The Angels played the Rangers on Wednesday, April 24, 2013. If you DVRd the blowout game, don't erase it. Save it for posterity to let them know why people stopped watching the Angels - not because of the terrible play on the field. Nope. Play a half hour of the game starting at one hour after the first pitch. You will hear the nonstop chatter of three children near a microphone in the stadium somewhere, whining and cheering for the visiting team.
At about the hour mark, Wednesday's telecast took time to wish Angels Team President John Carpino a happy birthday. If Carpy McButtercup wasn't safely ensconced in a stadium suite, he might might have to watch a game on television and if he did watch an Angels telecast, he would find plenty to be angry at if he also watched a Dodgers telecast and realized that the platinum broadcast extras are all up the Five freeway, north of Anaheim and that Fox Spots West produces a lower quality telecast for the Angels, cutting corners in every area of production. The Dorian Gray-like Carpino might actually look older than his boss Arte Moreno if he had to watch Arte's team on television and report the nightly disaster to the chief.
Dodger games have more cameras. They are all calibrated on the same color. Dodger games have a clearer, sharper picture and offer camera angles from places in the stadium that deliver the action. Angels telecasts always show a replay from the angle that just showed the play in real time, often twice before a different, better angle is played.
The announcing is fine, we've grown accustomed to the in-game pitches for products and ticket specials, but the technical aspects surrounding each telecast border on the amateurish and at their stellar best are lucky to be in the right place at the right time of otherwise plodding, predictable visual coverage.
It was a tense game for Angels fans, down early against a divisional rival.
Just about the time the man who brought the Angels fans BUTTERCUP as a theme song was honored, the stadium audio of the FSN-West-network-produced telecast picked up some cheering fans. Not the sound of the crowd cheering - which the crowd was not doing in what soon became a blowout - but of a small group of fans cheering.
Somewhere in the stadium there was a group of what sounded like three children. They were cheering for the Rangers (which actually was pleasant as it at least perpetuated the stereotype of all Rangers fans as both infantilized and new) which wasn't too annoying but they were constantly cheering. Nobody goes to grade school talent shows unless it is their kid - the incessant screech of whiny kid voices chirping "Let's go Kinsler let's go" were too much. Not my kid, don't want to listen, not because they are cheering for Ian Kinsler, just shouldn't have to listen. Just too much. Again, it was nonstop for well over thirty minutes. Nobody in Angels management watches our cruddy telecasts.
The Angels were slowly falling apart on screen and not a single person could simply turn off the microphone somewhere. I would bet it all that FSN-West has cheap microphones in Angel Stadium, Dodger hand-me-downs perhaps, and that a simple few hundred bucks would buy microphones that could be turned on or off to capture the ambiance of the crowd.
I write this as the game is a blowout and there is almost nothing else to write about. On Wednesday night the Angels used a few minor league pitchers to spot start for a major league player on the bereavement list and the telecast was even more minor league than the pitching staff. I notice that Angels telecasts never name the names of the producer, director and cameramen. Who would want to take credit for devaluing Arte's asset?
John Carpino better be sure to tell the advertisers who pay for audio spots on Angels telecasts that most fans mute the game. He should tell the stadium billboard buyers that fans mute the amateur telecasts and therefore look away more often and do not see the space they purchase as often as Dodgers fans who see and hear pitches during aesthetically pleasing game telecasts. Stadium billboard buyers and advertisers on Angels telecasts have a right to ask Mister Carpino: "Why do you build us up, just to let us down?"