Minor Irritation

By Tony Russo

So although I am a married man, I understand (barely) that this is called housekeeping: We moved where we are on iTunes. Same rules apply — type GCFL into your iTunes store search bar and you’ll find us, both. The the 300-ish hundred of you who have already subscribed, it’s an extra hassle. Sorry. I’d explain why but it is unbearably boring.

Now to business:

I understand that it is in poor form to knock the competition, but unfortunately I spent the better part of the Todcast doing it. Let me ‘splain.

I covered the Shorebirds this week (See Page 7 in this week’s Bayside Gazette ) during media day and began to worry for the future of sports reporting. To be clear I am neither an Orioles fan, nor a close follower of the Delmarva Shorebirds. I showed up as I do on every media day and, for the second year running, was astounded by the fatuousness of the questions.

Maybe as a non-regular sports reporter I don’t know how to interview sportspeople. But as a watcher, I’m always disappointed when a coach is forced to talk about his “young team” and how they’re just going to “play tough” and how he’s put into a position to predict the kind of season the team is going to have.

As an actual baseball fan, I know that the most important thing about the minors is that it develops potential players for the team I really like (in my case it’s the Mets, but let’s not get started on that) to have some sort of future.

I would expect that the Orioles fans are mostly interested in what the Shorebirds are doing to put the Orioles in a better position to win. I must have missed a memo, or something.

Because Todd Dehart, my co-host, cannot leave well enough alone we also had to cover how poorly the whole “cigarette smuggling epidemic” has been discussed and the reticence of some outlets for using Twitter, which is something reporters in the past would have killed to have access to.

For his part, Todd (aka Good Cop) talked about the fantastic time everyone had at Fager’s Brew Grass event and we gave tons of love to Evo. Well, half of us did. I live in Delmar, where Evo used to be made, and haven’t quite come to terms with the abandonment yet.