{"id":880991,"date":"2026-09-02T17:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/880991\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T17:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:54:09","slug":"tim-kurkjian-quits-baseball-tonight-after-discovering-mma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/880991\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim Kurkjian Quits \u2018Baseball Tonight\u2019 After Discovering MMA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph theonion-dingbat\">BRISTOL, CT\u2014Claiming he was now convinced he had wasted his life covering \u201ca little boy sport,\u201d longtime ESPN analyst Tim Kurkjian announced Wednesday that he was quitting Baseball Tonight after discovering mixed martial arts. \u201cThey can hit each other, they can kick each other, they can break each other\u2019s arms\u2014it\u2019s incredible. You can\u2019t do any of that in baseball,\u201d said Kurkjian, explaining that after spending the past several days watching UFC highlights, he had come to appreciate the simplicity of \u201cjust two guys in shorts whaling on each other,\u201d which he argued was far more exciting than \u201clike, 20 different guys standing around in dirt\u201d and wearing \u201call kinds of stupid gloves and helmets and shirts\u201d covered with \u201cnonsense words\u201d such as Mets and White Sox. \u201cAnd MMA fights only last a few minutes instead of a million hours like a baseball game, so you don\u2019t have to piss away your whole day to watch it. Plus, when you win, you get a big awesome belt. Baseball players have belts, too, but they\u2019re small and boring. Yeah, baseball fucking sucks. MMA is better in every single way.\u201d At press time, Kurkjian was reportedly demonstrating his newfound love of MMA by putting Buster Olney in a rear-naked choke until the MLB insider went limp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BRISTOL, CT\u2014Claiming he was now convinced he had wasted his life covering \u201ca little boy sport,\u201d longtime ESPN&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":880992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82,305658,305659],"class_list":["post-880991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-television-streaming","tag-vol-62-issue-35"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=880991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}