The MLB All-Star Game has unfortunately been handed over to Pat McAfee, who spent Monday kicking off the week’s festivities on ESPN. What better way to get baseball fans excited about the Home Run Derby than by subjecting them to a few hours of a poached ex-punter bellowing about a sport he barely follows while he embellishes his yinzer accent?
McAfee had a few lowlights today. While emceeing a press conference with Tarik Skubal, Paul Skenes, Dave Roberts, and Aaron Boone, he stammered his way through an answer to some pointed questioning by Jen Ramos Eisen. He also duffed an interview with Shohei Ohtani, at one point instructing Ohtani’s interpreter to provide some “energy on the delivery” of his question. But McAfee’s most embarrassing moment was probably donning a sleeveless jersey while sucking up to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred by stumping for a salary cap:
Enough of this guy. Nude Count Orlok, as portrayed by Bill Skarsgard in the 2024 film Nosferatu, would have been a better choice to host ESPN’s All-Star Week.
Count Orlok is a stinking, rotting corpse whose singular focus is traveling to Wisborg so that he may indulge his vampiric impulses while taking possession of Ellen Hutter’s everlasting soul. These are circumstances that would seemingly give McAfee an advantage in the hosting category, but Orlok’s life experience would in fact be quite useful on air. As someone who achieves his goals through patience, dedication, and maniacal focus, Orlok would be much better positioned to relate to an athlete like Ohtani. An undead creature who manages to execute a transcontinental real-estate transaction and then travel across the sea while sealed in a coffin, all for the sake of rekindling a psychosexual romance with a woman whom he’d only previously met in a vision, knows better than anyone what it takes to achieve seemingly impossible goals, just as Ohtani does.
It seems to me that Orlok also has the potential to bring more wit and charm to the airwaves than McAfee can. His accent and booming voice have a way of disarming guests by unmooring them from their senses and attacking their psyche with an unholy dread that makes it impossible for them to differentiate reality from nightmares—I bet you could get some pretty interesting answers from interview subjects who find themselves in that state. When Orlok used his dark power of influence to convince Thomas Hutter, who thought he was simply helping Orlok buy a house in Wisborg, to sign a contract binding his wife’s soul to Orlok’s, the Count cut through the tension of the moment by growling, “Now are we neighbors.” That kind of bone-dry wit plays in any interview setting.
And one thing’s for sure: Orlok would not have participated in any anti-labor propaganda for the sake of currying favor with a weasel like Manfred. The good Count would have immediately seen Manfred for what he is—an obsequious runt—and spent the first portion of their interview terrorizing the commissioner by implanting a vision of dread wolves feasting on his entrails into his head. He would have then sucked Manfred’s blood, crazy-style, right there on the stage before allowing him to be born anew into the world as a familiar, ready to spend the rest of his days eating rats and doing Orlok’s bidding.
Count Orlok also has a cool mustache, which I think would score well with ESPN’s demographic.