1. Fox loves its rules expert, Mike Pereira. Major League Baseball, not so much.
Pereira, who works NFL and college football games, would’ve added a third sport to his résumé if Fox had its way. However, then MLB chief baseball officer Joe Torre put the kibosh on the idea.
On a recent episode of the Papa and Lund podcast, Pereira revealed that years ago he was set to become an on-air rules expert for Fox’s MLB games, but Torre wouldn’t allow it.
“Not too long after I started, maybe three or four years after I started, the sport that was missing this role was baseball,” Pereira said. “So Fox, when they signed their new deal with baseball, asked me if I wanted to do baseball.
“They asked if I wanted to do it and go to umpire school to learn the rules. I decided, O.K., I will do it. I’ll go to the baseball school. I will come up and learn the rules so that I can do this role and I actually talked to some umpires and a couple of people in the umpire department in New York and Major League Baseball. But Joe Torre put the nix on it. He nixed me. He said we don’t want a guy being our rules specialist who’s never umpired.”
Pereira was very diplomatic about Torre’s decision, saying, “He was right. If I was a baseball umpire and here’s a football official that said I disagree with this call, I wouldn’t have had the credibility whatsoever with the umpires.”
So, why didn’t Fox use another MLB rules expert? Pereira shed some light on that, as well.
“So we did interview some umpires, retired umpires to see if they were interested or if they’d be any good and we found a couple that seemed to be pretty good but to be truthful they have a great disability program with MLB and they were told that they would lose their disability if they were paid by Fox to be a rules expert. So we never found one.”
2. Tremendous performance art by Stephen A. Smith after the Cowboys’ embarrassing blowout loss against the Cardinals on Monday night.
3. As soon as the Cardinals went up 28–3 on the Cowboys on Monday night, the Falcons’ Twitter account sent out this tweet, which easily became the highlight of Atlanta’s season.
4. Here is this week’s edition of the always entertaining “Bad Beats” with Scott Van Pelt and Stanford Steve. My favorite part was SVP’s “They don’t have the angle, Steve” line.
5. Former MLB great and current broadcaster Keith Hernandez turns 67 years old today.
Keith appeared on the SI Media Podcast a couple of months ago to talk baseball, broadcast and Seinfeld, and he was great.
6. This is a good tweet.
7. The latest Sports Illustrated Media Podcast features an interview with Turner’s Ernie Johnson. The host of Inside the NBA talks about the show’s popularity; working with Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal; the one time he got legitimately mad at Barkley, how he navigates the unruly cast; the lessons he learned when doing MLB play-by-play, whether he regrets talking politics in 2016; and much more.
You can listen to the podcast below or download it on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play.
8. RANDOM VIDEO OF THE DAY: Borat had a wild appearance even by his standards on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday night.
9. SPORTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: Eagles fans need some good news right now, so here’s a trailer about an upcoming documentary that looks very entertaining on Philadelphia’s 2017 season.
Be sure to catch up on past editions of Traina Thoughts and check out the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast hosted by Jimmy Traina on Apple, Spotify or Stitcher. You can also follow Jimmy on Twitter and Instagram.