So I watched Baseball's Seasons: 2003 tonight, and it was pretty good. But... okay, I was watching it at my dad's house. My dad doesn't care about baseball much, and he's been separated from my baseball-obsessed mom for over ten years now, so yeah.
The show was pretty good covering the division races and stuff in 2003 (though it said stuff like "Pujols hits .359, Doc wins a Cy Young" in the preview, and... they didn't really talk about either of those things. They didn't talk about Gagne's ridiculousness at all, hmm.). They obviously spent a lot of time on the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, and how the Red Sox proved they could keep up with the Yankees, and how smart they were to get Theo Epstein who signed Millar and Mueller and Ortiz and blah, blah, blah. To explain the Yankees' success, the show basically said they had signed Contreras and Matsui so, you know, whatever. Small market teams 4eva!!! Moneyball rulz!!!!*
They spent approximately five seconds showing the Yankees celebrating after beating the Twins in the ALDS, and that was all they talked about with the Yankees and the first round, but the show spent a good three or four minutes talking about the Red Sox's comeback against Oakland in the same round, detailing every game. Then, when talking about the ALCS, they went into great detail about Game 1, showing all the home runs off of Mussina and whatnot, but then they merely said, "The Yankees evened up the series in Game 2."
The show went into detail about the fight in Game 3, but didn't really talk about the result of the game (the Yankees won), and they basically covered the three games in Fenway Park by saying that Tim Wakefield left one game with a standing ovation, and they sort of off-handedly mentioned that the Yankees left Game 5 with a three-games-to-two lead. I'm pretty sure the narrator directly said "The Red Sox had to face the impossible: going to Yankee Stadium and winning two games in a row." And they followed that up by showing the Sox at the Stadium, being all goofy and stupid and UNITEDASATEAMZOMG and whatnot. Following that, they showed all these highlights from Game 6.
(They... They... They... yeah, I'm not being creative in my sentence structure there.)
The entire thing was interlaced with Kevin Millar going on about "Cowboy up" and how they'd all shaved their heads and they were such an awesome Sox team and blah, blah, blah. There were a couple of clips of Torre talking pretty neutrally, but he had nothing close to what Millar had in that show, talking about the closeness of the clubhouse and how this Sox team was going to show the world, etc.
So before they could cover Game 7, I pretty much thought they were openly favoring the Sox and that, if a totally neutral/clueless viewer saw the show, the way they were talking about the series, he/she would think the Sox won it. So I asked my dad:
Me: Dad, do you actually know how this series ends?
Dad: No.
Me: Okay, based on the way they're presenting this, who do you think wins it?
Dad: The Red Sox.
Like I said.
Oh, and they played sad music after the Aaron Boone home run. At least I got to see Posada's double - that, and his reaction after it, is one of my favorite Yankee moments ever. Not mentioning what Moose did in that game, though, should be some sort of crime punishable by death. And they sort of, again, off-handedly talked about what Mo did, which was frigging GODLY.
It was not necessary to relive the six-pitcher no-hitter by the Astros against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, either. Aaaargh. And I got to remember my mom literally screaming "NOOOOOO!!!!!" out loud, Darth-Vader-in-that-one-Star-Wars-movie-style, when Jeter hurt himself in that first game.
Oh, and here's another fun story involving my mom from after the Aaron Boone game. My mom and I were, at this point, basically just jumping up and down and screaming in joy, and then Joe Buck had to go and rain on our parade.
Joe Buck on TV: And for the Red Sox - more heartbreak.
My mom: WHO GIVES A SHIT?!?!?!!
* Moneyball does actually rule.
