To ESPN: Showing Aaron Judge's pursuit for Yankees history during Auburn's football game was wrong
I'm a baseball fan. Big one. Says so, right there in my twitter bio.
Y'all should go follow me; I'm hilarious
But on Saturday, when Auburn was playing a *close* matchup against Missouri, ESPN decided for me that I was going to watch baseball instead.
You see, Yankees slugger Aaron Judge is sitting on 60 home runs on the season - the Yankees franchise record in a season is 61, by Roger Maris in 1961. So ESPN decided that all college football fans watching their games this Saturday - Auburn vs Missouri, Clemson vs Wake Forest, etc - needed to watch him go for the record. They went split-screen, with the YES Network audio, for each of Judge's at-bats against Boston Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta. In order, he struck out, flew out, and walked (and then struck out, but that at-bat was right after the Auburn game ended.)
As you can imagine, there were a few problems with this.
For starters, this isn't the MLB record. Barry Bonds* hit 73 home runs in 2001. Mark McGwire* hit 70 in 1998, with Sammy Sosa* hot on his heels with 66. The rest of the leaderboard is different permutations of these three guys from the late 90s and early 2000s before we get to Maris's 61.
(Okay, seeing all those asterisks in the list, maybe we should consider this the official home run record.)
Secondly, some games actually had stuff happen during that split-screen that you may have missed - not Auburn-Mizzou, mind you, because they weren't allowed to have functioning offenses after the first half - but normal football teams like Clemson and Wake Forest, or Texas Tech and Texas (who, for the record, is still not back).
But also, here's the thing: NO ONE ASKED FOR THIS. It's 2022 - if I wanted to have a 2nd device showing me a streaming feed of the Yankees game, I would. Or I'd go find the video of Judge hitting the home run on Twitter thirty seconds after it happens. We all hold tiny computers in our pockets that can access the entirety of human knowledge in an instant - we'd watch baseball if we wanted to watch baseball.
Those people who are Yankees fans and/or big enough baseball fans to care about watching this moment would already be watching this game, either on their television or on a 2nd device.
Most football fans in the Southeastern United States, however, do not CARE about this. Again, if they did, they'd already be watching.
The worst part is, everyone knows that we wouldn't be subjected to this if it wasn't the New York Yankees. If it was Austin Riley chasing the Atlanta Braves single-season record of 51 homers (Andruw Jones, in 2005), ESPN wouldn't be cutting away.
Maybe just let us watch football in peace next time, yeah?
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