Scott and Mike and Dave's excellent Toronto adventure

Who says the American media ignore the Toronto Blue Jays?

Okay, these guys aren't exactly the media but they are American and they do make movies. Okay, they're YouTube movies, but they are kind of fun.

Scott Blumenthal, Mike Levy and Dave Kreshover -- three baseball nuts who grew up on Long Island, N.Y. -- decided to make a movie about every ballpark in the majors. They started last summer and chose, of all 30 cities, Toronto.

Why little old us? ``We wanted to go someplace completely different with a different culture and different language," says Blumenthal. ``But tickets in Cleveland were too expensive, so we picked Toronto."

Blumenthal says the trio plan to do all 30, but at one a year they'll all be 69 when they're finished. ``At some point we're going to have to pick up the pace a bit," he says.

So what was so different about Toronto to a trio of guys who grew up on the Yankees and Mets?

``The absence of people beating each other up in the stands," Blumenthal says. ``It wasn't New York."

Here's the video, which got more than 3,000 hits in its first two weeks.

FC on TV

CBC will be the main carrier for Toronto FC this season, broadcasting 11 of the team's 30 Major League Soccer games starting with the home opener on April 1.

Rogers Sportsnet will air 10, while the MLSE-owned GolTV digital channel has nine. Fox Sports World Canada has one game on its schedule. At this point, one game will be shown on tape delay.

Nigel Reed will return to call CBC games along with analyst Jason De Vos. Gerry Dobson and Craig Forrest will be behind the microphones for Sportsnet.

All of FC's games will also be carried on radio or the Internet for the first time. Dan Dunleavy and Bob Iarusci will handle the games on The FAN 590 (17) or the FAN's website (13).

Now, if only TV viewers could match the enthusiasm of those at the stadium. FC games are good entertainment, but for some reason ratings remain dismally low. Having Vancouver in the league in a couple of years will help.

The March towards madness

Prediction: Sometime during March Madness, CBS announcer Gus Johnson's head will explode and here's the evidence.

Despite Gus's over-caffeinated call, you will have to accept this fact: The popularity of the NCAA tournament in Canada, and probably south of the border, is due mainly to office pools. Proof of this is seen every year as ratings take a big dive after the first weekend, when poolies who previously thought that UConn was next to the Northwest Territories stop watching.

Games averaged 46,000 on The Score last year -- and that was up 15 per cent from 2007.

Regardless, it's a heck of a show and one of The Score's biggest properties. To that end, The Score is offering all games, live Twitter updates and will even send updates to your cellphone if you ask nicely.

It's also simulcasting with Sun TV in southern Ontario starting March 27, which will mean better ratings and maybe a better of indication as to how many Canadians really care.

Another ratings drop for TSN

When TSN swept away CBC for Canadian Curling Association rights and then booted out the national broadcaster from CFL games (enough lame metaphors for you?), there were concerns that the specialty channel might not be able to match CBC's ratings for the big events.

So far, those concerns have been realized. TSN didn't do very well with the Grey Cup, recording the lowest English-language ratings in two decades. There were plenty of reasons for this -- a Quebec audience accustomed to watching the Montreal Alouettes on RDS and a lacklustre game -- but the fact is TSN didn't deliver the big audience.

Now it's curling's turn. Sunday's Brier final averaged 873,000 viewers -- the second most-watched sports event of the week. But still, that was 20 per cent below the 1.1 million CBC attracted last year. Again, there are explanations.

Sunday's final, won 10-4 by Alberta, was pretty much a dud in the entertainment department. No doubt a lot of people headed over to Desperate Housewives or Big Love when the game got out of reach.

And, in TSN's defence,  over-all ratings were up 2 per cent from what both TSN and CBC drew last year and TSN did outdraw CBC on the Tournament of Hearts. But regardless, TSN is 1-for-3 in the big events it won from CBC.

One thing is for sure: Somewhere, somebody at CBC is chuckling and probably firing off an I-told-you-so email to the CCA and CFL.

Here are the rest of the weekend ratings highlights, according to BBM Nielsen Media Research overnight ratings:

1. Hockey Night In Canada, early game, Saturday, CBC: 1,160,000

2. Brier final, Sunday, TSN: 873,000

3. Brier semifinal, Saturday, TSN: 659,000

4. Hockey Night In Canada, late game, CBC: 592,000

5. Brier playoff, Friday, TSN: 587,000

6. Ottawa at Pittsburgh, Saturday, CBC: 369,000

Missing from that list are the World Golf Championships final round on TSN Sunday. It drew 278,000, but was also on NBC, whose ratings aren't tracked in Canada. Assuming at least half of Canadians watched on NBC, the total audience was probably about 600,000.

Also missing are the Toronto Raptors, who drew a paltry 104,000 on CBC Sunday.The team's poor record is starting to show in the ratings, which have never done well on CBC. Makes you wonder if basketball isn't about to join the Toronto Blue Jays on the CBC scrap heap.

CBC tees off on women's golf

There's no doubt that CBC Sports is about to feel the effects of the big knife hanging over the corporation's head, but that isn't stopping the network from adding properties.

CBC has signed a three-year deal to televise all four rounds of the LPGA Canadian Women's Open golf tournament, starting in September. The first two round will be aired live on CBC's digital channel, Bold, with the final rounds on the main network.

Announcers haven't been named yet, mainly because CBC hasn't done golf since Don Cherry was still coaching.

Tournament officials are no doubt hoping CBC can draw a bigger audience than Rogers Sportsnet did the past few years.

Hockey Night In Kandahar

You can't say Rogers Sportsnet won't go that extra mile for a story. In this case, it was more like an extra 6,700 miles.

It's definitely not her best side, but the woman holding the microphone with the Kandahar sky as backdrop is Sportsnet anchor Evanka Osmak. She was part of a Department of National Defence program that sends Canadian celebrities and hockey stars to Afghanistan as part of a morale-boosting measure for the troops. TSN's Brian Williams and Jennifer Hedger went on earlier trips to the war zone.

Osmak called the twice-daily road hockey games between the troops and a team of former NHLers, including Lanny McDonald, Tiger Williams, Ron Tugnutt and Mark Napier.

But it wasn't all fun and games. Three Canadian soldiers were killed during the visit.

``After the game,  there was a concert by Glass Tiger and everybody’s having a great time," Osmak recalls.. ``Then we heard about the three soldiers.

``It was devastating for us, but those guys rebounded so fast. I think we took it harder than they did."

What lesson did Osmak take from her visit?

``I’ll admit before I went on the trip, I didn’t really know what was going on over there outside of what I’d read in the papers and seen on TV," she says. ``When you get there, you realize what these guys are giving up ... It makes you so appreciative of what they’re doing. Most of us wouldn’t have the guts to do this."

And here are the real stars of the show:

 

The Ron and Howard Show

If you've been watching the sports highlights this week, you've seen Leafs coach Ron Wilson's tirade against FAN 590 reporter Howard Berger. For the sake of brevity, let's just say Wilson took offence at one of Berger's questions and accused the FAN man of attacking his integrity.

It was a masterful performance by Wilson and will no doubt earn him a hallowed spot on YouTube in the ``coaches gone crazy" section under the subheading ``paranoia."

It's hard to pick a bad guy in this. After Wilson had called for an illegal stick measurement against Ottawa's Jason Spezza, Berger asked him why he hadn't done it a few months ago when the game might have mattered. It wasn't a question that had to be asked and it certainly wasn't all that relevant, but it was worth asking and was hardly an attack on Wilson's integrity.

But that's the way Wilson saw it. At worst, he took the question the wrong way.

If there's a finger to point here, it's at the channels that gave this story way too much play. Of course, this is what you get when everybody's meal ticket, the Leafs, are playing a string of nothing games.

Best of the weekend: hoops and rocks

Here's something revolutionary: The CIS has decided to hold its annual men's basketball tournament at a time when every basketball fan in the country isn't obsessing over the NCAA tourney. That means somebody might actually be watching this weekend. The Score has the quarterfinals Friday at 6 and 10 p.m., the semifinals Saturday at 6 and 10 and final Sunday at 4. This is a tournament that has always deserved more viewers.

How can you top Sunday Night Curling? Okay, you could add John Madden, but he'd just get confused by all the sweeping and hollering. TSN has the Brier final Sunday at 8. With any luck, TSN might even get another shot like this one:

Score shoots and misses

 If you haven't noticed, and you'd be forgiven if you didn't, that live Score morning show is now in the morning sports show morgue. It was a good effort, though definitely a work in progress.

But the reality is there's no way to make a morning show pay for itself mainly because nobody's watching at that time of day anyway. Most people tend to be working or in school rather than checking on what's happening in the world of sports in the morning -- which is usually nothing.

That's something Rogers Sportsnet learned years ago. It tried a morning show and discovered to no one's surprise that nobody was watching. 

``The ratings just weren't there," says Score v-p David Errington.

Of course, if that were applied to all shows there might be a lot fewer shows on TV. The real story is that it didn't draw enough of an audience to justify the salaries of show staff.

The TSN2-Rogers Siege

It's Day 193 of the standoff between Rogers and TSN over TSN2, meaning most Toronto Raptors fans in the GTA can't watch their favourite team without buying a ticket. While this makes no sense to anybody outside the boardrooms of those two companies, you have to wonder why MLSE hasn't stepped in and ordered the release of its seldom-seen basketball team.

A lot of fans have reached the end. Fans like Jacob Abramowicz of Toronto, who writes to the team, league, TSN and Rogers:

"Not watching this team has made me realize something: why should I care so much if you don't care? Why should I blow my hard-earned money, time and energy to care about you guys? Give me one reason."

But,  maybe there is an explanation. MLSE knew how bad the Raptors were going to be and, in an effort to save fans the pain of watching, concocted a complicated setup to ensure that they wouldn't have to. Nah, not even Oliver Stone would buy a conspiracy theory that convoluted.