A consumer’s guide to the best and...

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: Fox Sports’ “Catcher Cam” at All-Star Game.

If we can send a roving camera to Mars and beam back laser-crisp color photographs from the planet’s surface, why can’t we strap a mini-cam to the side of Mike Piazza’s head and see just how big a bend Greg Maddux gets on that curveball of his?

Sounded like a good idea to Fox, which, with much pomp and self-congratulation, trotted out the revolutionary “Catcher Cam” for its telecast of Tuesday’s 68th All-Star game in Cleveland.

Fox had commentator Tim McCarver and Piazza preview the bulky device before the game, with both men staring quizzically at the contraption and Piazza observing, “It’s a little heavy.”

It’s not heavy, it’s the latest bell and/or whistle Fox is trying to attach to baseball in a never-ending effort to enliven a game so sluggish that Nike has built an advertising campaign around it.

Nike’s ads, peppered throughout the broadcast, featured such perennial complaints about baseball as “The Game Is Too Slow” and “The Games Are Too Long,” and, without apologizing, concluded with the same piece of loutish advice: “Got A Problem With Baseball? Move To Norway.”

(Which, come to think, is not a bad idea. Norway is beautiful this time of year and, I hear, Albert Belle rarely visits.)

The early word on Catcher Cam?

NASA still has a leg or two up on Fox Sports.

The footage from the side of Piazza’s right temple looked like one of “National Geographic’s” underwater shots--grainy and a little fishy.

The mini-camera sits just alongside a catcher’s right ear, making it ideal for a sport such as boxing. Mike Tyson’s next fight, perhaps?