Apparently, Keith Olbermann plays Fantasy Baseball at ESPN.com and isn’t too happy with the problems we’ve had this year. While I don’t want to speak out of turn, it’s been a pretty horrible fantasy baseball season so far with ESPN’s new Fantasy Baseball game. The short version, for those of you who aren’t using ESPN.com this year, is that a critical software bug made it past testing. You can read more here if you want the details.
Anyway, Olbermann laid into the fantasy team on the Dan Patrick Show (mp3 here) because he felt his team wasn’t that broken, so he’d rather we left it alone. Unfortunately, the bug wasn’t quite that simple, and we had to reset everything.
Anyway, so if Olbermann wasn’t harsh enough on the radio, on Wednesday night he took the next step of naming John Kosner, who is the SVP that runs ESPN New Media, the third Worst Person in the World. A bit harsh, there, don’t you think, Olbermann?
In defense of John, he’s a good guy and while he puts his name out there to take the blame, he really isn’t at fault here for the problems with Fantasy Baseball. Ultimately, he (and the rest of the Fantasy Team and even the company) takes issues like this seriously. While many companies just hide behind some relatively anonymous name (”Customer Service”), he’s chosen to give a name and, now on Olbermann, a face to show folks we care. So, go easy on Kosner there, Keith.
As for the Fantasy team, they’ve been working literally day-and-night to solve the issues with transactions and are finally getting some sleep tonight. I was there for one of the early all-nighters and they really haven’t gone home to sleep most nights. These are folks that care about the games they build. They wouldn’t have taken the step of reseting the rosters if they thought there was another way around it all.
Anyway, for the folks at ESPN.com, here’s a screen shot of an unfairly maligned Kosner joining two truly deserving World’s Worsts, Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris:
You can watch the video clip here on Olbermann’s site (click on the Bill O’Reilly World’s Worst Immigration video). I also have the video here on FM, which you can watch by clicking here. The video is a PSP formatted MP4 vid, so it might be a little stretched out on a normal monitor.
(While I do work for ESPN.com, and have worked on fantasy games in the past, I’m speaking here as a private individual.)






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