the sports announcing world has lost Jack Buck and Chick Hearn (to death), Ernie Harwell (to retirement), and now Summerall. Who'll be next? Scully? Enberg?

posted by Motown Mike to football at 11:12 AM - 9 comments