How is it that the country’s most famous baseball team, playing in the country’s largest city, presents the world’s worst radio broadcasts?
How? Hard work and preparation, that’s how.
Branch Rickey left us with, “Luck is the residue of design” and, before that, Louis Pasteur explained that, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
To that end, Friday’s Yankees-Dodgers broadcast could only be what it was designed to be: the most unprofessional, undignified radiocast of a Yankees game, with the exception of the next one, and the one after that.
Outside of growing worse — like a rash — they’re all the same, these days, a disgrace, a parody of a parody of a parody. Yankees radio has no more to do with listening to a ballgame than having change in your pocket constitutes a tour of the U.S. Mint.
Before the game was two innings old, the broadcast, starting with a recording of “The John Sterling Self-Promotional Calls Overture,” sounded like a put-on.
Unless you choose to curl up with a good book — The Yellow Pages, for example — there’s nothing more insulting than the Yankees on radio. Friday, if a product went unattached to in-stadium commercial reads — ads beyond those heard between half innings — that product either had not yet been invented or had been discontinued.
The lineups were sponsored, the ID of the umpires was sponsored, the weather was sponsored, a mention of CC Sabathia launched a read for C&C Cola, and there was something tacked to a read for Peerless Boilers.
And in just 15 minutes Geico could insure the AFLAC duck.
What little play-by-play Sterling could manage or chose to speak was brief. Unless he had the copy memorized, he and Suzyn Waldman had to turn away from the game to read ad after ad. It’s amazing Sterling still finds the time and energy to present his smug, incomplete and terribly inaccurate game descriptions.
Friday, there was even an “Attention shoppers!” episode. In the midst of an inning, instead of perhaps hearing where the outfield was playing or anything else that might have allowed us to watch the game with our ears, we were told that Steiner Sports Collectibles, an official take-its-cut partner of the Yankees, is holding a right-now, act-now sale — “Francisco Cervelli autographed baseballs, 50 percent off.”
Fifty percent off? Off what? How much would a Francisco Cervelli ball normally go for? And how long will this special offer last? Should I pull over and dial that 1-800 number? Or risk using my cell phone while driving?
“But Officer, they had Francisco Cervelli autographs on special!”
“Well, OK, then; I’ll let you go with a warning, this time. By the way, what’s the score?”
“I have no idea. They haven’t gotten to that yet.”
But everything about Yankees radio broadcasts has been discounted, reduced, diminished, disgraced. Pinstripe Pride? How much? For you? The seediest flea market would draw the line.
This is what the 27-Time World Champion New York Yankees now provide on radio, all season, every season. Their radio broadcasts only get worse, and there’s another one coming, tomorrow night.
YES tries Dodgin’ Torre
I don’t care if everyone passes a polygraph, there is no way, Friday in Los Angeles, that YES staffers, truck through booth, weren’t under direct or tacit orders to ignore or minimize the presence of Joe Torre, once a Yankees manager (but only for 12 years).
In YES’s lengthy, two-segment open, neither Michael Kay nor John Flaherty even mentioned Torre. Not until the telecast was 32 minutes old was “Torre” spoken.
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Steve Somers‘ shot at the Twins catcher Joe Mauer and his All-American image, Friday on WFAN, was more cheap than clever. When did clean become something to mock?
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With beefy (overweight) Jose Mijares in for Minnesota yesterday, Gary Cohen, on SNY, noted the pitcher had been on bereavement leave and that, “The Twins don’t believe he picked up a ball, for a week.” Keith Hernandez barely allowed Cohen to finish: “Looks like he didn’t miss a meal.”
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TV Shot of the Weekend: Bill Clinton seated beside Mick Jagger at United States-Ghana. Caption-writers on your marks, get set, go!
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SNY’s Twins-Mets, yesterday, included this from Ralph Kiner about Don Drysdale: “You had to hit him before he hit you.”
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FOX throwing Tommy Lasorda and Reggie Jackson in the booth with Joe Buck and Tim McCarver on Saturday made for a better notion than reality.
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Baseball in the Age of Bud 1: Yankees-Dodgers, Saturday, 8½ innings, no designated hitter, 10 minutes short of four hours. 2: Sunny Sunday afternoon, Mets, in their nice new ballpark, making their move on first place. Rows and rows and rows of good but empty, too-expensive seats.
‘Freeze Frame’ graphic on the ball … literally
Frankenstein TV: Friday, top of the seventh, after Brett Gardner argued an out call after a close play at first base, second baseman Jamey Carroll to James Loney, YES took us to its “Coors Light Freeze Frame” to allow us to judge the call.
The video froze as Gardner’s foot was about to hit the bag and Loney was about to catch the throw. So, throw or foot, which arrived first?
That became impossible to see, let alone judge, as the Coors graphic covered the ball and Loney’s glove.
“Ya’ can’t really tell,” said Michael Kay.
Well … it was more a matter of, “Ya’ can’t really see because the ‘Coors Light Freeze Frame’ disappeared behind the ‘Coors Light Freeze Frame’ graphic.”
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FOX’s Tim McCarver still has his fastball. Saturday, top first: “It’s always alarming when the starting pitcher [Hiroki Kuroda] and starting catcher [Russell Martin] have two meetings before the first out is even recorded. Always a bad sign.”
Next pitch, Mark Teixeira hit a three-run homer.
Incidentally, reader Mark Morley wonders what happens in a MLB game the day pitcher and catcher are Japanese: “Does the catcher bother to give signs or does he just holler in Japanese, ‘Fastball’?”
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Not that there was a good way to handle it on a Saturday afternoon telecast, but Gary Cohen noted that Johan Santana had “a difficult week” following “revelations that he had an encounter with a woman, last winter.” With ballparks and broadcasts loaded with ads for booze, casinos and erectile dysfunction pills, what the hey, let ‘er rip!
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The LeBron James Watch? Call me when it’s over.