Sorry, fellas, but I’m tired of turning on ball games and being lied to. Many of us get enough of that elsewhere, as in everywhere.
So as far as I’m concerned, David Cone and Paul O’Neill were lying to us Tuesday during YES’s Yankees-Mets telecast. I can’t believe that they believe what they told us.
That’s why excessive pandering — telling TV audiences that wrong is right, that they (and we) absolutely love what, off the air, they dislike — is helping to bleed baseball dry by 1,000 self-inflicted cuts.
The Mets led, 6-0, when Juan Soto homered to make it 6-1. Soto, who by now needs no introduction — he’s never shy to demonstrate his immodesty — exchanged a leaping high-five with third base coach Luis Rojas before reaching home to trade a flamboyant, rehearsed, lengthy handshake with Aaron Judge.
If we didn’t know five runs better, we might’ve thought the Yanks had just won the game, thus this wasn’t beneath Judge’s in-game, professional dignity.
But O’Neill and Cone were thrilled, or pretended to be thrilled.
O’Neill: “You like that bat-flip, huh Coney!?”
Cone: “Wow!”
O: “Almost went into the Mets dugout!”
C: “Big league style points!”
And then a slow-motion replay of the bat flip appearing to Cone’s and O’Neill’s continued merry approval.
I was convinced they’d fail a polygraph test; convinced they were full of it, insulting to YES’s respect-the-game audience.
Cone, who pitched 18 MLB seasons, would’ve been good with Soto’s response to one of his pitches? He’d have given him a smile and tug on his cap in salute? Or would there be a knockdown pitch brawl on the boil?
O’Neill, who had anger management issues as a big leaguer, would have enjoyed Soto’s display had his slumping team been losing, 6-1? As Soto’s opponent, he would have benignly suffered Soto’s repetitive, no-context act? Or would he have been instantly infuriated?
Cone and O’Neill would encourage the kids in their lives to exploit any sport to perform a self-impressed, me-first and me-only public demonstration?
Not a chance.
Are both Cone and O’Neill unaware that there’s a nationwide shortage of youth league umpires and on-field game officials due to the excessive misconduct of kids and coaches who were raised on bad is good images, provocations and consequences — as invited by commercial and TV-delivered pandering?
Kids’ league umps are daily assailed, then assaulted as per new-normal rotten sportsmanship. And replacement officials, if found, are short on rules knowledge, thus breeding even more hassles.
his home run Tuesday. USA TODAY Sports
Hey, Coney, would there be anything more hand-me-down sad than a 12-year-old performing an MLB Network-sold all-about-me bat-flip with his team down five runs?
Yet those who would preach civility are ridiculed as backwards “get off my lawn” relics.
So keep pandering, fellas. They thought Soto’s act was great, worthy of “big league style points”? Those who know better, know better. And I think they knew those guys were lying.
ESPN’s Kay makes mountain out of molehill
Even when he’s marginally correct, Michael Kay has the ability to talk us out of it.
Wednesday on his ESPN-NY radio show, Kay erupted over the inclusion of an ad characterizing SNY’s Mets booth as the best in the business.
I can see Kay’s point, not about the Mets having the best broadcast crew — what did Kay expect the ad to include, “They’re the sixth-best in the business?” — but about the promotion of a local TV competitor within a local ESPN show.
So he went off, again placing himself on a public psychoanalyst’s couch to declare that his YES Yankees’ crew is the best there is. He even fed his own everyone’s-out-to-get-me paranoia with, “Do you just expect me to take that lying down? I think our booth is the best in baseball.”
Thus Kay seemed to suspect that SNY’s ad copy was designed to target and attack him.
Off the air, Kay might’ve brought it up with management. Or, on the air, feigned emotional distress with a brief, “Ouch, that hurts.” He even could have had fun with it, especially since his three-man radio show is bereft of legitimate humor and burdened beneath serious and insufferable personal insecurities.
And so Kay saw to it that what could’ve been a legit point if handled correctly and, better yet, privately, became another session stuffed with self-afflicted, self-defeating, filter-less, tissue-thin skin and in-the-wrong-business sensitivity.
If Kay believes, “They’re all out to get me!,” it starts with Kay.
Despite the YES and SNY crews’ claim that Yanks-Mets hasn’t lost a drop of its fan appeal, TV told a different story in the form of empty expensive seats behind the Citi Field backstop.
Wednesday’s game, start to finish, couldn’t hide scores of empty up-close seats. Or weren’t we supposed to notice?”
This hide-and-seek TV baseball season continues.
Wednesday’s Yanks-Mets YES telecast was hidden behind an Amazon Prime subscription paywall, a waste of greed as it also appeared on SNY.
While Yanks’ Friday night games are regularly hidden on pay-more streaming networks, tonight the Yanks are on YES at Toronto while the Astros are in to play the Mets — but only on Apple+, which so poorly produces MLB games that only money could serve as Rob Manfred’s and team owners’ defense.
Priorities: After winning the U.S. Open, Bryson DeChambeau, the Saudi government money-summoned PGA Tour expatriate, embraced the trophy on the 18th green, but not before he took care to milk every nickel out of the scene.
Reader Dom LoVarco noted, via photos, that DeChambeau played without a watch on his wrist. But he wore one while posing with the trophy.
DeChambeau has an endorsement deal with Rolex.
USMNT must keep Pulisic in middle
The U.S. men’s national soccer team that defeated (pre-military coup attempt) Bolivia, 2-0, on Sunday — it easily could have been 5-0 — was led by left-side midfield star Christian Pulisic, who mostly played toward the center of the field.
And that’s where he belongs all the time. Playing the left side, as too often instructed, diminishes his advantages of foresight to anticipate the forward runs of teammates, his goal-scoring angles and his ability to use both feet as he can be more easily pinched toward his left foot.
In fortuitous fact, Sunday he twice took right side corner kicks, thus using his right foot.
Pulisic’s conspicuous skills as both a scorer and distributor are maximized from the middle, not on the left.
While Fox busies itself pitching itself as the top network for international soccer, it should back up a bit to learn the spelling of the game’s No. 1 star and attraction.
In a large graphic, Lionel Messi was identified as “Lional Messi.”
Even the non-sports fans in the room were blown away by the relentless gambling ads that surrounded the Yanks-Mets series on SNY and YES. At least once, gambling come-ons appeared simultaneously.
One co-starred family man John Legend to the tune of the Beatles’ “Come Together.” Its lyrics include: “Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease.”
