“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears…in…rain. Time to die.”
I posted yesterday about the Argentine junta style disappearance of the entire Circling the Bases writing staff with the exception of Craig Calcaterra and Bill Baer. I wasn’t sure then exactly what had happened but now it’s nauseatingly apparent that it was, at least in large part, an economy move by the stuffed shirts at NBC. We don’t know the details. Aware that the survivors need to keep their jobs and the victims will mostly keep their cravings for schadenfreude to themselves to maximize the chances of replacing their lost income, we probably never will. Remember, though, that this is the same wretched organization that in violation of laws protecting the employment of military reservists who have to miss work for service fired Air Force reserve captain Nicole Mitchell, who also happened to be a seasoned meteorologist and hurricane hunter, from The Weather Channel. Nothing they do would surprise me much, not even hiring Scrooge McLoria to run their sports division.
I have been asked – not infrequently, either – why I still bother to post on the site formerly known as Circling the Bases. I always answer “out of loyalty to my friend Craig.” It’s a loyalty I still feel, but as the situation at my once favorite sports blog continues to deteriorate I’ve pretty much run out of justifications for wasting my time there. A quick recap of what brought us to this pass is probably unnecessary, since most Fan Interference habitues already know the story.
Nonetheless, I respect the exigencies of historicizing, so here we go. First, a few years ago the suits at NBC decided it wasn’t in the interests of conformity – that hobgoblin of puckerdom – for their sports blogs to have unique personalities and shoved “Hardball Talk” down Craig’s throat as the new name of the blog he initiated. Craig posted a reasoned apologia for it but if you read between the lines, he was admitting that this imposition of such a lifeless title was out of his hands. Then, last weenter, NBC’s marketing department force-fed us one of the ugliest, most cumbersome, least user friendly site redesigns in the matrix. Antepenultimately, over the last few months the rest of Craig’s staff, except the charmed Bill Baer, were terminated.
Finally, today, the capstone of NBC’s dehumanization of the blog was put into play: the weekend dead zones left by the termination of the writing staff are being filled by soulless, anonymous AP wire threads, several of them already accompanied by comment sections from the various other blogs or sites from which they’ve been copied.
I’ve seen this before in NBC’s increasingly cryogenic dystopia. I’m something of a weather geek in my spare time; having spent thirty years as a private (and occasionally commercial, though not passenger-carrying) pilot meteorological knowledge was a must and I became fascinated with it all. Ergo, The Weather Channel, in its heyday (ie, before it was sold to the Bain Capital / NBC consortium that ruined it) was one of my favorite science sites to visit. But you know what happened: NBC slashed its budget, laid orf some of its most competent and long-term staff, not just on-camera meteorologists like Captain Mitchell (in whom any programming executives with half a mind in their brains would have recognized from the git-go a superstar in her field) but behind-the-scenes folks as well. They terminated live weather coverage from 8PM to 5AM on weekdays and from 2PM to 5AM on weekends, and replaced it with a sickening farrago of reality programming excrement, much of it having little or nothing to do with meteorology, and most of it endlessly repeated in varying times slots. Retch. Essentially, the same thing has now happened to the site formerly known as Circling the Bases. I understand that NBC wants to sell orf The Weather Channel. Oh, if only they would do the same with what little is left now of Circling the Bases.
So, regretfully, after having some months since already shifted my in-depth or extended writing to Fan Interference, I bid adieu to the replicant site into which a once-great sports blog has degenerated. Sorry, Craig, I’ll try to keep up with you on other media but as long as NBC thinks they can hold my interest with an undead product, I’ll settle in right here where it’s warm, comfortable, and humane. Since the ambulatory sphincters at NBC have apparently torpedoed the old site’s archives as well, all those wonderful blog posts and commentaries will now be lost, apropos Roy Batty’s perceptions, like tears in rain.