There Is No Love For Hee Seop Choi

After spending 20 years of my life of not having access to cable TV at the time of the All Star Break, I hurried home from work to catch the Home Run Derby. I came to three conclusions:

1. Watching people take batting practice for three and a half hours is pretty boring
2. Watching people take batting practice for three and a half hours with a ten minute down time between each one is worse.
3. There is no love for Hee Seop Choi.

I wanted to watch the Derby to see Hee Seop hit a few dingers, and hopefully not strike out. Then I watched Bobby Abreu hit for half an hour.

Finally, Hee Seop came to the plate, and I felt pretty good knowing that he wouldn't come out worse than Jason Bay. Hee Seop came up decently, with five home runs, but, you wouldn't know it by watching the coverage. ESPN, with great intentions, decided to spend the entire time talking to Reggie Jackson.

One of the benefits of talking is not having to use your eyes to do it. ESPN cares not for that, however, and chose to put Hee Seop on a split screen with Berman, Joe Morgan, and Reggie Jackson. For about a full thirty seconds, they focused entirely on the conversation, completely removing Hee Seop from the picture, causing us to miss one of his outs.

They managed to give Jason Bay and his singles fest their full undivided attention, yet when Hee Seop manages to crank five home runs on seven hits, they only break their conversation to mention that he has now hit home runs in five of his last seven swings. For every other hitter when they had a guest commentator, they at least had the decency to mention when they hit a home run, and were worthy of enough respect to never have the camera taken off of them, even the guy who came into the derby with a whopping six home runs.

The best part of the home run derby was listening to Joe Morgan pick three separate people to win, and then seeing none of them reach the final round. He started the day with Teixeira and his longshot pick, Carlos Lee (way to go out on a limb there, Joe). After Teixeira managed to complete the embarrassment of the Caucasians, he surreptitously changed his pick to David Ortiz. It was enjoyable watching Morgan put a hex on all his picks.

Even though Hee Seop Choi hit "only" five home runs (which would have been enough to go to the second round in about half the time) it would have been nice to show him the same respect that the other players got, like an interview after the at bat, or, at the very least, having the announcers at least pretend to show interest.