Does ESPN Understand Baseball?

This will sort of look like jumping on the (long-running) bandwagon, but ESPN continues to lose its luster, and this has become especially apparent now that the baseball season has started.

For starters, there is the sports network's seemingly infinite coverage of the NFL Draft, as if the NFL wasn't the only major sport out of season right now. Of course, they appear to be giving viewers what they want: a poll on SportsCenter revealed that fully half of ESPN viewers rated the NFL draft the most important event this coming weekend. Wow.

And it's not like those of us without the MLB network can simply stop watching ESPN: we need to see the highlights on Baseball Tonight. Even this show, despite Karl Ravech and the wonderful John Kruk, can be difficult to watch. Last night, Steve Phillips was ranting about Oliver Perez and the Mets, and the show also made a huge deal about the Pirates' sweep of the Marlins.

True, Perez's ERA thus far looks horrendous, and the Pirates' pitching has been terrific, and the Marlins were 11-1. Yet Perez's ERA is inflated mostly due to one bad outing, and when you play the Nationals for most of the first two weeks, as the Marlins did, your team record will be inflated beyond actual merit (not to take anything away from Pittsburgh).

With the plethora of wonderful baseball sites out there now (Fangraphs, Baseball Think Factory), watching Baseball Tonight becomes less pleasurable because they just don't seem to enlighten viewers much anymore. Do we really need a nightly Manny Ramirez update, or a fulsome focus on the new Yankees Stadium?