The Chateau Lafitte of sports commentary
The BBC continues to innovate, first making all their news available as RSS feeds, and more recently putting its live cricket commentaries on the Internet at www.bbc.co.uk/tms.
There are few greater leisure institutions than "Test Match Special," the decades-old BBC program that is the Chateau Lafitte of sports commentary. In no other game, and on no other radio program, is the play called with such elegance. Listen to Henry Blofeld's fruity Etonian tones, or to Christopher Martin-Jenkins's schoolmasterly erudition, and you'll be transported back to a sepia age of good grammar, structured narrative and perfect manners. These men are household names in the cricket-playing world, as were their late colleagues, John Arlott and Brian Johnston. A pity we didn't have Internet radio when those old boys were around.
I'm told that baseball commentary can be attractive too, and I find that easy to believe, for that game's structure is loosely akin to cricket's. In cricket, the play is highly compartmentalized: A ball is bowled, and the batsman either hits it (in which case there are various narrative possibilities, based on where he hits it, and how hard, and to whom) or he misses it (with its own set of consequences). Between balls (the cricketing equivalent of the "pitch" in baseball), listeners learn about the adjustments to the fielders' positions made by the captain, all of which can be visualized thanks to a bizarre specialist vocabulary that covers every conceivable fielding position. (e.g. "Hussain rearranges the field, moving Caddick to deep fine-leg, and pushes Butcher back to widish extra-cover.")