ESPN panned for terrible in-game interview

You can’t please everyone — we’ll get that cliché out of the way first — but baseball fans aren’t looking to be pleased during the playoffs; they want to be entertained. And to them, nothing is entertaining about watching or listening to an in-game interview right smack dab in the middle of a playoff game.

When every pitch matters in October, listening to a player who’s been sidelined since July talk isn’t exactly endearing to the average baseball fan, regardless of whether they support the Milwaukee Brewers or New York Mets.

So despite Christian Yelich being one of the better personalities in the sport, few people were interested in hearing from the Milwaukee Brewers All-Star outfielder wax poetic about his team calling themselves the “Average Joe’s,” while its manager, Pat Murphy, eerily resembles Patches O’Houlihan. If you wanted to watch Dodgeball , you’d tune into FX in the middle of a weekday afternoon, not during the MLB Playoffs.

ESPN has successfully integrated players being mic’d up into its Sunday Night Baseball coverage, and Karl Ravech is incredibly proud of this . It’s worked (except when it hasn’t) but for the most part, it’s an enjoyable part of ESPN’s MLB coverage.

With the playoffs in tow, there’s the possibility of players being mic’d up. Still, with every pitch mattering, the financial incentive to do so when players already enjoy a playoff share might not mean much.

While we don’t know what will transpire in the second game of the National League Wild Card round between the Mets-Brewers, anything similar to what happened with Yelich won’t be well-received by people watching a playoff game. They were anything but pleased on Tuesday.

While most of the explicit reactions on social media were understandably from Mets fans, the overwhelming sentiment on X (formerly Twitter) seemed to be that this unnecessarily detracted from a meaningful portion of Tuesday’s game. And ultimately, playoff baseball isn’t the time for distractions.

Fans are locked in, living and dying with every pitch, and the last thing they want is a random interview pulling them away from the action. Sure, Yelich has plenty of charm. But it just doesn’t sit right when he’s talking about Dodgeball while the game’s on the line.

In October, fans aren’t tuning in for banter. They want drama, tension and every ounce of intensity.

So, letting the game breathe and letting the fans enjoy what they came for — baseball at its purest — could go a long way.

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