How Do We Feel About Jerry Remy?

First I'd like to apologize to anyone who does not care about the Red Sox or does not watch them on TV, where Jerry Remy is the long standing, 20 years as of yesterday, color commentator. But I want to get this out there because I seem to be in the minority when I say that I am not a fan. Also to be fair I'm a fan of Tommy Heinsohn, even if he is guilty of some of the things I am about to accuse Remy of. Those are the facts. Now on to my issues.

1. At times Remy will completely talk over the game about numerous non-baseball related topics. Off the top of my head the most egregious examples came several years ago when in a short span of time (couple of weeks as I remember it) he actually read lacrosse box scores from the newspaper and tried to get one of the interns into Syracuse. Those are two unrelated incidents but they stick out to me. Granted the baseball regular season is 162 games long and some of those are downright atrocious. This was even more true before this current golden age of Red Sox baseball. But I'm of the opinion that the games matter. It's up to sports talk radio, guys in bars, television shows, now blogs, and to a lesser extent newspapers to talk about the off topic stuff. During the game I want to know what was just thrown, how fast it was, etc.

2. The biggest issue for me, which is somewhat related to the first is that Remy thinks he is a major part of the show at this point. It started with the cameras focusing on all of the Remy signs in stadiums. Granted this is not the WWF and those signs were made by the fans. Why not show them? Still from there it went to the love fest with Wally the mascot, the whole president for Red Sox nation thing, numerous commercials including a recent one where he plays air guitar (I couldn't make that up), Rem Dawg, the Remy Report, and everything else.

Now I can be open minded. For starters a ton of people genuinely like him. Also he knows baseball. That counts for a lot. And for someone who is from the old school he does not seem to fear/hate the sabermetrics stuff. And some of his schtick is at the very least similar to Tommy Points and "I Love Waltahhhh!", while a lot more on point than - "Gerald Green will be an All Star someday." If I'm off on this one so be it. Just throwing it out there.