Looking For Entertainment and Hairpieces on the MLB Network

I've been watching the MLB Network for the highlights and staying for the hair, wondering who might be wearing a piece. These are, after all, the dry, arid summer months of sports viewing.

I tried watching a few summer league games on NBA TV, including the big Karl-Anthony Towns vs. DeAndre Russell match-up in Vegas, but couldn't hang in. It looked like a really, really well-played game at a Y.

For a baseball fan who is only mildly hungover from the steroid era, with no online fantasy account and no favorite team since the Angels traded Howie Kendrick, "MLB Tonight," the network's flagship show, is a decent veg-out, whipping you from ballpark to ballpark on a given night for any number of in-the-moment situations or just-completed play.

Regular viewing of "MLB Tonight" can give the sense that 1) the analysts are all white and 2) the broadcast is coming from a Buffalo Wild Wings, but neither of these things are true. Actually, the ratio of ex-ballplayer-commentators-of-color to Caucasian ones roughly—sorta kinda—matches up with recently studied league demographics. Close to 60 percent of players on opening day rosters in 2015 identified as white, versus 29.3 who identified as Latino, and approximately 8.3 percent African-American or black, according to an annual report by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics at the University of Central Florida.

I counted 17 former ballplayers (plus ex-GM Dan O'Dowd) who are listed as "studio analysts" on the MLB Network's website. Four of these—Pedro Martinez and Harold Reynolds, whom I see a lot of, and Cliff Floyd and Carlos Pena, whom I don't—are not white. The NHL Network, for one, is far whiter, but so is the NHL. To my knowledge, nobody in that league is wondering why fewer African-Americans are playing pro hockey. But the decline of black players in the Major Leagues is an ongoing story, and one the league has been making strides to change.

Meanwhile, on too many nights, if you changed the "MLB Tonight" logo to "NASCAR Tonight," you wouldn't have to make too many tweaks. Lots of middle-aged white guys, some perhaps with sore grilling wrists. The poster child for this good ol' boy milieu used to be the ex-reliever Mitch "Wild Thing" Williams, until he filed a wrongful termination suit last September against MLB Network, an imbroglio that stemmed from an alleged altercation Williams had with an umpire at his son's Little League game.

Williams might be a horrible sports parent, but I kind of miss him. The current personalities tend towards meh, including the requisite wonky baseball insider types, which is hardly surprising but also disappointing. The dream of "MLB Tonight" (again, for those without a fantasy account) is that you're sitting at every ballpark in the country, at the same time, watching games with ex-players like Eric Byrnes, Dan Plesac, Harold Reynolds, and Ryan Dempster. As seat-mates they're not very gossipy, though. Byrnes is going for high-energy clown and getting at least halfway there; Reynolds is a classic over-explainer, while signifying not nearly enough; Plesac, for his part, is among those in sports broadcasting with a serious "that" problem, when the article "the" or "a" is called for.

"Wade Miley running that fastball in," Plesac said, coming out of a recent Red Sox-Marlins highlight. "There you see the rotation, kind of that sideways rotation," Plesac said minutes later, of a Max Scherzer strikeout. "Hey, congrats, get that baseball," he was "that"-ing moments later, when they cut back to the Red Sox game for rookie Travis Shaw's first hit.

That is the kind of thing that bugs one if one isn't careful.

Far better is Pedro Martinez, who exudes personality without trying to affect one. He's also a little mischievous, which means you don't need to reflexively flip your settings to cliché when he speaks. During this week's glad-handing coverage of the All-Star Game, when everyone was on point about the infusion of young stars ushering the game into a new era, Martinez caught Scherzer off-guard when he asked the Nats' ace, "You feel like Arizona gave up on you a little early?"

Still, the lineup could stand with a new position player; how much longer will they have to wait for Torii Hunter? MLB will doubtless have to compete for his services—I'm sure Hunter will have offers when he hangs up the cleats, and with every major sport having its own dedicated cable network, there have never been so many green rooms filled with so many guys one or five or 10 seasons removed from their respective sports. I enjoy "MLB Tonight" best when it feels like I'm killing a three-hour layover at an airport sports bar with a genial guy who just happened to play 12 years in the big leagues and can predict what the next pitch will be.