THE CATBIRD SEAT—THE BLOG. Hawk Harrelson, the long-time White Sox announcer—has a distinctive phrase—“the catbird seat”—which he uses a lot. It describes the desirable position the batter is in when the pitcher throws the first two pitches for balls. The batter then has a 2-0 count, “the catbird seat”. The pitcher is under pressure to avoid going to a 3 ball, no strike count by throwing a pitch that is easier to control and more to the middle of the plate; the batter can look for a particular pitch in a particular location.
Nick has switched his blog posting to an ESPN blog, “the Catbird Seat”. It is one of a set of 30 blogs, one for each major league team. The name of the blog was chosen in reference to Harrelson’s phrase as an appropriate title for a White Sox blog.
Here is a link to the Catbird Seat blog.
Here is the link to the ESPN Sweetspot Network for all 30 teams (you can google sweetspot ESPN and get there as well).
I always associated ‘the catbird seat’ with the Yankee’s announcer, Red Barber, who claimed to have invented the phrase. I, and millions other, loved Bob’s semi-senile ramblings about his garden, birds and the weather in Tallahassee on Friday morning’s ‘All Things Considered’ when was supposed to be discussing the week’s sports with Bob Edwards.