Like squeezing water out of 30 Rock for media notes

**BASEBALL:

==The Fox roster doing Tuesday's All-Star Game includes Joe Buck (play-by-play, for the 10th time, tying him with Mel Allen for second all time behind Curt Gowdy's 12), Tim McCarver (analyst, a record 17th game broadcast), Ken Rosenthal (reporter), Kevin Kennedy (AL dugout), Eric Karros (NL dugout) and Jeanne Zelasko (post-game host). The network is using 21 high-def cameras, 80 microphones -- plus 15-20 mikes for players and managers to wear, and 150 production folk.
On the red-carpet pregame -- basically, an hour-long ad to appease a sponsor that sells trucks -- Fox uses Chris Rose , Mark Grace , Laura Okim and Charissa Thompson to "interview" players and Hall of Famers coming into the game from 4 to 5 p.m.. The show had previously aired on FSN, but this year, it's graduated to the network.

==KSPN-AM (710), with ESPN Radio's Dan Shulman and Dave Campbell, and XM Satellite Radio (Channel 175) has the game on radio Tuesday. Dodgers Hall of Famer Jaime Jarrin makes the call for ESPN Deportes Radio with Juan Marichal heard on 980-AM.

==Reaction seems rather positive to Texas Rangers DH (and former Dodgers hothead) Milton Bradley given a chance to blog for the New York Times (linked here). After Bradley's first posting this week, among the reader comments included: "I wish I could be there when Milton doesn't like an editing change," and "Nice to see a human side with this guy...thought he was just a crazy lunatic."

==ESPN's coverage of the Home Run Derby on Monday (5 p.m.) reaquaints Chris Berman with the MLB audience for one night, using Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips for some reason as the event's analysts. Mike Piazza not available? Not even a Barry Bonds cameo? Erin Andrews does interviews, while Karl Ravech, Peter Gammons, John Kruk and Rick Reilly also get unnecessary face time.

==Morgan used a network conference call Thursday to vent about how today's All Star Game isn't the same as the ones he used to play in. "Part of the reason the game doesn't bring that energy is it's a different game now. Now it's considered an exhibition, where as before it was considered life and death," said Morgan, who led off the last All Star Game played at Yankee Stadium in 1977 with a home run in the NL's 7-5 victory. "If you had Willie Mays and those guys with the attitude that they had playing now, you'd have that same awareness. I don't say the players don't play hard. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm saying that before, Willie Mays might play the whole game. Hank Aaron might play the whole game. Now it's, you know, two innings, three innings and everything is changed. By the sixth inning or something, you do not have the same type of stars in the game that you had before." Morgan also was less than impressed with the fact that the league that wins the All Star Game gets home-field advantage for the World Series. "Unless the players buy into it, it doesn't matter what you say. You can say, 'This one counts,' you can say anything you want, but the players are the ones that make the game, not the marketing."

==ESPN2 has the All Star Futures Game (Sunday, 9:30 a.m.) with Gary Thorne, Phillips and Gammons.

==MLB.TV, the online spot to watch live games, offers an All-Star package that runs from Sunday through July 19 for $2.95. Included are live videostreaming of the Home Run Derby, every out-of-market game during that week and the entire Fox All-Star Game coverage 45 minutes after it ends. PC and Mac compatable. More info, link here.

==Kind of a low-key weekend of national games considering the build-up for the MLB All-Star Game on Tuesday. Fox's regional game sent to L.A. is Arizona-Philadelphia (with Matt Vasgersian and Mark Grace; Saturday at 12:55 p.m.). Sunday, TBS goes with Baltimore at Boston at 10:30 a.m. and ESPN has Colorado at the New York Mets at 5 p.m. with Jon Miller and Morgan.

==A schedule of Fox's Saturday games for the near future (just revised from the original schedule):
Week 18 - August 2: L.A. gets Angels at New York Yankees (others are Milwaukee at Atlanta and Chicago White Sox at Kansas City)
Week 19 - August 9: L.A. gets Angels hosting New York Yankees (versus St. Louis at Chicago)
Week 20 - August 16: L.A. gets Angels at Cleveland (as opposed to Chicago White Sox at Oakland or Seattle at Minnesota)
Week 21 - August 23: L.A. gets Dodgers at Philadelphia (vs. Atlanta at St. Louis or Tampa Bay at Chicago White Sox)
Week 22 - August 30: L.A. likely to get Colorado at San Diego (or Philadelphia-Chicago Cubs or Seattle-Cleveland).

**GOLF:

==The Golf Channel is geared up to cover the British Open starting next week with daily shows starting Tuesday. Live from the Royal Birkdale Golf Club, the Golf Channel has news conferences Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 a.m. (with Inga Hammond and Ted Trybe), with a tournament preview on Wednesday (4 p.m.) and live recaps after the first round Thursday (11:30 a.m. and 4 p.m., reairing at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m.). Reporters include Brandel Chamblee, Steve Sands, Rich Lerner, John Hawkins, Tim Rosaforte and Alex Miceli at the event. In an unrelated programming decision, Golf Channel is also airing "Caddyshack" (Tuesday, 5 p.m., 8 p.m.; Saturday, 6 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.) and "Caddyshack II" (Tuesday, 1 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.)

==NBC has the hit-and-miss American Century Championship from Lake Tahoe, which features athletes and celebs (including both Wayne Gretzky and wife Janet, NBC's Al Michaels, Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, John Elway and apparently former U.S. women's soccer player Brandi Chastain dancing) uses Dan Hicks, Roger Maltbie, Gary Koch, Mark Rolfing and Jimmy Roberts on Saturday (1 to 3 p.m.) and Sunday (noon to 3 p.m.). A public-relations company for the event claims Jessica Simpson will be in the gallery to watch Tony Romo play on Saturday, if that matters whether you watch or not.

==CBS understandably takes a low-key approach to covering the big-name-depleted John Deere Classic third and final-round (Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3 p.m.) with Bill Macatee and Ian Baker-Finch in the tower, Peter Oosterhuis on No. 17 and David Feherty and Bobby Clampett on the course.

**MISC.

==KSPN-AM (710)'s Steve Mason and John Ireland, who got dueling stories on Thursday's show from both agent David Falk and Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy on the Elton Brand bait-and-switch move to the Philadelphia 76ers (listen to the Dunleavy interview at this link), are sitting in this morning for Colin Cowherd (6-to-10 a.m. on 710) and plan to have Brand on to fill in the gaps of what really happened. Expect an update when Mason and Ireland return later in the day to sit in on their own show from 1 to 4 p.m.

==ESPN has readjusted its plans for its morning live "SportsCenter" block starting next month. Instead of 3 a.m. to noon, it'll now start live at 6 a.m. PDT, cut from nine to six hours. That 3-to-6 a.m. spot will be re-aired "SportsCenter" from the night before. Linda Cohn and Steve Berthiaume were going to do that now-axed block of shows. Now they are thrown back into the vast ESPN pile of "other stuff."

==Part of the arrangement that brings Dan Patrick into the NBC family - aside from his heralded reunion with Keith Olbermann to do NFL highlights on the network's "Football Night in America" studio show - is the ability for network sports chief Dick Ebersol to use him on future Super Bowls and Olympics. Just not the upcoming Summer Games, as ESPN stipulated when Patrick left nearly a year ago that they'd let him out of his deal early only if NBC didn't use him in Beijing. "We have not talked about doing anything beyond that (Super Bowl and Vancouver 2012 Games) principally because he's got a five day a week, three hour (syndicated radio) program and he has four children, and he'd like to be home on alternate Saturdays," said Ebersol. "So at this point we have not talked about anything more largely due to his family desires." Asked on a media conference call what role Patrick could have at the next Winter Games, he replied: "I like the two-man luge. Keith and I have done that before." Olbermann interjected for some reason: "You haven't seen Matt Lauer and Al Roker together on a luge? It's quite a sight." Patrick concluded: "I was hoping for Meredith Viera, but if Al Roker's available, I'll take him." Ah, it's like Abbott and Costello all over again.

==One of the responses to the NBC hiring of Patrick, from FoxSports.com's Jason Whitlock, under the headline "NBC's cast of thousands is a bad act" (linked here):
"What in the hell is NBC doing adding another person to its NFL studio show who doesn't really care or know anything about the NFL?" The last thing "FNIA" needed was Patrick and Keith Olbermann "trying to out-cute each other while highlights play. ... The Big Show era is dead."
In terms of "relevance and chemistry, the NBC show will lose more ground" to the "Fox NFL Sunday" studio crew.
Having included that last line, you can see a conflict of Whitlock's opinion -- he knows where his bread is buttered, and no matter how he wants to spin it, he's employed the by the company that pays for him to write on FoxSports.com. Even if he includes this paragraph:
"I'm not pimping Fox's studio show because I work for FOXSports.com. I don't roll like that. Just about everyone in the industry agrees that Fox's studio show is the best in football."
But as for his take on Patrick overloading the NBC show, and the 'out-cute' element -- that's valid, 100 percent. On a scale of 1-to-10, we're at an 8 agreeing with Whitlock's take in that Patrick-Olbermann trying to rekindle their flame is OK, but hardly worth forcing it back on such a grand stage. Their one-hour a day show on the radio was much easier for them to spread it out, breathe and riff. This is destined for forced chest thumping.
Or, as Whitlock closes:
"NBC's show will be so bad that about the only thing that could be worse would be if ESPN decided to team Stu Scott, Jay Mariotti and Emmitt Smiff in the Monday Night Football booth."

==Petros Papadakis, part of the fill-in crew for the Jim Rome syndicated radio show this week, admitted he recently signed a two-year contract extension to remain as the Pac-10 FSN college football game analyst. The upcoming season will be his fifth for FSN.

==The latest installment of FSN's "Amazing Sports Stories" covers the saga of Ben Malcolmson, the Daily Trojan sportswriter who earned a spot on the USC footbal team from a 2006 Pete Carroll tryout camp when all he was trying to do was write a first-person account of how grueling the process would be. The show airs Sunday at 8 p.m., FSN West, right after the second installment of the new "Baseball's Golden Age," which takes a look at All Stars of the past.

==HBO's Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant and Lennox Lewis will call the heavyweight championship bout between Wladimir Klitschko and Tony Thompson on Saturday from Hamburg, Germany (1:30 p.m. live, replayed at 10 p.m.).

=="Path of Purpose," a 34-minute documentary that follows surf legend Laird Hamilton on his bike and paddleboard trek from London to Paris, and then across the Hawaiian Island chain, to raise awareness of autism, debuts on the Sundance Channel on Monday (7:30 p.m., replaying July 20 and 24). Don King, the underwater cinematographer from "Riding Giants" and "Lords of Dogtown," directs the flick.

==CBS jumps into the Tour de France with the first of three hour-long recaps of the race to date with a show Sunday (11 a.m. to noon, Channel 2). Future cut-ins from Versus' daily coverage include Sunday, July 20 and the final stage Sunday, July 27. Greg Amsinger will host with analysts Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin.

==Chris Marlowe, Karch Kiraly, Mike Dodd and Heather Cox do the AVP event this weekend from Chicago on Saturday (11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. men's final) and Sunday (10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., women's final) on NBC. All eight players who'll represent the U.S. in the beach volleyball competition at the Beijing Games will be participating in this tournament: Defending gold medalists Kerri Walsh and Misty-May Treanor, plus Elaine Youngs and Nicole Branagh on the women's side, and Todd Rogers-Phil Dalhausser and Jake Gibb-Sean Rosenthal on the men's side. May-Treanor is going after her 100th career beach title.

==Bob Fitzgerland and Wolf Wigo cover the U.S. women's water polo exhibition against Australia from Stanford (on tape) for MSNBC (Sunday, 9 a.m.)

==ESPNEWS airs the Man o' War race from Belmont Park on Saturday (2:15 p.m.), featuring the return of Curlin, the 2007 Horse of the Year.

==The Major League Lacrosse's Riptide face Denver in an ESPN2-televised game Tuesday at 7 p.m. from the Home Depot Center.

==Onion Sports headline and story of the week (linked here):
Mark Cuban Buys Sports
DALLAS--Billionaire Mark Cuban, tired of the opposition he has encountered from NBA management in his role as owner of the Dallas Mavericks and frustrated with opposition from the MLB owners' association in his attempt to buy the Chicago Cubs, liquidated almost all his personal wealth and holdings and purchased the entirety of sports for an undisclosed but undoubtedly large sum on Monday.
"I want to assure fans and athletes around the world that very little will change now that you are all my fans and athletes," Cuban said. "Of course, there will be a review and streamlining of all the rules as soon as possible, so I can settle certain things once and for all, like what is and isn't a foul, and where the Cubs will be playing after they leave Chicago, and what Dwyane Wade will be doing now that he's banned from basketball. Oh, yeah, and the Olympics are canceled. And I need to see [former Texas Longhorns softball player] Cat Osterman in my office tomorrow evening, dressed appropriately for dinner at a fairly good but charmingly low-key steakhouse. Anyway, I realize how important sports are, and want to reassure the world that with the increased cost will come greatly increased enjoyment."

**AND FINALLY:

==The always never reliable Slic Ric Bucher told the ESPN audience on Tuesday night that Elton Brand would remain a Clipper on Tuesday night. We woke up Wednesday to find out that, again, Buecher was ... less than correct. Bucher, who continues to maintain that Kobe Bryant will be traded, might want to find a whole new set of sources as far as L.A. NBA fans are concerned: