The ALCS and NLCS on TBS and FS1, respectively, are being presented this year by Google Assistant. During each series, play by play broadcaster Brian Anderson and Joe Buck are doing ad reads for the service, and through a total of seven LCS games, these ads are driving me insane.
Here’s an example of one, and the sad thing is that this ad is repeated *every* night, with Google Assistant giving a different answer every time based on which game is taking place.
I think my least favorite part of these ads are how forced and unnatural they seem. They always take place coming back from an inning or during a lull in game action (mound conference, etc), and just seem…weird.
Here’s Anderson asking for dumb facts about Minute Maid Park in between at bats in the second inning.
And here’s Buck, a few hours later, asking the same damn question about Dodger Stadium, also in between batters.
Anderson dropped a great line after one of these silly reads on Tuesday night, saying that the just wanted to hear Google tell him the answer.
Furthermore, and your mileage may vary on this, the ads don’t really make Google Assistant seem Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, or any other voice-activated assistant. At least show me what else Google Assistant can do (which is pretty damn difficult during a ten to fifteen second in-game ad) instead of just….answering questions.
On the bright side, we only have a maximum of seven more games of these awkward Google reads, and a minimum of four. The presenting sponsor of the World Series is YouTube TV, so instead of awkward, repetitive ad reads, we’ll just have to deal with intermittent service outages and giant red play button ads in the middle of your screen. I guess it could be worse, right?
