By most accounts — including mine — Giants co-owner John Mara is a very decent man, aka “a good guy.”
But when Mike Francesa, on his WFAN show from new PSL Stadium on Friday, asked Mara how much the seats just in front of them go for, and Mara said $500 per game per ticket and “$12,000 for the PSL,” Mara couldn’t possibly have given such a preposterous answer without adding, “I know that’s a preposterous cost to attend a football game.” But he didn’t.
And that cost is not even close to the most costly — the most preposterous — that the Giants and Jets now charge for PSLs, game tickets and the right to remain or become their customer, the right to pay the teams’ mortgage on a new stadium that, even in good economic times, wasn’t needed, unless one regards more luxury boxes as essential.
Francesa’s session with Mara was interesting in that Francesa asked some good questions (see above), yet blew past logical ones. When Mara said, “We couldn’t have built the new stadium without PSLs,” that statement begged for, “Then why did you build it?” — a question he didn’t ask.
But Francesa did say that PSLs rub him the wrong way — creating the rare anticipation that he was going to stand up for the disenfranchised little people — but then he quickly dismissed the issue with, “But it’s not my money.” Ah, that common man’s touch.
And when Mara volunteered that the sight lines in abandoned Giants Stadium were “the best in the NFL,” Francesa passed on a chance to ask something like this:
“Then why, especially in view of PSLs, insane ticket prices — including must-buy exhibition games — and the cold, cruel elimination of generations of good/bad/worse-times customers, did Giants Stadium, just 33 years old, have to be destroyed?”
Sight lines? The Roman Coliseum was completed in the first century A.D. It’s still around, seats 50,000 and has no obstructed-view seats. Three big league ballparks completed here in the last two years — for a total of approximately $3.5 billion — are loaded with obstructed-view seats. Surely the work of the Greco-Roman spirit Prepostoris, patron muse of the absurd.
YES crew takes Tex head-on
YES’s Ken Singleton/John Flaherty team began the Yankees’ West Coast trip strongly, then grew stronger. Friday, after Mark Teixeira knocked the Angels’ 27-year-old rookie catcher, Bobby Wilson — two-plus innings into his first start — out of the game (and into a hospital with a concussion), Singleton and Flaherty did something that among Yankees TV/radio voices is uncommon:
They looked at the play objectively, calmly and clearly concluding that there was no good reason for Teixeira to have wiped out Wilson, that Wilson was slightly up the first-base line, thus he’d “shown Teixeira home plate” and a basic hook slide would have scored the run, no harm, no foul. And they made no apologies for their take.
On the Mets’ radio side, Saturday, Howie Rose and Wayne Hagin became incredulous when Atlanta’s Troy Glaus, on a day when fly balls already had proven difficult to track under a blinding sun, didn’t bother to run after hitting a fly to center — a ball Angel Pagan lost.
Rose and Hagin added that the discard of sensible, winning-baseball fundamentals at the game’s highest level is an epidemic, how, game after game — often several times per game — the unacceptable is becoming standard.
Two innings later, Yunel Escobar cost the Braves at least one run and gifted the Mets a double play when he apparently didn’t know how many outs there were and failed to tag up from third.
As for that fly Pagan lost in the sun, it was scored a double. On SNY, Gary Cohen asked Ralph Kiner what, in such cases, distinguishes a hit from an error. Kiner: “A lot depends on where you’re playing. In Little League, that should be a two-base hit.”
ESPN ‘live’ draft DOA
Not that by now we expect better, but after weeks of begging viewers not to miss its live NFL Draft coverage, ESPN disallowed just that; it was too busy selling ESPN or taking us here, there and everywhere else.
Friday’s Round 2 “coverage” looked and sounded like a satire of ESPN: screen-choking graphics, ESPN’s cast of thousands, its poor sense of timing and its overall dependence on self-defeating and mindless excesses made ESPN’s advertised intentions impossible. The moments most tuned in to see — live selections from the podium — were shown only sometimes.
When Buffalo’s second-round pick, 41st overall, was announced, ESPN stuck with a too-long video chat with Browns president Mike Holmgren. We could hear in-house reaction to the choice, but not his name. ESPN then went to commercials.
But by then ESPN’s intentions were clear: The big story was the names of Mel Kiper’s top 10 players — ESPN is big on top 10 lists — not yet picked.
Cards’ new unis (oxy)moronic
Hail, hail the gangwear’s here! The NFL’s Cardinals unveiled their new jerseys — what a shock, they’re black! You were expecting Cardinals to stick with red? They join, among others, the Louisville Cardinals, St. John’s Red Storm, Duke Blue Devils, Texas Tech Red Raiders, Toronto Blue Jays, Harvard Crimson and Rutgers Scarlet Knights in black uniforms.
If computerized K-Zone, PitchTrax, StrobeProbe and UmptyDumpty-Cams are essential to appreciate postseason baseball on FOX and TBS, why haven’t they appeared within their regular-season telecasts?
Golf Channel’s “Shot of the Day” from Friday’s PGA stop in New Orleans was a natural “Wow!” — video of a lightning bolt that struck about 350 yards away, creating a fire ball.
Memo to Mets radio man Wayne Hagin: Careful, not all Yiddish expressions are clean.
If new Met Ike Davis looks like Bruce Springsteen, both look like old Met Dave Magadan.
Soundalikes: As heard yesterday for an inning on TBS’s Cubs-Brewers, Milwaukee play-by-player Bob Uecker and Warner Wolf. Exact soundalikes, uncanny. In the 1970s, Uecker and Wolf were together on ABC’s MLB telecasts.
In Lexington, Ky., last week, a man bowled a perfect 300 game. His name? Charlie Bowling. And now you know the rest of the story!