What a shame that Ryan Braun, last week named the National League MVP, didn’t take a few seconds to give credit where credit is deserved.
Braun, after all, became a lock to win the award even before the season began, when our incomparable all-seeing and all-knowing evaluator of human athleticism and horse flesh, Mike Francesa, dismissed Braun as nothing special, not even among the majors’ top two-way outfielders.
Francesa even ridiculed and stepped on a caller who asked him how he could not include Braun on his list of the best outfielders in the majors.
There is no one who speaks more authoritatively and more imperiously — and gets more colossally wrong — than Francesa. He can turn a three-TD road ’dog into a blowout winner simply by stating that the visitors shouldn’t even bother to get off the bus. Good thing he didn’t take the U.S. in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And while he’s so wrong so often, he’s relentless, speaking from way up there, as if he knows something — and plenty — that you don’t know and, because you’re a mere peon, wouldn’t know.
Braun’s NL MVP is reminiscent of the AL MVP won by Dustin Pedroia in 2008, after Francesa had dismissed Pedroia as “a nothing.”
Early this past baseball season, Francesa huffed and puffed about how Brett Gardner may be fast, but he doesn’t know how to steal bases. Gardner then led the AL with 49 stolen bases.
But the true greatness of Francesa’s Erasmus-like genius is its sweeping diversity. Horse racing? No one knows more.
Early last year he declared, and at great length, that the filly Zenyatta also was nothing special, that she couldn’t compete against the best. Not only did Zenyatta compete against the best, she was the best, so much so that she won the MVP, Horse of the Year.
Of course, Braun simply may be ineligible to win the NL MVP by Francesa’s reckoning because he’s half-Jewish, thus he may be a disloyal American.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in a long, on-air simplistic, facts-barren and bigoted spew that seemed taken from the Josef Goebbels How-To Handbook, Francesa not only laid the mass murders at the feet of Israel and on the heads of Jews, he strongly suggested that Jews are unpatriotic Americans, thus make suspect U.S. citizens.
WFAN still has been unable to find the tape from that day — what a coincidence! — and Francesa has denied saying any such things. But he’s a liar. As did many others, I heard him, and wrote about it then. And if I’m wrong, if I made this story up then had it published here, that would be highly actionable, a slam-dunk, can’t-lose libel suit. So then sue me.
More recently, when I again raised this issue here, Francesa again, on the air, denied it, this time adding that a Jewish watchdog agency had even given him, in this matter, clearance.
Really? Which agency? Who, where, when? Tell us. Show us. If the tape is missing, or was erased, or eliminated, or just disappeared or it’s being subjugated, how could any group have issued him such a thumbs-up, declaring that he never spoke such things?
Or was this another lie atop another lie?
Oh, well, we’ll just have to place an asterisk next to Braun’s name in the record book, perhaps a yellow Star of David. It must come as some consolation to Francesa that Braun won the National League MVP and not the American.
Texas QB an ‘impact’ on bench
Espn, near the top of Thursday night’s Texas-Texas A&M, showed Texas QB David Ash to be one of the game’s “Impact Players,” one ESPN would statistically track throughout the game in order to further distract viewers, clutter the screen and minimize the view of the game. Turned out Ash was pretty easy to track. He was on the sideline. He was in for two, maybe three plays.
During Texas-A&M, either analyst Jesse Palmer or his co-analyst Craig James (throw three guys in a booth and at least two can be indistinguishable) gave us this nice slice of sweet potato pie: “You’ve got to run the ball for as much positive yardage as you can.” Hmm.
* Kevin Kugler, play-by-play man on Westwood One Radio’s Packers-Lions, on Thursday offered some welcomed relief from the scream-at-anything/everything bunch. His play-calling, while hardly dull, seemed to reflect the action. His nuts-and-bolts down, distance, time and player IDs came quickly and clearly. Poor guy has a very limited future in the business.
* Pomp and Circumstances: All you have to do is check a team’s schedule to get a whiff of systemic academic fraud. Seton Hall’s basketball team, starting Nov. 17, played four games in six nights, three of the games in Charlotte, N.C.
* Memo to All Football Producers: Please stop showing late hits, cheap shots and everything of the kind only in slow motion. Whatever happened didn’t happen in slow motion.
* This year’s traditional loud and clear Thanksgiving F-bomb was provided by the 49ers sideline and presented by the NFL Network. Almost ruined the mood for midnight shopping.
* How much longer will Jerry Jones allow Rob Ryan to keep stealing his TV face time?
* Reader Josh Rosenstock emails that he finally figured out how it works with football telecasts: “If you run on the field, they won’t show you. If you act like an idiot but stay in the stands, they will. Makes perfect sense!”
* At 7:37 Thursday night, NFL Network posted a graphic that read, “49ers-Ravens, 8 p.m.” At the same time, a NFLN “Countdown to Kickoff” clock read, “53 minutes.” So the game was coming up in about 20 minutes, give or take an hour.
* Ndamukong Suh’s next Subway sandwiches TV commercial will show him stomping Jared into a ground beef Sloppy Joe, with relish.