Keith Olbermann poses with his autographed baseball card collection May 2, 2000, in Santa Monica, Calif.
After Conan O’Brien was fired from Tonight Show, he was in an odd position: a high-profile TV personality with a following, but in a business where there were few open outlets for the thing he did. Conan eventually landed at TBS, where he remains today.
When Keith Olbermann acrimoniously left Current TV, he was also a high-profile TV personality with a following, but in a business where there were few open outlets for the things that he did. At least for the thing he did most recently—liberal political commentary, given that he also left MSNBC acrimoniously.
Now he’s also landing at TBS, albeit in a more limited role, doing the thing he did before he became lefty politics’ Special Commentator: sportscasting. The network announced today that Olbermann will host its postseason Major League Baseball studio show this fall with analyst Dennis Eckersley.
Olbermann obviously has background aplenty for his new gig, having first hit big as an anchor for ESPN’s SportsCenter in the ’90s, and later doing sports for Fox and (more recently) MLB. He likes it, he’s good at it, and his acerbic sense of humor was a good fit for it before his career shift. As TBS’s press release says:
A noted baseball enthusiast, whose long media career began in the pages of the early baseball memorabilia magazines when he was just a teenager, Olbermann previously served as a studio host for both NBC’s (1997-98) and Fox’s (1999-2000) MLB Postseason coverage. During his tenure at Fox, the MLB studio show Olbermann anchored was nominated twice for an Emmy Award, winning in 1999 for the Best Sports Studio Show. Including his hosting work, Olbermann has covered 19 World Series and 28 MLB post-seasons during his career.
The announcement does not, you’ll note, delve into Olbermann’s politics-hosting career. This may not be the kind of TV comeback that followers of his MSNBC and Current news shows have wanted, but it may be that sports junkie Olbermann is more comfortable stepping back into his old broadcasting role. And it may make for less opportunities for public friction with yet another employer.
(Update: I don’t want, by the way, to set up the suggestion here that hosting sports is somehow a comedown. As a culture writer who sometimes overlaps with politics, I always hate the knee-jerk assumption that other areas of journalism are somehow lesser—dumber, less substantial, less significant—than politics. About five minutes of following politics coverage will usually disabuse you of that.)
To be honest, I’m not sports fan enough to guess at how Olbermann will be received on TBS, but it will be interesting to see what, if any, effect his interim career as fulminating pundit has on his new gig. Olbermann had fans on ESPN, and he had passionate acolytes on MSNBC and Current, but his commentary also created shall-we-say detractors over the years—not only among his bosses, and sometimes even among people who share his politics but were put off by his combative style.
Which means that Olbermann’s hire will generate attention–I would not be writing this post for pretty much any other TBS baseball-hosting hire–but the question is whether it will be good attention. Will baseball fans be able to set Olbermann’s politics aside from his sportscasting, if he does the same? Sports fans, the lines are open.