Ball Bloopers

Last night, through the magic of Roku, I was wandering through local TV news from around the country (No need for an intervention--this is the only time I've done it, and I can quit whenever I want), and I somehow ended up watching an LA TV station's "Extra Innings" baseball highlights show. There was a segment on an Angels player and a ticker of MLB scores running at the bottom of the screen. Looked semi-interesting.

Turned out I was just in time for "Baseball Bloopers." Well, who isn't down for some amusing diamond mishaps? "Yakety Sax" started playing to get viewers in the mood.

First up was Cleveland Indian Mike Napoli's terrible slide into third base on a triple last week. He came up short and sort of sputtered his way to the bag. It looked awful and made for a classic blooper, especially with the wacky music and the shots of teammates cracking up in the dugout. Good stuff if you're into "The Lighter Side of Baseball."

But the next two Baseball Bloopers were home plate umpires getting nailed in the family jewels with baseball. Ouch! Now, we have a proud tradition in this country of laughing at men getting hit in the balls with balls, but often a funny fail video will give us a shot of the victim laughing, giving a thumbs up, or otherwise providing some indication that he's OK.

Not so "Baseball Bloopers"on "Extra Innings." After each shot of a poor fella being smacked in the nether region, the producers showed a catcher and/or team trainer attending to the hunched-over ump. The effect was to make the impact seem WORSE. It was like they wanted to reinforce that each blow wasn't something they could just shake off, but a painful, devastating injury.

And by the way, "Yakety Sax" played the whole damn time! You know, just so we remembered that these were funny bloopers, not just chilling snapshots of the last moments two adult males were able to conceive children.

I guess if they had played "Shake It Off," it would have been worse.