MLB

BASEBALL FANS DESERVE BETTER THAN STERLING

DON’T misinterpret this; it isn’t a rip, it’s a plea, a plea for change. Enough is enough. For those who care about baseball, a preventable, 20-year problem has become a crisis.

John Sterling, the radio Voice of the Yankees and a man who has always cherished the sound of his own voice while placing strained self-promotion over good-faith play-by-play, has created and cemented a dilemma: Every game played by the Yankees is a doubleheader — the game that’s played and the game Sterling calls.

This weekend, the games Sterling described did not exist. Some examples:

In the eighth inning Saturday, Sterling called a game-tying home run by Hideki Matsui — Sterling gave it his, “It is high … !” routine, culminating with, “It is gone!” But the ball, as Sterling several seconds later acknowledged, didn’t even reach the wall on the fly; it bounced over it.

And radio-reliant Yankees fans again were led to believe that a Yankees batter had performed the ultimate — had hit a home run — when he hadn’t.

In the fourth inning of Saturday’s game, Sterling and Suzyn Waldman fabricated a story. Johnny Damon lost sight of a pop fly as he approached the stands along the left-field line. Damon missed the ball, plain and simple as that.

But on the Yankees’ radio network, Sterling claimed the ball fell from Damon’s glove. Nonsense. Then Waldman added, “He had to fight a fan with a glove.” But there was no fan with a glove, no fan hindrance at all.

Later, Sterling would repeat that “fan with the glove interference story” as fact, as the eyewitness testimony of the Voice of the Yankees. But it never happened, nothing even close.

Friday’s broadcast wasn’t two innings old when Sterling had done his best/worst to wreck it.

Derek Jeter led off the bottom of the first with a line drive that was caught waist-high by Twins left fielder Denard Span in front of the warning track. Sterling, however, gave it his “Waaaay back!” treatment. Next he said the ball smacked against the wall. Finally, he said the ball was caught for an out.

The next batter, Damon, struck out on a 3-2 pitch that Sterling thought was strike two. Although the YES monitor in front of him showed a full count, Sterling blamed his error on the scoreboard operator.

In the top of the second, Sterling was so eager to describe a spectacular 6-4-3 double play, so eager to put his hollering pre-fab excesses to every play, he became the last in the house to notice that it wasn’t a double play; the low throw to first wasn’t caught.

Yesterday, Sterling didn’t bother to describe, as it happened, a seventh-inning wild pitch that made it 2-0, Twins. He suddenly declared that a run just scored, then explained it.

And, despite it all, Sterling’s on-air demeanor remains smug, haughty, condescending.

I’ve never advocated any sportscaster’s removal. I don’t take anyone’s livelihood lightly. But something’s gotta give — either Sterling gets better (most unlikely), gets his time reduced by a fresh voice (why not?), or gets out.

And the idea that New York baseball fans, the last 20 years and counting, deserve better is too parochial. What baseball fans, and where, deserve this?

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Lines of the Weekend: Friday, after Brett Gardner’s inside-the-park dash, YES’s Paul O’Neill said: “One of the quickest home-run trots you’ll see.” … Steve Somers, on WFAN Saturday complained about a caller who “always calls with the radio on in the background. Worse, it’s never on our station.”

It’s a Craig Carton, wiseguy, low-life sports world. In a promo for a new Versus TV show yesterday, a young man was asked what he’d do if he could spend the day with the Stanley Cup. “I’d use it to get [bleeped],” he said, expletive undeleted. What a pity.

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Bob Rosburg, accomplished PGA Tour pro who for ABC in 1974 became one of the first on-course, roving commentators, died last week at 82.

“Rossie’s” legacy is sustained in an expression that’s spoken by all levels of golfers, even if they’re unfamiliar with its derivation. Thirty years ago on ABC, after a player hit an approach shot close, Dave Marr would say: “You could hit a small bucket [of practice balls] and not do better, Rossie.”

To this day, a good shot will inspire some to this compliment: “You could hit a small bucket, Rossie.”

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If you didn’t think the world is crazy enough, Jeremy Schaap, from Serbia for ESPN’s “E:60,” reported otherwise. He updated the year-old story of Bryan Steinhauer, the SUNY-Binghamton student who was stomped into a coma by Miladin Kovacevic, a Binghamton basketball player twice Steinhauer’s size.

As Steinhauer, a graduate of NYC’s Stuyvesant High School, undergoes extensive physical and neurological rehab, Kovacevic fled to Belgrade after posting a $100,000 bond. He now plays for a Serbian pro team.

Though he didn’t feel much like speaking with Schaap, Kovacevic, Schaap noted, in January made an appearance in the Serbian parliament, invited by anti-Western politicians who paraded him as a hero. Kovacevic, incidentally, was recruited to Binghamton on money supplied by New York taxpayers.

phil.mushnick@nypost.com