I hate the ESPN 'Ball Track'

Memo to ESPN: Thanks for ruining the annual Home Run Derby with your annoying, distracting, execrable and stupid Ball Track graphic.

For those of you who care about such things (all two of you), ESPN introduced a fiery line that follows the path of batted balls during the annual homer tournament. Remember the glowing tail that Fox used to follow the course of the puck during hockey coverage about a decade or more ago, presumably because they thought fans were too dimwitted and slow (or so their message seemed)? ESPN has brought the technology back to crap on its fans tonight.

Hey Bristol Braintrust — Josh Hamilton blasting 28 home runs is exciting, thrilling and made great television. Your Ball Track? Not so much. In fact, quite the opposite. The Home Run Derby is simplistic, perfect television at its best. It’s not complicated, it’s strictly for the fans, and it showcases exactly one aspect of an extremely complex, thinking-person’s sport. So what? It’s July. It’s hot. It’s fun.

The Ball Track? It celebrates the triumph of ESPN.

I’m turning your broadcast off, now. Thanks. Alienation was just what I was looking for to begin my week.

Is this what British and Spanish fans have to look forward to next year when the Bristol Galactus takes over part of the Premier League and La Liga coverage? Oooo. A line that follows the course of a ball, because we think our viewers are too stupid to follow it. Nice. Thanks for condescending.

You can take our Wiffle Ball, but you can't take our Freedom

With apologies to Defiantly Dutch, who would assuredly disagree (thanks for the plug, Double D), what the hell is wrong with Connecticut these days? Earlier this summer you had some overly aggressive moneyed homeowners in Greenwich trying to shut down Wiffle ball-playing teens and kick them back into the Great Indoors where they apparently belong.

Now we’ve got a youth baseball league in New Haven booting a 9-year-old pitcher and probably his entire team because he’s too good a hurler.

After reading about these back-to-back fiascoes, I have to ask, why doesn’t Massachusetts annex the Northwest Corner and add it to the Berkshires and let tiny Rhode Island have everything else from this crazy state? (In a battle of disgraced politicians, I’ll take Providence’s Buddy Cianci over former Connecticut Gov. Rowland.)

Let’s see, here are some things that Connecticut cursed us with: the Hartford Whalers, Joe Lieberman, Carl Pavano, Benedict Arnold, and the movie Mystic Pizza.

Good things to come out of the Nutmeg State? (nicknamed after something you put in your apple cider, I might add.) You have Katharine Hepburn, no arguing that. I’m OK with Meg Ryan, too. Wiffle Ball itself was alleged to have been invented in Fairfield. And then, … um, the Danbury Mall was pretty cool for a week in, like, 1987 (this once was the site of an even cooler fairgrounds). That’s about it.

And, no, I didn’t forget the worst offender in Connecticut’s lineage — no, not the various other corrupt elected officials from the self-named Constitution State. It’s that all-consuming monolithic sports Galactus in Bristol.