Anyone watching TBS’ coverage of the baseball playoffs has found it uncomfortable watching the studio analyst debut of Frank Thomas, who appears like he’d rather be anywhere else than offering insight on the playoffs.

When TV executives decided several years ago to employ active players as analysts, it seemed like a dubious proposition. After all, current players are unlikely to offer candid opinions on anything, not wanting to offend teammates and opponents they’d be facing again the following season.

Unfortunately for viewers, Al Leiter and Mark Grace did a terrific job for ESPN and, not surprisingly, are now excellent analysts for the Yankees and Diamondbacks broadcasts, respectively. TV producers, forever playing copycat, now trot out current players for every postseason series in every sport. With little training beforehand, it’s usually a recipe for disaster.

The players, like Thomas, usually are chosen based on name recognition. If TV producers were smart (insert punchline here), they’d choose players based on their on-camera presence and how they appear in interviews. Fortunately, baseball players have opportunities to do interviews EVERY SINGLE DAY. It’s easy to tell who will be good in a broadcast situation and who will not be.

In the case of guys like Leiter, Grace, Tony Gwynn, and ex-Devil Ray John Flaherty, now a part of the Yankees broadcasting team, it’s no surprise that they’re naturals on television. That’s because during their careers they were accommodating to the media, not only giving their time but offering insightful answers that were as candid as possible. After doing literally thousands of these interviews, they were able to make smooth transitions to the broadcast booth. (Gwynn, however, needs to speak up. It seems like he’s too far away from the microphone. He has one of the most distinctive voices you’ll ever hear – and should want to hear. I learned more from interviewing Gwynn over the years than from any other player.)

Thomas, on the other hand, has had a combative relationship with the media, especially in Chicago. After being accommodating for the first few years of his career, he generally avoided reporters. Even though he’s a good-looking, well-spoken guy with a big grin – people used to say he looked like an extra-large version of the actor Gary Coleman – he now comes across on TV the way he does when facing reporters: guarded, uncomfortable, even paranoid.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to baseball. Eric Dickerson never spoke to the media as a player. Because of his stellar career as an NFL running back, he was given an opportunity to work as a sideline reporter for Monday Night Football. Not surprisingly, he was a trainwreck, stumbling over sentences and struggling to offer any sort of coherent insight. ABC soon let him go. What a shame. Dickerson could have used all those years in the NFL to hone his on-air camera presence, much like Tiki Barber did.

There are players like Bill Walton and Sterling Sharpe who avoided the media and gone on to solid television careers, but they’re the exception.

Then there are ex-jocks who fall in the middle. Cal Ripken, who is working for TBS, and Fred McGriff, who does TV work here in the Tampa Bay area, were generally accessible to the media as players. Always professional and polite, they still kept their guards up, often talking in “coachspeak” and not offering a lot of insight or candor, usually just the minimum in terms of quotes. This is the formula guys like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez have learned to follow. Ripken and McGriff seem okay on TV, but they have a long way to go to reach the Gwynn-Leiter level, which is less a reflection of natural personality than it is how they approached interviews as players.

None of this really matters. We’re talking about guys – even Leiter and Grace – who made in excess of $45 million in their careers. Ripken, McGriff, and Thomas made much more. None of them needs to do TV work and perhaps in the case of Ripken and Thomas, they’re just trying out the TBS gig to see if they like it. As someone who has struggled to develop a comfortable on-air TV presence, I understand the challenge.

But if athletes aspire to careers in television, all they have to do is agree to some informal on-the-job training every day with the media.

To remedy the Thomas situation, TBS announced today that John Smoltz will be joining the TBS studio team beginning Sunday. Smoltz will be much more comfortable than Thomas bantering with host Ernie Johnson, a longtime Braves announcer. With more meaningful postseason experience than any pitcher of his generation, Smoltz will have plenty of insight.

Most importantly, Smoltz is a terrific interview who has always made himself available to the media. Like most great athletes, he makes his teammates better. So even though Smoltz no longer is a relief pitcher, Thomas and Ripken no doubt will appreciate this call to the bullpen.

Bruce Froemming retired as a Major League umpire last week, completing a record 37-year tenure in the big leagues. The 68-year-old received a nice ovation while working in Milwaukee, where he lives during the off-season, and received warm wishes from people throughout the game.

Tim McClelland was behind the plate on Monday night when the Colorado Rockies came from behind to defeat the San Diego Padres and advance to the National League playoffs. McClelland ruled that Rockies outfielder Matt Holliday was safe when he slid headfirst into home with the winning run. Television replays were inconclusive, though Padres fans – already believing the umps are against their team since Padres president Sandy Alderson once was a league official overseeing the men in blue – now have more fuel for their conspiracy theories.

One might assume Froemming is a highly-regarded umpire and McClelland a guy of modest credentials. Actually, the opposite is true.

One of my most challenging assignments came in 1998, when I was the point reporter for an anonymous survey of Major League Baseball players. We asked them who they believed were the best – and worst umpires – in baseball. As you might imagine, nobody wanted to talk on-the-record about this for fear of reprisals. Many players didn’t even want to do that.

Along with several of my USA Today Baseball Weekly colleagues, we fanned out across the country and approached the players we knew best. All told, we sampled about 100 players. We took the data and ranked the five best and five worst umpires in each league. (Back then, umpires worked only one league.) Froemming was rated one of the five worst in the National League, with players suggesting he had a hair-trigger temper and was burned out on the game.

When the story came out, Froemming blasted the piece, suggesting that 100 players was hardly a representative sampling. Interestingly, the survey was widely-quoted (if rarely attributed) by baseball broadcasters and we received several reporting awards for our efforts. Shortly thereafter the MLB Players Association did its own survey, with presumably higher levels of participation, and the results were almost identical, with Froemming again rated low.

McClelland? In both surveys, he was among the highest rated. Players praised his consistency, his work both behind the plate and on the bases, and his fair, even demeanor.

A year after the Baseball Weekly survey, MLB managed to break the powerful umpires union. With the umpires’ labor agreement about the expire, umpire negotiator Richie Phillips made the ill-advised decision to have all of the umpires turn in letters of resignation.

Alderson, the former general manager of the Oakland A’s who assembled the team’s late ’80s dynasty, was working as an executive in MLB’s front office at the time. He graciously accepted the resignations. The umpires backpedaled, rescinding their resignations, but MLB to some degree got to pick and choose who it rehired. Some umpires struggled to get back into the game for years. Several never did, taking early retirement. Phillips was out, the union was busted, and Alderson and MLB now had disciplinary power over umpires that they hadn’t possessed in nearly two decades.

In 2005, Alderson left the MLB front office to become an executive with the Padres. Several players privately have suggested that the umpires have since taken out their frustrations with Alderson on the team.

Anything is possible, but there’s been quite a bit of turnover in the umpire ranks in the last decade and many younger umpires were not part of the 1999 battle. Certainly nobody would question the integrity of McClelland. If anything, players and managers seem more satisfied with the work of all umpires since the ‘99 labor dispute took the power out of the hands of the umpires union and brought it back to MLB. Even Froemming seemed like a better umpire in recent years.

No system of officiating is perfect. But as the Holliday slide indicates, not even instant replay is always conclusive. Against that measuring stick, baseball umpires are pretty darned good.