When television rained on the viewers

Few things are worse than a NASCAR rain delay. It’s bad enough to be there. On TV, it’s excruciating.

When a baseball game is rain-delayed, they generally don’t talk to the ballplayers. This is a great advantage baseball possesses over NASCAR. Baseball players are every bit as knuckleheaded as stock-car racers. But they don’t get to show it.

More people may know today what drivers’ favorite movies are than the actual ones that won the Oscars. None of the drivers apparently like quality movies. One said he tried to watch “Michael Clayton” but couldn’t understand it.

You can’t make this stuff up.

One would think, given the fact that the networks rule this sport (NASCAR merely facilitates this rule), they would’ve put together hours and hours of quality programming to be used in the event of rain. Apparently, they haven’t. The burning issue of the rain delay was coming up with a name for the pop-up “gopher camera” Fox uses in coverage. The network didn’t just invent it, by the way. A pop-up camera imbedded in the surface of Indianapolis (now O’Reilly) Raceway Park was a staple of ESPN sprint-car coverage 15 years ago.

What few sober matters that were considered, Fox’s vaudeville crew chose to soft-pedal. For instance, Carl Edwards’ motor coach, without Edwards in it, had been involved in a crash between Daytona and Fontana. Naturally, the Fox team chose to stress the fact that Edwards was now sharing infield space with ZZ Fox.

Many sports fans channel-surf during commercials. Perhaps the NASCAR channel-surfing occurs during rain delays so that viewers can catch the snazzy ads. The racing-themed commercials featured infinitely more funny repartee than what was emanating from the desk that had Chris Myers, Jeff Hammond and Darrell Waltrip behind it.

Myers got in a shot at Jeff Hammond’s year-round tan, which led him to spend the rest of the show lying that everyone else was quicker-witted than he. That’s called fake humility. Or maybe Hammond threatened to break him in two during a commercial.

Once the race started, as usual, it horrified Messrs. Mike Joy, Waltrip and Larry McReynolds when they had to confront the untidy prospect of drivers criticizing NASCAR. They had already conveniently assigned tire failure the blame for Denny Hamlin’s crash, which, according to Hamlin, was, oh, maybe, untrue. Then Dale Earnhardt Jr. let fly the frank opinion that they had no business running a race under the conditions in place.

A pall apparently fell over the broadcast booth. Presumably, several long commercial breaks were required in order for the announcers to figure out how they could possibly rationalize away NASCAR’s abandoning the modest responsibility of providing a racing surface that doesn’t have water seeping out from it.

Meanwhile, things were looking up for MRN. Where can we get the Nielsens on how many television sets were muted Sunday night?

You can reach Monte Dutton at mdutton@gastongazette.com.