Diamondbacks fans love to hate Bob Costas, but he was the ideal announcer for Dodgers defeat

Now they’re playing with house money.

The Arizona Diamondbacks swept the hated LA Dodgers with a 4-2 win Wednesday at Chase Field in Phoenix, advancing to the National League Championship Series. I don’t care how much of a Diamondbacks fan you are, no one saw this coming. Not like this.

Or, as TBS play-by-play announcer Bob Costas put it, laughing, “If you had the Diamondbacks advancing to the LCS, good for you.”

Ah, Bob Costas. Once again he served as a punching bag on social media, with Diamondbacks fans beating him up over a perceived preference for the Dodgers.

Sorry, but they’re wrong.

Costas can be annoying. He's also good

Costas is officious and kind of annoying at times, the smartest kid in the class who never tires of telling you so. But he knows his stuff, and he gave the Diamondbacks their due: “84 wins, a modest total in the regular season. What matters now — 5-0 in the postseason.”

Hmm. OK, maybe that’s a bit of a backhanded compliment. But it’s a compliment all the same.

I get it — local fans have their radar set for any slight, real or imagined, by national broadcast crews. (Though Costas is evidently an equal-opportunity offender; Dodgers fans hate him, too.) And yes, Costas, is a baseball purist of the first order, who spends more time than you’d like bemoaning the changes in the game since, I don’t know, Babe Ruth was playing. And he did spend a lot of the three-game series talking about the Dodgers.

But LA made up 50% of the teams playing Wednesday. And they were once again folding in the postseason. He had to talk about them some.

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Four home runs in one inning was history-making — and great TV

If a baseball game is on some level a TV show, and it is — it’s how everyone but the 48,000 people inside Chase Field experienced the game — the central set piece was the third inning, in which the Diamondbacks hit four home runs.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” analyst Ron Darling said.

“Nor have I,” Costas said.

Of course they hadn’t. It had never happened before. No team had ever hit four home runs in one inning in a postseason game. And they were dramatic, and they were huge.

Gabriel Moreno, who later left the game with an injury, hit what looked like the record-breaking homer, but replays showed it went just foul. On the next pitch, he blasted another ball into the seats, and there was no doubt about that one.

“And then hits the next pitch to the moon!” Costas said. “There’s your fourth home run!”

Does that sound like a guy rooting for the Dodgers?

Darling, who went to Yale, provided the more analytical take on the four home runs: “1,650 feet of home runs for the Diamondbacks,” he said. “Approximately.”

It’s the “approximately” you’ve got to love. Attention to detail — it’s a baseball thing.

Dbacks sweep Dodgers in the upset of the year

Here’s another great thing about baseball: the context.

Costas and Darling talked about how the Diamondbacks were a middle-of-the-road team when it came to hitting home runs in the regular season, but have exploded in the postseason.

Or, as Darling memorably put it, “They found their slug in the post, right?”

Out of context it sounds like something an exterminator might say while checking out your yard. In the moment, though, it was just right.

I’m no Costas apologist, by any means. He’s the walking definition of the person who, if you ask them what time it is, he tells you how the watch works.

But sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — you need that. This game was one of those times.

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When do the Diamondbacks play again?

Now it’s on to the LCS.

Game 1 is set for Monday, Oct. 16, where the Diamondbacks will play either the Philadelphia Phillies or the Atlanta Braves. The game will air on TBS. They won’t be favored in that series, either. But this postseason Diamondbacks series has had more than enough twists for any TV show. Darling will be back as an analyst, along with Jeff Francoeur. Brian Anderson will handle play by play.

So Diamondbacks won’t have Costas to kick around anymore.

Their loss.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X, formerly known as Twitter: @goodyk.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Diamondbacks sweep Dodgers. Sorry, Bob Costas haters, but he nailed it