THAT we should never expect better from John Sterling doesn’t make it any easier. To be stuck in a car, forced to listen to the 20-year Voice of the New York Yankees describe a game, is to be the victim of a crime against baseball, broadcasting and the public trust.
Monday, in the second inning, the Twins’ Brendan Harris scored from second on a base hit to right. There was a play at the plate.
Having had several opportunities to view the play, Sterling, heard locally on WCBS (880 AM), began the bottom of the second with a windy sermon about how baseball has certainly changed – in view of the incompetence just demonstrated by home-plate ump Mike Everitt. After all, Sterling said, once upon a time had Bobby Abreu charged that hit, fielded it cleanly, thrown a fastball strike to catcher Jose Molina, who then merely had to await the arrival of Harris before he tagged him out, Harris would have been called out.
According to Sterling, that was exactly what had happened. That was the mind’s-eye scene he crafted for his radio audience. That’s all we had, all we could rely on. And yet, and inexplicably, Sterling concluded, Everitt called Harris safe.
Could it really have happened that way? Having conditioned listeners not to believe a word he says, could it have happened that way?
And then Suzyn Waldman, who perhaps had heard enough, provided a strong clue that Sterling’s version was bogus. Harris, she said, might have gotten his hand to the plate “under the tag.”
Ohhh.
So maybe the play was nothing as Sterling had described it, nor the call as bad as Sterling decried it. Maybe? John Sterling sees 55,000 people in Yankee Stadium on rainy nights when there are 25,000 present.
To little surprise, TV replays supported Waldman’s suggestion while exposing Sterling’s conclusion as a wishful fabrication that the Yankees were done obvious dirt by a fundamentally flawed ump. It was, in fact, a very close play. The YES TV guys, relying on the same replays as Sterling, concluded it was too close for them to call.
But stuck in a car with John Sterling, voice of the most famous team in sports, Harris was out by a mile. Mile, after mile, after mile, season after season, to be stuck in a car with Sterling is to be stuck like no other baseball fans, anywhere.
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Hardly matters if he’s hitting .200 or .350, Jose Reyes‘ self-impressed demonstrations, the kind that maturity, if not Omar Minaya, should have by now eliminated, make him hard to root for.
By now we know where SNY’s team of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling stands on such acts. Yet, as Reyes, during and after his three-run homer on Wednesday, was shown performing three different check-me-out acts, starting with a jogging vogue, they indulged it under the transparent rationalization that, “He knew it was gone.”
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Reader Tim Castor of Merrick, LI, can see the future. A non-recruited college player will kick a game-ending field goal. It will be called “a walk-on walk-off.”
Gosh, Mike Francesa‘s long opening riff on Tuesday sounded familiar. Where had I just heard or read almost exactly the same words, numbers and take on Johan Santana? Oh, that’s right, that morning in Mike Vaccaro‘s column.
ESPN’s annual “ESPY Awards” show on Sunday, was, of course, stuffed with cheap put-downs and prurient content that was inappropriate for kids and alienating for right-headed, sports-minded adults. Isn’t that nice? Then it was back to ESPN for more on the latest athlete to be nailed for antisocial behavior.
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On July 10, to scant media notice, Mike Souchak died. He was 81. If you’re old enough to recall PGA telecasts and “Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf” TV series from the early 1960s, you’ll likely recall that Souchak, a muscular man who played golf and football at Duke, was the John Daly-bomber of his time.
As an impressionable kid, I was drawn to Souchak by his power the same way impressionable kids, 35 years later – for what became the worst reasons – were drawn to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.