TALK is cheap until it starts to cost you your sanity or hearing.
Reader John Cox of Woodside, N.Y., was watching Sunday’s Yankees game when Michael Kay asked Al Leiter about MLB adding replay. Leiter said he’s in favor of it, “as long as it’s quick.”
Kay: “That’s one thing that always makes me laugh, when people say, ‘As long as it’s quick.’ I mean, if it takes two, three, four minutes to get something right, isn’t that better? Where are we all running to that we can’t commit 3 1/2 hours to a game?”
On behalf of Cox and hundreds of thousands of viewers of Yankees telecasts over the last several seasons, allow me to holler, “What!?!”
This is the same Michael Kay who for years lamented the proliferation of interminable games; the same guy who concluded telecasts by telling us that the nine-inning or eight-inning game ran “an unmanageable three hours, 20 minutes.”
And now he finds such fans laughable?
Beyond that, for all the 8:05 ESPN games the Yanks play, if Kay now feels that 11:35 on a Sunday night is a reasonable time for a ballgame to end he should flatly say so. And then he can explain his 180-degree flip after years of declaring that there’s seldom a good reason for games to run past three hours.
Unless, of course, as an ESPN and YES/Yankee employee, he can’t touch either issue, thus he can’t explain why what he used to feel so strongly about he suddenly finds laughable when felt by others.
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From Sunday with Kay to Monday with Tony Kornheiser: After noting that Eli Manning, following seasons of doubt and criticism and having been eclipsed by brother Peyton’s personality and successes, led the Giants to the Super Bowl championship, Kornheiser provided this open to ESPN’s Browns-Giants:
“Cinderella story, right? Not exactly. Turns out it’s a pumpkin story. A very likeable fella, Eli doesn’t even get take one snap as reigning Super Bowl champion before getting kicked to the curb in his own city. Brett Favre comes to the Jets and chews up all the scenery on Broadway and it’s ‘Eli who?’
“Good thing the kid doesn’t like the limelight, because it’s gone!”
What easy and superficial nonsense. No media entity made a bigger fuss over the Favre saga than did Kornheiser’s ESPN, which actually made “Favre” a stand-alone “Bottom Line” category and produced a “special” devoted to Favre’s NFL future.
As for NYC kicking Manning to the curb, which city would have not made a fuss after its team landed Favre? And a week earlier, in an interview with NFL Network, Manning said he was thrilled Favre’s a Jet because it made his life so much easier.
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After throwing out the first pitch of a Little League World Series game on ESPN on Monday, former LLer Ryan Howard, bless his heart, gave an honest answer, but not the one that LL and its metal bat business benefactors preferred to hear.
When Gary Thorne asked if there’s a difference between wooden and metal bats, Ryan said: “A lot. With metal, you would get jammed and you could still hit it to the wall or hit it out. Wood bats tell the truth.”
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Early in Tuesday’s Braves-Mets on SNY, Keith Hernandez provided a neat stat: Atlanta catcher Brian McCann, a left-handed batter hitting .302, was hitting .309 against lefties.
In the seventh, the Mets brought in Luis Ayala, a right-hander. When McCann batted, Gary Cohen said that Ayala was being allowed to face him because Jerry Manuel is hoping that Ayala is effective against lefties and righties. When that McCann stat that Hernandez earlier was eager to note would have been best applied, was when it became completely lost.
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How much strategy does NBC Olympic track and field interviewer Bob Neumeier think goes into world-class 400-meter races typically run in under 45 seconds that he kept asking about it?
Reader David Kolb of Englewood, N.J., notes that Max Kellerman, during his 1050 ESPN radio shows, not only provides his enthusiastic personal commercial endorsements of Verizon Fios TV, he has even added that it’s better than Time-Warner cable. Given that Kellerman is an HBO boxing commentator and that HBO is a subsidiary of T-W, how long before he’s told to cut it out? My guess, David, is sometime today.
Another bogus scoop claim: Ch. 4 news anchor Sue Simmons reported Monday night that “Ch. 4 has learned” that Chris Russo would join Sirius the next day. If “the next day” constitutes a scoop, Ch. 4 was half-a-day late from when everyone else knew. And if joining Sirius was the scoop, everyone in Ch. 4’s audience who knows who Russo is knew four days earlier.