Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

MLB

Here’s hoping things go ‘right’ moving forward

Ever consider whether it’s all just a giant put-on, a reel of cure-all, fix-all, get-rich-now infomercials?

On Friday, Joe Torre, MLB’s go-to guy for new replay rule applications, acknowledged a reversal that extended a half-inning in which the Reds scored seven on Wednesday, was a rotten second opinion.

OK, “getting it right” offers no such second-chance guarantees.

But this overrule, after a long delay, seemed the work of folks unfamiliar with baseball. A simple force play at the plate — Bucs’ catcher Russell Martin caught the throw, stepped on the plate then moved clear — was correctly seen then called.

But that team of ostensibly wiser overview umps in master control in lower Manhattan, inconceivably determined the runner was safe via the new catcher interference rule.

And so, in the populist pursuit to “get it right,” the plate ump got it right, the last-word replay umps all got it inconceivably dead wrong, and then the man who oversees the project acknowledged that right was overruled by wrong, and that in the interest of getting it right, the wrong undid a right, but it’s too late to right that wrong.

In the words of Maynard G. Krebs — the G. stood for Walter — “What an age we live in.”

Carlos Beltran’s game-ending homer, Friday, allowed the stat-minded and hot phrase-smitten to reach a different ridiculous conclusion. As repeatedly heard on WFAN, it was the Yankees’ “first walk-off hit in 70 games, this season!”

We’ll let reader Steven Arendash handle it from there: “You can’t get ‘walk-offs’ on the road!” So what a New York all-sports station reported as a first in 70 games, was, in fact, just 33.

But for consistent, colossal failure to demonstrate knowledge of what it claims to know best, ESPN’s capacity to share ill-applied research remains exceptional.

For all the work, money and personnel ESPN has invested in showing and promoting the World Cup, its center-stage sense of the event has, as per the network’s negligent habit, been laughable.

Thus, graphics have told us that this is Croatia’s “first appearance since 2006.”

Wow, eight years! Except the World Cup is contested every four years, so Croatia had missed exactly one in a row!

But everyone, everywhere seems to know what they’re doing and saying. On Wednesday night, after noting that Jays’ starter Mark Buehrle has 10 wins, ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” host Hakem Dermish, after two innings in Jays-Yanks — Yanks up, 1-0 — and while seated between two analysts, said, “Looking to get to 11 wins, what does he have to do tonight, going forward?”

Going forward? Well, for starters he has to pitch the third inning.

Going forward, as opposed to being frozen in time or even going backward, now seems a matter of advancing to the rear.

As the NFL pretends to have crossed into an age of human enlightenment, Andrea Kremer’s piece on NFL cheerleaders — as if their presence is an essential element of pro football — tomorrow on HBO “Real Sports, 10 p.m., tells otherwise.

In order to entertain big-ticket ticket-holders who otherwise have nothing to do at games except drink and await the ends of TV commercials, some teams are offering at-game “phone-in, order-up” visits from selected cheerleaders. Seriously.

Next? Perhaps “The Naked Bootleg Mezzanine Gentlemen’s Club” or stay-seated halftime lap dances.

Hop on, everybody! We’re going forward!

YES announcer Leiter is Al talk

Al LeiterYES

We hold these truths to be self-evident: a) Al Leiter, on YES’s Yankee telecasts, has good things to tell us about baseball. b) Leiter talks too much. C) The games he talks over are televised.

Thus, b) and c) combine to destroy a).

Leiter talks so much that regardless of what he’s saying he risks going unheard. He drowns analysis that otherwise would be appreciated in his alphabet gumbo. He’s the three C-Span channels at once — debate, speeches, discussion, analytical examinations, historical perspectives, personal reflections, advice, instructions and statistical data.

Throughout the Jays-Yankees series, Leiter, never gave the game a chance to put its pants on, to speak for itself. He jumped it early, relentlessly.

Lost becomes the idea and the ideal that we primarily tune in to watch. That’s a commonly uncorrected issue in TV game-casting: Those who talk too much would be twice as good speaking half as much.


As the issue of Redskins-as-slur intensifies, we’re reminded of the theme song from the 1960s TV show, “F Troop,” one that contained equal-opportunity slurs:

“Where Indian fights are colorful sights and nobody takes a lickin’,

“Where redskin and pale face both turn chicken!”


Eddie Olczyk’s son, Eddie Jr., turned 25, last week. His dad placed him on a float that paraded Senior and other 1994 Cup-winning Rangers in Manhattan. Junior, then five, thanked his dad for inviting so many people to his birthday party.

Unable to fill the seats

On Friday, Mets at Marlins on SNY, it was impossible to miss that one fan seated behind home plate. He was the only one. To think that in June even the worst teams used to fill the best seats.

And this new-age, sick-greed consistency is as much Bud Selig’s legacy as is Sammy Sosa’s sudden inability to comprende English before a Senate sub-committee, and Roger Clemens’ claim that Andy Pettitte “misremembers.”

Reader Ron Cole: “My son purchased the Playstation MLB ’14 game, and I saw something shocking: The expensive ticket sections in Yankee Stadium actually had people in every seat.”


Yet, more lost tapes: This time, last year, after the Spurs lost the NBA Finals to Miami, Mike Francesa — locally known to Native Americans and native Americans as Sitting Bull — authoritatively declared the Spurs kaput; they’d had a good run, but were now too old, thus this season they’d enter a rebuilding period.


The Big Ten Network continues to present nonsense-as-fact. The “Big Ten’s Greatest Games.” Last week, was the 2010 Missouri-Nebraska football game. Nebraska was not yet in the Big Ten, Missouri has never been.


The rule: No acknowledgment of a friend’s deed appears here unless it meets one of two qualifiers: A murder conviction or a hole-in-one in my presence (credibility factor). To that end, Fred Shechter did it the hard way: Saturday, 5-wood into the wind, the 207-yard fourth at New Jersey’s Battleground CC.