'Cause I can't get you out of my head.

 So anyway, where were we? Oh right, baseball.

The baseball this year, it's been very good from where I sit. As a Brewers fan, I've gotten to watch a team of entry-level contracts and spare parts put together an astonishing 103-win campaign with a lock for the Cy Young before it inevitably develops a fatal case of cheese curd farts against the Padres, or finds itself playing a Dodgers team in the NLCS whose narrative for October will be "Somehow, everyone returned." And as someone who is a lapsed White Sox fan and a longtime lapsed Catholic, well, 2026 has turned out to be quite the convergence. The team is relatively good, might be getting hot right as we get into the playoff crapshoot, and is giving off an aura of joy and fun for the first time in years - which may or may not have something to do with the fact that I haven't heard a single syllable uttered by John Schriffen this season.

You see, 2026 is the year my old Xennial butt finally got motivated enough to ditch cable in our house, get an antenna wired in the attic, and let streaming handle the rest. And as baseball season started, I let our kids decide what they wanted as a viewing option. Rather than plunk down $20ish a month on CHSN or Marquee, we went for MLB.tv for about the same price, because the boys wanted to watch more Brewers games than anything else. So I've had the pleasure of watching several dozen Brewers games, plus whatever other MLB games might grab my interest on a given night.

At least, I've had the pleasure during the game broadcasts themselves. When they go to break, the horrors commence.

For those unaware, MLB.tv, once owned and operated by Major League Baseball, has been fully owned by The Walt Disney Company for the past few years. In 2026, MLB.tv got more formally integrated into ESPN's streaming properties, as Disney pushed its new cable-free ESPN standalone streaming product. Because MLB.tv overrides local broadcasts' commercial breaks, instead of finding out about the big weekend clearance at Steinhafel's or hearing that hot dog buns are 99 cents all summer long at Kwik Trip, the out-of-market Brewers viewer gets national sponsors. And when there aren't enough sponsors to fill the break, Disney fills in the remainder with promos for its own products, especially ESPN, which it is making a huge sales push for across multiple platforms. And there is one promo in particular that has absolutely tortured me for the past six months. It is fifteen seconds of incomprehensible hell.

If this is your first time seeing this promo, first off congratulations and I'm sorry for sharing it. Now when you watch it, you may not immediately grasp what is so bad about it. I certainly had no problem letting it go in one ear and out the other probably through the first or second week of April. But when this fifteen-second promo airs during every single game you watch, multiple times during every game, and sometimes twice during a single half-inning break, like any omnipresent ad, it becomes an infection.

Now, I was not able to find a clean copy on YouTube, so this video is phone-at-the-TV-shakycam quality. If you have a clean copy of it to share, please let me know. But in the meantime, mask up, because here comes the virus:

Okay, so what's so bad about that, so grating that it drove me to break the seal of my crypt and blog for the first time in almost five years? Allow me to break it down in pieces:

- We begin with "WATCH LIVE EVENTS," and the event on display is tennis. It is tennis presented by the worst announcing voice I have ever heard. Again, I know I have uploaded this video after shooting the TV screen with a potato/Android phone, but the sound quality of the actual spot is terrible. I hope the audio got garbled in processing somehow, because the idea that a voice like this could be nationally televised on the largest sports network from one of the world's largest media companies makes my brain feel hot. It sounds like an interview subject on a news magazine show whose name and voice have been altered to protect their identity. And what are they saying? After six months and hundreds of exposures to it, I still can't tell you for certain, but it sounds like "The best maybe tennis has ever seen... ever bringing in." And the start of it is so distorted that it sounds more like "Yebs maybe tennis has ever seen." If I stuck a breathalyzer into the USB port of my TV while this was being said, it would blow at least a .09.

- As our announcer pontificates on the Yebs, we see a feature of ESPN's streaming platform: "MULTIVIEW." ESPN Unlimited allows you to stream up to four windows at once on a single screen, so why just watch tennis when you can watch, uh, tennis, tennis, tennis, and tennis? Are these four matches from a tournament being played simultaneously? Or does this "multiview" feature just let you stream four separate camera angles of a single sporting event? I've already done too much and suffered enough here, and I am not going to go full Zapruder on this clip to get a solid answer.

- Now for the next exciting feature available to ESPN Unlimited subscribers: "ORIGINAL CONTENT." And it's... a tennis documentary. Or at least the audio of one, with Serena Williams saying "That was something no one had ever seen before, ever." What was that something? No idea, as there is no video clip. Also, it's worth noting that this is the second time we're hearing the phrase "has/had ever seen" in seven seconds of airtime. Generally, unless it's your product's slogan or the hook of your ad, you want to avoid repetitions of a common phrase like this so you don't sound derivative. This should be fairly easy to do in a 15-second spot for a sports media behemoth that has literally millions of hours of owned content at its fingertips. And yet, ESPN is establishing itself as your one-stop shop for yebs maybe tennis has ever seen. Ever.

- Our final highlight of this platform is that it allows you to "STREAM STUDIO SHOWS." Like them or not, Disney is forking over eight figures per year each to Stephen A. Smith and Pat McAfee and slapping them up and down their daily schedules, so clearly this is a big marketing point for them. Yet the marketable studio show the audience sees here is not Stephen A. yelling about LeBron James or Pat McAfee wondering why that last fart felt lumpy as Aaron Rodgers mentions that his very real wife told him the other night how nice it would be if someone placed a bounty on Anthony Fauci. It appears to be a SportsCenter anchor wrapping up a segment of a halftime by saying "G-League Winter Showcase in Orlando, stay tuned for the second half coming up after this."

- Then hit 'em with the slogan: "ALL OF ESPN. ALL IN ONE PLACE." To review, "all of ESPN," as presented by the outlet itself over the preceding seconds, is comprised of tennis matches, tennis documentaries, and minor league basketball. Well, maybe not the actual minor league basketball games, but definitely the halftime studio shows of those games. All this can be yours, for only $31.99 a month!

So, okay, why would The Worldwide Leader in Sports market itself so shoddily, with an ad that looks, sounds, and reads like someone integrated Grok into Final Cut Pro while watching the U.S. Open and called it a day? I can't provide a definitive answer, but I do see this ad as part of a much larger pattern with the network that people who analyze and report on the media have noticed for several years: ESPN has been steadily caring less and less about the quality of what they actually put on your screen, in favor of offering sheer volume. Sports media archivist extraordinaire Timothy Burke has noted repeatedly that ESPN live sports broadcasts often look worse on TV now than they did at the start of the HD era, as the network sacrifices on equipment and behind-the-scenes staffing to instead spend its money on rights fees for every single sports property it can get. That's how you end up with one network that broadcasts the NFL, NCAA, MLB, NBA, WNBA, and NHL but then blurts out "Tennis!" when you ask it to give you one good reason to buy its product.

And now, for the hockey pivot. NHL season is here, and last night Blackhawks fans were online lamenting having to suffer through another ESPN+ webcast of their favorite team with John "fellow kids" Buccigross on the play-by-play. A lot of American hockey fans were excited when the NHL returned to ESPN, after more than fifteen years of the biggest sports network actively ignoring the league. But the ESPN that dumped the NHL in the 2000s is definitely not the one that reacquired broadcast rights in the 2020s, which is how a philosophy of "if it's good enough, it's good enough for ESPN" leads to a studio show anchor with a Beanpot fetish becoming the 1A play-by-play guy without any qualifications besides "I like the sport and I'm already employed here."

So yes, you can watch your team's games. Maybe you can even watch more of your team's games than you were able to a few years ago. But those games are going to look and sound worse than they used to, even on your bigger and better TV, and the odds are they're going to cost you more than they did back when your TV was hooked up to a cable box filled with several hundred channels you had no interest in ever watching. But on the bright side, we live in an era where literally any proposed media merger will get near-immediate approval, so I'm sure a complete elimination of competition will only make things better for us as consumers in the near future. I just need to know which sportsbook or prediction market is currently offering the best odds on whether Fanatics will acquire ESPN or vice versa.

As I have said before on this blog: For this, they would like you to pay money.