---

What in the world happened to fishing and hunting shows on television? It seems like overnight most of the fishing shows I enjoyed watching in the past - shows that tended to have a calming effect on the viewer - have been replaced by hard-rocking, high-fiving, testosterone-fueled dudes sporting spiky hair and flip-flops.

The hunting shows, in my opinion, are even worse. Now we're forced to look at disconcertingly tight full-face shots of out-of-breath guys with crazy-looking eyes whispering into the camera's lens as a 300-pound Boone & Crockett buck heads his way. Every time I see these guys, I think of the 1999 horror film, The Blair Witch Project, when one of the unlucky student film makers in the dark and forbidding Maryland woods turns the camera on himself so he can tell his mom and dad he loves them before checking out. "We are going to die out here! I am so scared!"

It seems many of these full-tilt shows nowadays are so focused on showcasing over-the-top personalities and musical sound-tracks, they forget to tell you a story, or at the very least, share some useful information you can apply to your own fishing and hunting experiences. Personally, I'd like to see a show on how a guy could, over the course of a few weeks in October and early November, re-train his bowels to not kick into high gear every single morning of the deer season while sitting in a stand.

The other night I gave this topic some thought and decided that the downfall of the outdoor show is not unlike the expansion of major league baseball, particularly the dilution of the talent pool. Major League-caliber players have always been pretty tough to come by, and that's evidenced by the simple fact that all clubs have a number of minor league farm teams. You've all heard of Triple A, Double A and Single A farm teams, but are you aware of the High A, Mid A and Low A minor league clubs? How about at least two - usually three - Rookie farm teams? That's right, each major league team typically runs seven or eight of these minor league farm clubs that are designed for one purpose and one purpose only, to develop major league-caliber talent.

So, let's pull out our calculators and see where we're at, shall we? There are (until MLB decides for financial reasons to expand again) 30 major league teams, each with, say, seven minor league clubs. Multiply 30 and 7, and then multiply that amount by 40, the number of players on a typical roster. What'd you get? I got 8,400 ball players all vying for about 1,200 positions. I mentioned the 40-man roster, but in reality, each team has a 25-man "active" roster with even fewer players than that playing regularly. So now we have about 720 or so major league slots to fill. See what I'm saying? Major league talent is truly rare.

Every time the league expands, as it last did in 1998 with the addition of the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now simply the Rays), it's forced to dip into its minor league farm systems to extract players that aren't ready to play at the major league level.

It's the same deal with outdoor television. There are simply too many of them. We're left to watch guys and gals that have no business being in front of a camera. Their talent still needs to be cultivated at the local access cable level - TV's farm system, so to speak. Plain and simple, television particularly cable television, has diluted the talent pool.

Seriously, I can spot guys each week hosting TV shows who are not good anglers. Or worse, they're one-dimensional anglers, unable to understand and generalize fish behavior and find success chasing a broad spectrum of fish species. I see guys crank on reel handles as if they have a cable winch in their hands. I see severely bent rods suddenly point directly at large fighting fish, and we all know what happens next - the line breaks or hardware fails. It looks to me like fishing came late in life to some of these guys. I can't speak for you folks out there, but if I see one more surfer-cum-fisher dude with a dark tan and perfect teeth high-five a fellow dude and say, "Great fish, bro!" I think I'm going to kill myself.

Sometimes I wish my brain didn't work the way it does. Flipping over and over in bed at 2:30 in the morning attempting to find some correlation between fishing and baseball and horror shows is exhausting work, not to mention the fact that I considered these thoughts to be perfectly reasonable and cogent in the first place.

If my deadline were tomorrow instead of today, I might've come up with even more questionable evidence supporting my somewhat flimsy theory. But then, re-reading it, I guess it doesn't sound too marginal.

Dan Brown's weekly outdoor column is brought to you by Frankie's Bait and Marine, in Chisago City, and St. Croix Outdoors, in St. Croix Falls, Wis.

---