Is the art of baseball talk on sports radio lost? 92.3 The Fan host Ken Carman feels like it has.
On The Ken Carman Show with Anthony Lima on Wednesday, Carman said baseball talk even in Cleveland, had become trite.
“Because we don’t know how to talk about baseball,” Carman said. “And I put myself right in there it’s not where I am above the fray or anything like that. There’s a lost thing about talking baseball. The art of it I’m not sure.”
Ken remembered one of the most fun arguments he had with Lima was a knock down, drag out over bunting and getting callers screaming about the topic. He feels like hosts don’t dive as deep into the nuances of the game as they used to.
“You listen to old Mike and the Mad Dog from the early 2000s, and when the lineups would come out, them getting into shouting matches about who’s batting sixth,” Carman said.
Carman also thought about 2017 and 2018 when the Cleveland Browns had the number one overall picks, Carman also thought about the run in the 1990s the then-Indians had and were the top team in the city. Baseball talk dominated the radio airwaves also because there were no Browns at that time.
He felt like because of a number of factors with the Guardians, talking baseball on the show has been shuffled out of the limelight in some respects.
“I think that’s been lost over the last how many years in this city, everywhere,” Carman said. “I’m part of the problem, I’ll admit it, sorry.”
“One of the things I try to avoid, because I want to be better, and you are with me on this – I can’t turn every conversation into ‘Fix your sport’,” he added. “Well, this is the problem with baseball. That’s too easy to do, and it doesn’t help anybody’s interest. If I’m just telling you how bad baseball is, well you’re not gonna have any interest in baseball or talking about baseball. So it’s a terrible, terrible thing to do.”
Reacting to fan reaction in regards to the Guardians getting the top pick in the next MLB draft, Ken Carman said he was hoping to have a little fun on the air with it. But fan cynicism it seems has tapered expectations a little bit.
“There’s not as much generated craziness with the baseball draft that there is with the football draft or even the NBA Draft. But we can have a little fun with it,” he said.
“Are those just not baseball fans?” Lima asked in response to the cynicism in the fanbase. “Those don’t sound like big-time baseball fans.”
