Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game and Home Run Derby have come and gone and while there were some great performances on the field, a lot of the talk afterwards is about things other than the game. The National Anthem from the Home Run Derby has been a major topic along with the (interesting) jerseys chosen for the players to wear. Mike Francesa addressed the uniforms as well as something else that bothered him a great deal – the in-game interviews.
During The Mike Francesa Podcast, he said about the interviews, “I think it is so wrong and it takes away from the telecast to have these intrusive interviews during the game, interviewing the player while the game is going on.
“Get off the field. Interview him before the game, interview him after the game. We don’t need you to interview him during the game.”
Francesa said not only is it distracting but that you know going into it, there isn’t going to be much information that comes from the player or coach.
“You don’t learn anything,” Francesa said. “They are puff interviews all the time because they are quick, and nobody is going to say anything penetrating at that point. To me they just got in the way. I want to see the performance.”
When it came to the uniforms, Francesa is not alone in his thoughts. Many in sports media talked today about how silly the jerseys looked and how the old tradition of having the players wear their own uniforms is what the fans want to see.
“What really distracted from the showcase more than anything else were the uniforms,” he said. “The uniforms were hideous. They were bad looking softball uniforms. But baseball has no idea what they’re doing with uniforms. They proved that in the pre-season they proved that with the move to [the current jerseys].
“You wonder why Nike stock is in the dumpster, why it’s $72 a share, it’s because they’re making stuff like that and designing stuff like that. Those uniforms were awful, they were embarrassing. They would be bad high school uniforms.
“Plus, put the players back in their own uniforms. That is part of what the All-Star Game is about. It’s a showcase. Put the player in his uniform. Brand him that way. Brand a young player in his own jersey, not in some softball uniform where he gets lost in it. You can’t even tell who those guys are in those uniforms. And they’re players that the world doesn’t know anyway because you have a lot of new All-Stars, a lot of kids that people don’t know a lot about. Put them in their own uniforms. I hear they might go back to that next year. Do it. Put them back in their own jerseys and their own uniforms. Stop trying to sell everything to everybody all the time. And thats what this is about, it’s about creating a jersey that people will buy.”
