HIGH, FAR AND GONE: Nick Swisher’s 400-plus-foot homer on Saturday got a call from John Sterling that he could have given for a shot barely over the right-field fence at Yankee Stadium. (Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post)
It’s just not fair. This is New York, we’re baseball fans …
It’s not fair that in Tampa Bay and in Oakland and in Chattanooga and Topeka and throughout the Appalachian League, for crying out loud, baseball fans, at worst, can hear a decent radio call of their home team’s games.
But in New York, capital of the world, Yankees broadcasts are …
It’s just not fair.
You bet, I’m whining.
I know it’s too late, but it still strikes me — like a 2-by-4 — that there is no one within the Yankees authority structure to demand that John Sterling cut it out, and at long last start placing the games, the Yankees and the fans ahead of John Sterling.
Do they not listen? Can they possibly believe that Sterling’s even an adequate play-by-play man, that he well represents the most famous franchise in sports, a franchise once represented as well by Mel Allen and Red Barber as it was by Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford?
What, after all, do the current bosses like about Sterling beyond the fact that he reports that Yankee Stadium is packed when all those crazy-expensive seats right in front of him are empty?
Yankees radiocasts remain ludicrous, relentlessly childish, just plain awful, a sustained bad joke perpetrated on the good baseball senses since the appointment of Sterling, 21 years ago.
Saturday, Nick Swisher hit a huge home run, off the face of the upper deck. A monster job. For all of Sterling’s pre-fabricated, exaggerated and nonsensical calls, this was one that surpassed his baloney.
Here was a home run that deserved immediate specifics, one that listeners should not have been left to guess about or find out about later.
But for Sterling, it was just another home run, one that served as preface to more of his stupid, self-absorbed shtick.
This is how Sterling described it: “Driven to right. If it’s fair, it’s gone. That ball is … gone! Nick Swisher drives one into the right-field seats to get the Yanks a run down; his second home run in as many days. Nick Swisher is positively Swish-a-licious!”
That’s right; he hit it “into the right-field seats,” a home run indistinguishable from most others. Sterling again chose his signature nonsense over all else, then fed it to a discerning New York radio audience as a substitute for legitimate, descriptive play-by-play.
No different than in 1996, when, immediately after Dwight Gooden completed his no-hitter, Sterling chose to holler his “Thaaaaaaaa, Yankees win!” nonsense.
Not that we expected better then, or on Saturday.
Only much later, after seeing a TV replay of Swisher’s bomb, did I see that those “right-field seats” were nearly in the upper deck!
Twenty-one years of this sophomoric gimmickry. Sterling, hired by George Steinbrenner because his boot-licking appealed to the Yankees owner, remains “The Voice of the New York Yankees.” What a stinking shame.
“Did you hear about Swisher’s home run Saturday?”
“Yeah; I was in the car. I heard it was Swish-a-licious.”
They’re going crazy from the heat
Thursday afternoon, 96 degrees, and the Mets were wearing their white uniforms — with black caps.
Speaking of the heat, Keith Hernandez, on Friday on SNY, spoke of an infielder being “A gold golf glover.”
Saturday, watching a stakes race for fillies on NBC from Saratoga Springs, where the thermometer hit nearly 100, made me want to call the ASPCA.
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Monday, the Mets made it 4-1 in the ninth when Jason Bay hit a one-out sac fly with the bases loaded. Reader Ken Collier of East Stroudsburg, Pa., asks why several Mets met Bay with high-fives. Easy: They have him in their Fantasy League.
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Here, there and everywhere: England’s National Rugby Team, which has worn white kits (what they call uniforms in the UK) since 1871, has, on Nike’s orders, changed. Take a guess to what. That’s right, it now will wear black jerseys with black shorts.
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Gary Cohen screamed so hysterically after David Wright‘s 3-2 count, two-run, go-ahead homer yesterday, he turned woofers into tweeters.
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WFAN’s web poll yesterday asked which wide receiver the Jets should sign: 1) Santonio Holmes, 2) Braylon Edwards, 3) Plaxico Burress, 4) Randy Moss. Next week: How would you prefer to be executed: Gas, injection, rope or firing squad?
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A minor annoyance: We can do the math, yet several radio updaters, when giving final scores of 8-4, 6-3 and 4-2, find it important to tell us that the winning team “doubled up” the losing team. If it’s a 2-1 final, they go with “edged,” as if we couldn’t tell.
Doc has the Rx for great TV
With Doc Emrick retired from Devils telecasts — he’ll remain on NBC, VS and NHL TV — Joey Wahler, an NJ News 12 and WFAN reporter, nails Emrick’s presence and essence:
“He was calling a Devils’ game one night when he wasn’t feeling well. He said, ‘I’m struggling with a cold tonight, although it won’t affect my enjoyment of the game. … And I hope it won’t affect yours.’ ”
Whoever replaces Emrick, no matter how good, is in a tough spot, like Larry Holmes supplanting Muhammad Ali as heavyweight champ. Yet MSG’s Steve Cangialosi was always a steady, prepared and selfless backup that he could handle the burden.
Meanwhile, had Emrick chosen baseball instead of hockey, he’d be nationally embraced, way up there with Vin Scully, as a treasure.
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ESPN, the Infomercial: U.S. Women’s Soccer Team goalie Hope Solo was interviewed Friday on ESPN’s “First Take.” Talk turned to whether she’d compete on ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars.” Of course, it did, ESPN and ABC belonging to the Disney Fatherland.
And it doesn’t matter that urban AAU basketball now constitutes the sport’s powerful, sneaker cartel-underwritten underworld. ESPN just hosted (from ESPN’s Disney World) and televised (on ESPNU) a now annual AAU showcase/meat-locker for 11th graders.
ESPN even threw in its Top 100 male child rankings.
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Friday’s Post carried Marc Berman‘s piece about a one-on-one chat with Knicks first pick Iman Shumpert, how he’s coping with the NBA lockout, how he plans to work out with other Knicks. That night, SNY’s “SportsNight” repeated and reported that story, no source provided, as if it were its own.
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Carroll “Beano” Cook, the 79-year-old Pittsburgh-based curmudgeon — introduced to an unsuspecting nation by ESPN in 1986 — has been elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.