Phil Mushnick

Hard to back Olympic teams lacking true American pride

NFL's 'black' and 'white' anthems will only promote divisiveness

MLB broadcasts keep playing ignorant to rotten baseball

MLB finally gets one right

Some English soccer fans' vile bigotry easy to see coming after Euro loss

I suspect the reason merry-go-rounds don’t circle backwards is to prevent kids from vomiting cotton candy all over the horses. Backwards would be more go-round than merry, bad for business.

Yet those who call the shots at MLB are smugly tethered to backwards and bad business.

In MLB’s attempts to speed the pace of play by making inedible hash of games — automatic walks, seven-inning doubleheaders, runners placed at second in extra innings — while inviting long and totally unintended replay delays, the one effective change it could legislate would be to shorten TV and radio commercial time to 1:30 from 2:05 per half inning.

That would save almost 10 minutes of dead time per nine innings. Before TV money became the reason MLB gets out of bed every morning, just over a minute lapsed between half-innings. Games played in snappy order helped sustain baseball’s popularity and status as our national pass-time. For decades prior to the addition of VPs of Marketing, kids were born to play and love baseball.

Game 7 of the 1960 Yankees-Pirates World Series, won 10-9 by Pittsburgh, was played in 2:36. That famous (or infamous to this 8-year-old, at the time) game was played in sunlight on a Thursday, Oct. 13.

Today, it would have been played in November. It would’ve begun at 8:15 p.m. and been played in over four hours, ending after midnight, thus unseen by kids and adults in Pittsburgh and New York, to name two large cities in the Eastern Time zone.

But such a between half-innings change — one that doesn’t alter the game — would cost, uh-oh, some money. Both MLB and national and local baseball networks would have to take a little less in TV and commercial revenue.

Players, including the overpopulated strikeout-or-home-run legions who step out of the batter’s box to adjust their batting gloves after every pitch, including balls, also would have a few fewer bucks thrown at them.

And with yesterday gone, there seems no better time to make that change than now.

Consider what we now see during commercial breaks during Yankees and Mets telecasts: a pile of repetitive ads for get-rich-quick sports gambling operations, team promos, network promos, ticket sales promos, postgame show promos and public service announcements.

Not only does much of this advertising produce no TV revenue, much of it can be — and is — seen and heard during the games. Yet MLB puts games on extended hold for this.

Heck, Yankees radiocasts have “official sponsors” of the Yankees or the Yankees’ Radio Network, from roach spray to potato salad, and after every pitch.

And it’s not as if 10-12 pitching changes per game can’t or don’t bring additional commercial revenue.

But MLB is so blindly addicted to TV revenue that its foresight has been sacrificed to short-term greed that ill serves baseball as both a sport and healthy business. And that senselessly summoned decline continues.

Consider that while Rob Manfred nobly declared what we know isn’t even close to true — kids are MLB’s top priority — yesterday, a summer Saturday, the earliest game scheduled east of the Mississippi was Royals-Blue Jays at 3:07 in Toronto.

The Saturday before, only one early afternoon game was played. All else began in the late afternoon or were played at night.

Yet, this past Wednesday, with no national TV money in play, five early afternoon games were played. That’s backwards.

But taking care of baseball now, to best ensure its tomorrows, is anathema to both Manfred and team owners. As baseball continues its course of self-mutilation, they deserve each other.

As Mr. Burns, who owns the nuclear plant, said after Homer Simpson reminded him that he’s the richest man in Springfield, “Yes, but I’d trade it all for a little more.”

What’s two more or-all-nothing New York sluggers?

What’S on “special” today?

While multi-talented two-way infielder Trea Turner makes his way from the Nationals to the Dodgers, the Yankees remain stuck on acquiring home run-or-whiff specialists, the latest available in the Giancarlo Stanton mode.

In Joey Gallo, acquired from Texas, they now have a fellow who, though he walks more than most, entered Friday with 25 homers but 125 strikeouts in 310 at-bats, 40 percent of his at-bats.

The Yankees seem to hold small interest in batters who don’t try to uppercut the ball in the analytical pursuit of hitting blasts. It’s as if Brian Cashman still hasn’t grasped the value of a DJ LeMahieu. He got that one right, why wouldn’t he want more?

Meantime, as even the YES announcers have hinted, Stanton, at $29 million per to DH, seems as complacent as a moose head over a fireplace. When not grounding into double plays — 13, heading into Friday, three off the AL lead (Jose Abreu, Josh Donaldson) — he has struck out 101 times in 298 ABs, 34 percent of the time, and, as Michael Kay twice last week told, he’s over 40 percent since the All-Star break. In exchange for a $325 million contract, he has been more problem than solution.

As for the Mets’ acquisition of Cubs shortstop Javier Baez, you likely know he’s from the Robinson Cano school — talented, but disinclined to run to first base, even in postseason games, including the World Series.

With a penchant for showboating, he’s an undisciplined batter, this season striking out a fraction short of 40 percent of his at-bats. He’s tough for old schoolers/smart schoolers to root for.

Runners are out to lunch

Last Saturday, Yankees catcher Rob Brantly was double off first because he ran thinking there were two out when there was one. Days earlier, the Mets’ Jeff McNeil, the runner on first with two out, stopped near first after the ball was batted fair.

In this age of the-game-has-changed, we don’t know what MLB first-base coaches say to runners, but we do know the first — and last — thing they should tell them.

When “nyet” means “da”: Everything smells of a con. Russia, banned from these Olympics for systemic drug test cheating, nevertheless is doing very well at the Tokyo Games, competing as the “Russian Olympic Committee.”

Reader Ron Brandmayr suggests that with words under attack by the woke (who should have remained asleep) — “mother” must be replaced by “birthing person,” thus even vulgarities are threatened. “Motherf—ers,” he writes, should now be spoken, tweeted or rapped during Super Bowl halftime shows as “birthing person f—ers.”

The Olympics have added dangerous stunts — “extreme sports” such as skateboarding down hand railings and watch-’em-wreck BMX bike racing — to attract younger viewers. It’s not working.

If cussing in public were an Olympic sport, the U.S. women’s contingent would win gold.

Reader Keith Marston on an Olympic headline he’d have liked to read, as per Naomi Osaka: “Introvert Holds Torch On World’s Largest Stage.”

Remember, sports fans, that’s The Guardians, “Keeping Cleveland safe from foreign invasion since 2021.”

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

MLB broadcasts keep playing ignorant to rotten baseball

MLB finally gets one right

Some English soccer fans' vile bigotry easy to see coming after Euro loss

Adam Silver's take on ESPN drama reveals NBA's double standard

Rob Manfred robbing MLB's fans with clueless rule

At roughly $40 million per, the NFL employs more than a mere commissioner. In Roger Goodell, the league also contracts a social engineer, the kind who cowardly chooses to ignore those problems he should fix — the increasing criminality of NFL players comes to mind — in favor of fixing what’s not broken.

To that end, this season Goodell’s plan is to include two pregame national anthems at marquee events — the traditional one, which I guess now is explained as the “white” anthem, and the new addition and largely unknown “black” national anthem.

To think that Goodell is dense enough to believe that such a separate-but-equal public relations scheme will promote good will as opposed to divisiveness.

What will happen this season? Should black fans stay seated during the “white” anthem? After all, Goodell has implied that the standard version is not for blacks.

Should white customers remain seated during the “black” anthem? Goodell has clearly indicated that it’s not being played for the NFL’s white fans.

And what to do with those misguided souls, black and white, who might still feel as if we should all be united under just one anthem? Should they seek race counseling? Will group sessions be segregated?

Will there be enough security at games willing to break up race-based brawls?

Why doesn’t Goodell have NFL stadiums further divide by race? Have race-specific entrances, water fountains, concession stands, parking lots, rest rooms? His anthem plan resurrects such long-gone racist history.

Only a pandering boob who exercises no foresight would even consider such a plan, let alone enact it. But Goodell has allowed attending or watching an NFL game to become a political exercise, an avenue to express and stress racial discord as opposed to watching a football game.

And as a white minority — I’m also a Jew — who was raised to recognize wrong from right and never black from white — I’m tired, make that sick and tired, of being tacitly condemned as a racist by sports commissioners who work in mortal fear of being called racist by the selectively blind, outraged, wishful and politically ambitious.

If Goodell truly believes that the NFL’s white fans are in need of a racial awakening and makeover, just say that, rather than install repugnant reminders, starting with separate national anthems.

Boone searches hard for ways to lose

Of course, I saw it. It was hard to miss. Yankees manager Aaron Boone again played bullpen roulette until he landed on a reliever to blow the game. He does so every chance he gets, thus, until further notice, he’ll do so again and again.

But he’s no different from most MLB managers who work off computer spreadsheets loaded with analytic fantasy scripts. The actual game? Ignore it. Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Thursday in Boston, the Yankees had the Red Sox beaten until Boone removed reliever Luis Cessa — for no good reason.

With the Yankees up, 3-1, in the eighth, Cessa entered and made all-gone, 1, 2, 3, on just five pitches. Perfect. And with the DH, no worries about pinch-hitting for the pitcher.

But Boone went to designated closer — don’t leave home without one! — Chad Green in the ninth. Soon the Yankees were 5-4 losers in 10.

But new-standard, mind-throttling senselessness remains the specialty of all the houses. In the fourth, one could see why Brett Gardner is batting .191. He had a 2-0 count against starter-without-portfolio Tanner Houck, righty pitcher versus lefty batter, thus Gardner loaded up to swing for Uranus and beyond.

The next pitch was so far inside it hit Gardner — but not before he swung at it!

In the words of Maynard G. Krebs (the G. stood for Walter): “What an age we live in!”

Last week, during Mets-Pirates on SNY, Keith Hernandez spoke of appearing on “Kiner’s Korner” and how Ralph Kiner would slip his guests a $100 bill.

I always thought it was $50, but one night at Shea, as a kid reporter in 1978, I was taught an early lesson in “follow the money.”

The Pirates’ Bert Blyleven had just beaten the Mets, 1-0, when he was headed back toward the field to do the postgame radio show back to Pittsburgh. His catcher, Ed Ott, stopped him to tell him they wanted him on Kiner’s show.

Blyleven shrugged and was about to continue back toward the field, when Ott added, “They pay 50 bucks.”

Blyleven did a fast 180 and headed for Kiner’s Korner.

It’s not just Boone: Tuesday, in the Dodgers’ 8-6 win over the Giants, three relievers who totaled one hit allowed in four innings were replaced.

Monday, Angels manager Joe Maddon, who tried to lose the 2016 World Series for the Cubs with absurd pitching changes, removed Shohei Ohtani, placing him in the outfield after he had pitched six scoreless innings. The Angels then lost to the Athletics, 4-1.

Mets radio man Wayne “Promo Code: Wayne” Randazzo is another who has sold his name, position and reputation to a sports gambling site. Seems he’d like everyone within the sound of his voice to have at least one bet on the game he’s calling.

Selective media shyness

There’s too much suspicion attached to this Naomi Osaka saga about her serious, heart-rending fear of media and the public’s glare to swallow it whole.

Why then does she pose for the cover of Sports Illustrated’s hubba-hubba swimsuit edition? Why did she shun interviews except those conducted by the Japanese TV entity to which she’s under contract?

And Friday, Osaka became the international showpiece of Japan’s Olympic Games’ opening ceremony.

Sorry to be so cynical, but when two plus two equals anything other than four …

Florida remains headquarters to highly compromised Florida football players — student-athletes — recruited by highly compromised Florida colleges.

Those fine folks at Miami have found yet another. Safety Avantae Williams, a 20-year-old redshirt freshman and four-star recruit, has been dismissed from the team after his arrest last week for three counts of aggravated assault against his 31-weeks pregnant girlfriend.

ESPN is going to produce 10 alternative “Monday Night Football” telecasts that will appear on ESPN2 and star Peyton and Eli Manning. How would you like to be the regular MNF team — Steve Levy, Brian Griese and Louis Riddick — and have your network be similarly supportive and committed to you?

YES’s all-times score box, that gives the name of the batter as well as the pitcher, remains 50 percent more instantaneously useful than SNY’s, which only names the pitcher. There’s nothing wrong with better-TV “stealing.”

Reader Doug McBroom can’t wait for the first Guardians-Angels game. “That’s the righty, Curtis Sliwa, warming in the bullpen.”

Time for Brooks Koepka to cease fueling his childish feud with Bryson DeChambeau with petulant taunts — though I suspect his Nike endorsers love him for it.

According to impeachable sources, Capital One and Subway will combine to launch an ad campaign with the catchphrase, “What’s in your sandwich?”

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

NFL's response to Carl Nassib coming out as gay stinks of grandstanding

US Open commentators better shut up

There's a simple way to fix MLB's replay diaster

Sports broadcasts aren't giving up on dumb ideas

Sports' latest mindless promotion: Graffiti

From the Olfactory Factory, more that doesn’t pass the stench test:

While the NFL fully relies upon our business to stay in business — big business — nothing else seems to be any of our business.

Your job is to buy PSLs; tickets; expensive trinkets; $10 cups of warm, flat beer; cable TV or satellite packages; at least two of four or five per team jerseys; NFL and team phone apps; “official” cars, plumbing supplies and salad dressings of NFL teams; TV money-ordered bait-and-switch schedule flexes; price-gouged parking spots; and now sucker-betting opportunities supplied by the league and its teams.

But as Bernie Madoff clients understood, in return for promises of 15 percent returns, just “don’t ask any questions.”

Yet one question remains worth asking, answering, or at least addressing, as it continues to grow and persist: Why are so many NFL players, mostly physically imposing college men, busted for carrying weapons, often the kind designed to spray many bullets and kill many people?

Where do they go, why, when and with whom that they find it essential to carry guns? If they expect life-threatening trouble, why go there? If they expect to have to defend themselves with deadly force why is that a logical destination?

The arrest of NFL (and even college players) for illegally packing has become a weekly occurrence. If your employees were regularly arrested for carrying weapons, you’d demand to know why, among many other particulars, for the sake of the business and its clean employees, no? And changes would be made.

But then there’s Roger Goodell’s NFL.

Last week, Chiefs defensive end Frank Clark, a former student-athlete at Michigan, was arrested in Los Angeles for carrying an Uzi, a submachine gun, as if he were expecting that kind of trouble.

His attorney, Alex Spiro, said that the Uzi belonged to Clark’s “bodyguard.” Help me on this, Barrister: In what environment would Clark — a 6-foot-3, 260-pound NFL defensive lineman — need not just a bodyguard, but a bodyguard with a submachine gun?

It was this arrest that brought to light Clark’s arrest in March on another gun charge, thus two separate gun charges in three months.

In 2012, he was arrested for a felony home invasion — stealing a laptop from a dorm room. He was sentenced to one year of probation but played on as a student-athlete. In 2014, he was dismissed from Michigan following an alleged violent episode with his girlfriend in a hotel room. He plea-bargained to a charge of disorderly conduct.

No matter, no big deal. In 2015, Seattle selected him in the second round of the NFL draft. Traded to the Chiefs in 2020, he signed a $105 million contract, $63 million of it guaranteed. Now he has two different gun charges in three months.

Also last week, rookie Vikings defensive tackle Jaylen Twyman, drafted out of Pitt, was shot four times while visiting family in Washington. His agent, blustering Drew Rosenhaus, explained Twyman was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Well, that answers it. Which of his clients have been shot for being in the right place at the right time? Beyond that, how often are such drive-by shootings done at random?

Two weeks ago, Giants defensive back Sam Beal pleaded guilty to 2020 gun charges. Since March, there have been at least five arrests of NFL players on gun charges. On a single Saturday in 2020, four were arrested on gun charges in three separate incidents.

Yet, the Nero Fiddles League plays stupid, as if working off a copy of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to decriminalize crime while the voices of the NFL’s partner TV networks only concede that players have “off-field issues,” which now cover anything from a flooded basement to aggravated domestic assault.

So back to the top. Why do so many players carry guns? Nothing so prevalent can be a coincidence. Perhaps Goodell doesn’t see it as a problem, or is just counting on it to go away by itself. He knows he can count on the sports media to keep it on the down-low.

Yet if the answer remains that it’s none of the NFL’s business, why should it be any of ours? And if the NFL doesn’t care about the integrity of its product, why should we? You’re supposed to pay the freight, sit down and shut up. And make lots of bad odds bets.

Amazin’ voices expose seven-inning distortion to the game

As Gary Cohen and Ron Darling discussed Friday during the first doubleheader game between the Phillies and Mets (both games went eight innings), such new-rule games destroy whatever sense is left in them.

With Philly leading 1-0 in the fifth inning, Darling said the teams were approaching the presumptive end of the game, which changes everything.

Cohen: “There’s no way you pinch hit for your pitcher in the fifth down, 1-0, in a nine-inning game, but you do in a seven-inning game.”

In other words, the next softball team needs the field.

And because this game was tied after seven, the eighth was played with automatic runners on second. All aboard for Somewhere Else!

Anyone old enough to recall the jingle, “Vote, vote for Miss Rheingold”? Can’t have that anymore. Tough to find a woman — er, biological female — who “identifies” as a beer.

Anyway, ranked voting, as witnessed in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary, is nothing new.

Years ago, when TV network employees were assigned to vote on Sports Emmys, those we knew at NBC received their orders:

Vote NBC’s goods first. Anything worthy of winning that wasn’t NBC’s was to be ranked last, and all CBS and ABC’s submissions placed as low as possible. One honest voter could mess up the whole thing!

Then there was the late agent and character, Art Kaminsky, who stuffed the ballot box in a long-ago Post survey to determine readers’ favorite news anchor among CBS’ Dan Rather, NBC’s Tom Brokaw and ABC’s Peter Jennings.

The winner? In a stunning upset, write-in candidate Forrest Sawyer, then a “CBS Morning News” anchor — and Kaminsky client.

CWS KO’s MLB on ESPN

Reader Damian Digiulian much prefers ESPN’s College World Series telecasts to its MLB versions, because less is more. The CWS productions have no artificial additives in the form of that “silly strike-zone box to distract me from seeing the actual pitch and deciding for myself whether it’s a strike.” Wonder if kids enter MLB parks these days confused as to why that box isn’t visible.

Then there are readers such as Patrick Rice, who recognize silly, look-what-we-can-do graphics, in this case a Game 6 Lightning-Islanders posting that appeared over the live form of Tampa Bay’s Steven Stamkos to let us know the fascinating news that “Stamkos [is] 4-of-7 on face offs.”

And it appears that fat THE YES APP, like one of those pillow tags threatening arrest if one removes it, is going to remain on the screen this entire Yankees season.

Pitchers of seven-inning no-hitters will now be rewarded with unlimited edition Rob Manfred trophies that come attached to bells with clappers so they’ll always have a hollow ring to them.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

US Open commentators better shut up

There's a simple way to fix MLB's replay diaster

Sports broadcasts aren't giving up on dumb ideas

Sports' latest mindless promotion: Graffiti

Naomi Osaka's French Open drama is full of holes

They’re the standard lines from the street cop in old movies: “OK, folks, nothing more to see here. Break it up and be on your way.”

Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib handled it well on Instagram: “I just wanted to take a quick moment to say that I’m gay. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, now, but finally feel comfortable getting it off my chest. I really have the best life, the best family, friends and job a guy can ask for.

“I’m a pretty private person, so I hope you guys know I’m not doing this for attention. I just think that representation and visibility are so important. I actually hope that one day, videos like this and the whole coming-out process are not necessary, but until then I will do my best and my part to cultivate a culture that’s accepting and compassionate.

“I’m going to start by donating $100,000 to the Trevor Project. They’re an incredible organization, they’re the number one suicide-prevention service for LGBTQ youth in America.”

Fabulous.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. After all, who among us doesn’t have a genuine fondness for family members and friends who are gay? “Some of my best friends …” long ago became a matter of fact.

So with the stigma and prejudices in steady decline, why would anyone applaud Nassib’s decision by emphasizing the bigotry of the unenlightened and the just plain bigoted?

Why? Because that’s what we do. While Nassib made it plain that he was not grandstanding on behalf of himself or his sexuality, Roger Goodell, the NFL steward who ignores so much of what degrades the league, immediately did some grandstanding in Nassib’s name:

“The NFL family is proud of Carl for courageously sharing his truth today,” Goodell said in an NFL-issued statement “Representation matters. We share his hope that someday soon statements like his will no longer be newsworthy as we march toward full equality for the LGBTQ+ community. We wish Carl the best of luck this coming season.”

In other words, Goodell and the NFL are eager to make a big deal out of no big deal.

And Goodell wanted all of us to know that the NFL’s magnanimity includes approval of gay players. Goodell’s quick and condescending approbation of Nassib’s decision stunk of grandstanding.

Nassib, a “private person,” comes out, and Goodell is quick to exploit him for all the political correctness he’s worth — while the NFL’s most serious issues — the increasing episodes of players packing assault weapons, for example — go publicly unaddressed.

Goodell’s public response to receiver DeSean Jackson’s ignorant, hate-filled antisemitism? Two years later, still nothing.

Goodell’s credibility on social and financial matters has always been suspect. He once testified that gambling destroys families, but then became an all-in, give-us-our-cut gambling advocate. And he’s now available to identify himself and the NFL as in step with any movement — as long as its carried by prevailing winds.

Thus Nassib has Goodell’s approval to be a gay NFL player.

There are those who have already taken Nassib’s good-for-him, yet no-big-deal matter and stretched it — disfigured it — to absurd, wishful-thinking activism.

It remains historical folly that a made-for-TV novelty act — that 1973 Bobby Riggs-Billy Jean King match in the Astrodome on ABC, a total goof replete with brightly feathered, bare-chested musclemen carrying King to the court in an ancient Roman slave sedan — is now regarded as a serious, pivotal moment in the women’s rights movement.

And so, because anything worth doing is worth overdoing, Nassib is already being assigned his place as a beacon of diversity, inclusion, tolerance and social revolution. Will the pass rusher please report to Mt. Rushmore.

But given the modest, sorry-to-bother-you content of Nassib’s missive, I sense he won’t be easily played. After all, his declaration was not preceded by a publicist alerting all to “Stand by for a major announcement,” the sale of TV rights to his public declaration or a Nike ad campaign.

And that pat on his head by Goodell? Why would we expect better?

Superfluous graphics, babbling praise distract from Jake’s greatness

We get it! We get it! Jacob deGrom is sensational, a sight to behold.

So then let us behold!

What SNY did throughout deGrom’s Monday appearance vs. the Braves was what’s known in the news business as “burying the lead” — hiding the big story behind smaller ones.

Rather than just allow us to watch — to enjoy — the telecast was loaded with the appearance of deGrom stats of every imaginable category and value, followed by a distracting discussion of them among Gary Cohen, Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez.

Rather than consider and watch deGrom as a spectacular pitcher, we were encouraged to look upon him as a dissected lab rat. And when the stats weren’t front and center, discussion of where deGrom ranked compared to the likes of Tom Seaver and whether the previous pitch was a four-seamer or a six-fingered flounder fling from Flushing Bay.

The three nearly gasped when, with two out in the third, deGrom walked a batter. Each of the three then took a shot at trying to explain how this could possibly happen. If only they’d been so lost for words they didn’t bother to look for any

Baez is ‘out’ of excuses

Seems every season a Cubs manager benches “star” shortstop Javy Baez for proving he doesn’t give a rat’s rectum, be it for failure to run to first base or having no sense of game circumstances.

This week, Cubs manager David Ross pulled Baez in the fourth inning for what has become the latest epidemic of the once nearly impossible: not knowing how many outs there were, thus Baez, in a 4-0 loss to Cleveland, was doubled-played off first.

Credit Baez for unspoken candor. He didn’t promise he’d never do that again.

On the subject of epidemics, Braves manager Brian Snitker is another who appears eager to find a way to lose. Monday, in a seven-inning game against the Mets, he pulled starter Ian Anderson for no apparent good reason. Anderson had allowed just three hits on 85 pitches in 5 ¹/₃ innings. Seemed Snitker was eager to reach closer Will Smith, so reliable he’s with his fourth team.

Smith wiggled out of it for the save, but not before loading the bases — and leaving the usual wonder as to why MLB managers insist upon tossing winning hands.

The Islanders continue to fascinate. They bring to mind the resiliency of the 1960 Pirates, who beat the Yankees in seven in the World Series despite being outscored 55-27. Before beating the Lightning, 3-2, in Wednesday’s Game 6, Tampa Bay had scored 12 straight goals.

Yeah, but he’s our creep: A tweet from ESPN/SiriusXM/YES’ Frank Isola: “The Phoenix Suns are now condemning violence in the arena. Last week, ‘The Suns in Four’ guy received an autographed jersey [and tickets from the Suns] for fighting.” That fan was so rewarded for brawling with a Nuggets fan in Denver during a playoff game.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

There's a simple way to fix MLB's replay diaster

Sports broadcasts aren't giving up on dumb ideas

Sports' latest mindless promotion: Graffiti

Naomi Osaka's French Open drama is full of holes

Aaron Boone’s Yankees can play like they’re managing themselves

No fair! I have to listen! Or as Groucho Marx said to movie audiences in 1932’s “Horse Feathers”: “I’ve got to stay here, but there’s no reason why you folks shouldn’t go out into the lobby until this thing blows over.”

How do I put this politely, delicately, so as not to seem harsh or offend anyone, yet still make my point and maintain my dignity?

How’s about this: Shut up! Just shut up!

Or, better yet: Please, shut up!

There is rarely a televised American sports event that now escapes the epidemic of excess, starting with, and often ending with the verbal kind. That we can see what’s happening — TV’s primary mission and one most worth pursuing — is not enough.

As if we can’t handle it by ourselves, we now must be told, and by a coterie of people attached to microphones, what we’re watching and just saw. And explanations of the self-evident — a two senses redundancy — must be added.

Long before the first round of the U.S. Open concluded Thursday, NBC/Golf Channel’s coverage had tried and fried the nerves.

When Tommy Fleetwood tapped in to finish at 1-over, four off the lead, at the time, the most we needed to hear was, “Not a bad start.”

Instead, one of the many NBC commentators — so many it was difficult to distinguish one from another — felt compelled to decode it for us: “You always want to get something decent on the scorecard in a major championship, especially the U.S. Open.”

That’s not commentary, that’s vacant, but now standard, filler. If someone in the gallery said that to you, you’d look around for his escort from the insane asylum.

Shortly before that, with Brooks Koepka already identified at 3-under and about to putt for a birdie, Kay Cockerill “added” to that when not a word was needed:

“This is to get back to 4-under, a nice bounce-back birdie, a great opportunity in front of him.” The corner of Good and Grief.

After Koepka missed it right and long, this: “You can’t let the poa annua [grass] greens get into your head. You have to welcome them, and know that they’re not going to be that consistent, always.

“But if you start it on the right line, and get it rolling well, your percentage chance of making it will be good.” Sanctuary!

And then the obligatory “clarification” from two of the male commentators lest the USGA refuse to cash NBC’s check:

Male Voice 1) “And let me point out, the greens on the golf course are just in tremendous condition this week.”

Male Voice 2) “Oh, they are, and with the drier conditions — we haven’t had a lot of rain — these greens are very smooth” adding, “As Kay said, the little wiggles you get every so often can certainly get in a player’s head.”

Well, alrighty then. The greens are spectacular, inconsistent, bumpy and very smooth. And you need to get putts rolling on the right line to make them. Got it?

Then there was the usual suspicions of “plausibly live” coverage as per NBC’s Olympics coverage.

Why there’s Martin Laird. Hadn’t seen him earlier. Now he was about to hit a long putt for eagle. Why, he made it! If what we saw was presented live, the clairvoyance was uncanny, even spooky.

But we were led to believe it was live, thus who does NBC like in today’s the feature at Belmont?

Soon, we saw Xander Schauffele backing off a shot, apparently to gauge the wind.

“Smart play there to recalculate” we were told. “This is the U.S. Open, where every single stroke matters.”

As opposed to what, the Waste Management Open? The Yiddish Open? The C-flight qualifier at the Mosquito Run Golf ’N Gulp?

Bottom line: No bad idea is unworthy of duplication, then perpetuation. No network seems even mildly interested in distinguishing itself as better by doing it better. Thus telecasts, including the U.S. Open, are increasingly stuffed with untreated, unfiltered nonsense.

And that makes for a severe option: Watch on “mute” or turn it off. Wish I had that option.

Unhappy Le’Veon? Well, doesn’t that ring a Bell?

Interesting how fans know better — certainly before GMs.

When the Mets re-signed Yoenis Cespedes for $110 million, fans at his previous stops — Oakland, Boston and Detroit — already knew that he couldn’t be bothered to run to first or after balls in the outfield, and that he was a divisive, selfish presence, a rotten investment at a fraction of the price.

After all, why was such a talented player so often expendable?

When the Jets signed running back Le’Veon Bell, my pals in Pittsburgh, where Bell played for the Steelers, knew the Jets had bought expensive trouble, that Bell was a selfish, vulgar, boastful, whining, me-first guy, and an unreliable castoff “star.”

The Jets, either having done no due diligence or ignoring their own research, soon regretted signing Bell for a dime, let alone a four-year, $52 million contract.

But Bell didn’t depart without first providing some memorable comedy. He claimed to detest drug testing “because I don’t like needles” — despite an upper torso covered in tattoos, and not the wash-off kind.

Still, Bell caught a big break, signing a deal to join the defending champion Chiefs as a backup running back. He even started two games.

Last week, Bell ripped Chiefs coach Andy Reid, who regularly indulges bad-social-risk players, claiming “I’d retire” before again playing for him.

Brew crew swings through

Still plenty of good seats available!

The Brewers, against four Reds pitchers in a 2-1 loss Wednesday, struck out 17 times. Let’s see: 27 outs, 17 of them by strikeout, that’s 63 percent!

Four Brewers in the starting lineup (excluding the pitcher) were batting .160 or lower. And the Brewers were 38-30!

Despite the 2017, time-saving application of an intentional base on balls rule, the game still ran three hours — saving seconds per season.

That Yankees tickets promo, the one that appears 4-5 times per telecast since the start of the season? Enough! Change it!

Chris King, the Islanders’ radio voice, during games refers to the Isles’ pesky Finnish-Russian forward Leo Komarov simply as “Uncle Leo” — as per the persistently annoying, in-your-face character in “Seinfeld.”

The Rays’ Mike Zunino, who swings as hard as he can, has become the neoclassical MLB catcher. As of Friday, in 143 at-bats, he was batting .189 with 65 strikeouts. He had just 27 hits, but 13 of them were home runs. And in 2021, that makes him indispensable.

Class dismissed. I’ve finally figured it out. To publicly use the F-word is now the best way to express your sincerity, enthusiasm, conviction and Constitutional rights. Still, Steve Cohen can’t take Pete Alonso aside and tell him that for the sake of common decency — not to mention kids — lose the F? Or is it too late for that?

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Sports broadcasts aren't giving up on dumb ideas

Sports' latest mindless promotion: Graffiti

Naomi Osaka's French Open drama is full of holes

Aaron Boone’s Yankees can play like they’re managing themselves

NBA recklessly gives LeBron James another pass

Bugs are underrated. They do things that don’t show up in the boxscores. They’re rarely admired for thought capacity, for foresight that exceeds, say, big, game-changing decisions by MLB. Unlike MLB, bugs know to bolt into corners to avoid being squished.

Though Homer Simpson reminded us that, “Trying is the first step toward failure,” here’s one more try to at least tame the Frankenstein monster created by the unsteady hands and minds at MLB.

Almost everyone who can think as well as a bug now recognizes that whatever energy is left in baseball has been sapped by lengthy and fully unintended replay reviews. Yet the self-affliction of this rule-too-far has been left untreated. So here’s the plan:

Each team is allowed one, and only one, replay challenge per game; doesn’t matter if it’s successful, only one.

That would force managers to be more judicious, awaiting the time when what’s perceived to be a significantly rotten call — curing of which was the rule’s only original intent — is made.

In some games, then, no replay challenges would be made, while close bang-bang calls at first and second — for which the rule is overwhelmingly applied — would return to on-field, right-there, one-opinion, we can-live-with-it, reasonable human status.

If it had been anticipated that microscopic, super slow-motion, freeze-framed inspections of calls at first were what would most commonly result from existing replay rules, there wouldn’t be a replay rule. There was no populist uprising to demand stoppages to reexamine calls that might have been off by half an inch.

Yet here we are, and here we remain, tethered to the ridiculous.

The proposed new-rule’s savings in time, the restoration of the applied better senses and the unrestricted continuation of games would be both considerable and welcomed.

Only in one other case would replay be used, and this by umpire mandate, not challenges: the determination of home runs, be it whether the ball was fair or foul, fan interference or if the ball cleared the wall or line indicating a home run.

Otherwise, one, and only one, replay challenge per game. Use it wisely.

But the folks at MLB are accomplished at fastening “Kick Me” signs to their shirts, fore and aft. Unless they feel they’ve reached the point of “Can’t Return,” which would be both absurd and a shame.

In that case, the bug that preemptively protects itself from being stomped on by heading for the nearest corner — snug as a bug in a rug — is smarter than those homo sapiens who make the rules.

Big-money sluggers continue ‘walk’ of shame

The compromises demanded of right-minded folks to remain sports fans are becoming insurmountable.

In 2017, when free agent in-waiting Manny Machado was with the Orioles, his desultory approach to the game — he couldn’t be bothered to run toward first — was so conspicuous that on YES, Michael Kay said, “He just doesn’t seem interested.”

The next season, killing free-agent time with the Dodgers, he further cemented that when three times in NLCS games he headed back to the dugout when he belonged on first — once failing to run on an infield error, twice by jogging into double plays. He didn’t care if it was the NLCS.

Machado explained that running to first “is not who I am.” Well, that explains it!

But this is an era of maximum payments to one- or two-trick minimalists in what used to be a a game that rewarded five-tool players. So, in exchange for $300 million, Machado signed with the Padres.

Sunday, in the top of the sixth, the Padres trailed the Mets, 2-1, runners on first and second, no outs. Machado hit a grounder to short. The double play was no-sweat easy as Machado was out at first by roughly eight feet.

“Machado doesn’t tend to run hard on ground balls to the infield,” Gary Cohen said over Ch.11, “That’s just a given.” Cohen didn’t mention that for $300 million, that’s “not who he is.”

The Yanks have had trouble scoring? You wouldn’t know it watching home-run or strikeout $325 million designated-hitter Giancarlo Stanton.

Tuesday in Buffalo, Yanks and Jays tied, Stanton hit one to deep right, then stood near home plate as the ball was caught against the wall. “Stanton thought he got it,” said Kay, issuing the common “he thought,” as if that’s a valid excuse for the inexcusable.

David Cone seconded Kay’s “he thought” as Stanton was seen in a replay finally summoning the grit to walk toward first.

No mention that if “he thought” had hit off the wall, Stanton likely would have reached first instead of second. Or maybe been thrown out at second.

With the Marlins in 2016 and in the midst of a playoffs push, Stanton was lost for over a month after an awkward slide toward second, having “thought” that the ball he hit would be caught.

Kay and Cone, Tuesday, had to know better, yet both pretended that we didn’t know better, the kind of insult compromised audiences must suffer.

Then again, MLB managers now insist on the least players can do, thus they — and we — should get used to it or get out.

The despicable dishonesty of ESPN as a news entity continues. This week it took credit for its “sources” claiming that the Rangers have hired Gerard Gallant as their latest coach.

The last sentence in ESPN’s website report read, “The story was first reported by the New York Post.” ESPN, despite taking credit at the top, had nothing to do with this fresh news!

But ESPN would take credit for curing polio, then finish with, “The vaccination was first developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.”

Crude feud now ‘good’ for golf

And now to wreck golf.

So Nike-funded Brooks Koepka, in a hollow but now-standard rationalization, thinks his crude, childish feud with Bryson DeChambeau — one that has fueled loud-mouthed, attention-starved fools in PGA galleries — is “good for the game.”

Wait until some booze-filled, PGA-certified gambler — perhaps with a bundle on DeChambeau — screams during Koepka’s backswing on 18.

Of course, on TV, where all courses are in “immaculate condition” and blind pandering replaces candor, no one is heard to try to protect the sport as a sport as its condition deteriorates.

Those Jets’ radio ads pitching, Hurry! Hurry! ticket sales are back. So is the memory of long waiting lists for Jets’ tickets prior to PSLs and Roger Goodell’s bogus claim that they’re “good investments.” That Goodell has been given a media pass on that, among other things, is both unsettling and unsurprising.

Yanks and Mets telecasts are each now sponsored by three different sports gambling operations as well as casinos and the lottery. Gambling problem? Ya don’t say.

We’re moving close to a Doc Emrick-less Stanley Cup finals, the first since Gary Thorne called them in 2004 when ESPN had the rights.

Now we have to be concerned whether Aaron Judge’s legs can withstand playing center field. Mickey Mantle regularly played center in old Yankee Stadium, where center field was vast, on rotten knees.

Kevin Durant’s performance against the Bucks on Tuesday was sensational. It’s therefore an extra shame that his social incivility — needless vulgarities, mean-spirited mistreatment of fellow humans while he demands respect — makes him hard to root for.

So now, if you reach first base, you gesture your extraordinary achievement to your dugout. Look what I did! Hooray for me!

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

NBA recklessly gives LeBron James another pass

Vulgar sports fans are only following many players' example

Breakfast with stars became routine for pair of old pals

Chris Carrino's courage puts Kyrie Irving's 'load management' to shame

Retiring Marv Albert is so much more than a broadcasting icon

I’m NOT a big league manager. I don’t even play one on TV. But I watch a lot of managers on TV.

Mike Francesa once said he’d consider an offer to manage the Yankees, “But only if the money is right.” He was serious, as if …

I harbor no such delusions. Besides, I married money. (Insert laugh track.) Still, I wonder about the current condition of MLB teams under the direction of their managers, especially from what may be seen watching Aaron Boone’s Yankees.

Let’s start Saturday in Detroit against the pathetic Tigers. Lots of pathetic teams these days. At 0-0 in the second, the Yanks had no out, the bases loaded on a hit and two walks including one to Mike Ford, who was batting a robust .140. Miguel Andujar was up next and the first pitch from Spencer Turnbull was a ball.

If Andujar was not taking the next pitch, Kyrie Irving was right: The earth is flat.

The next pitch was low and outside, yet Andujar swung and missed! On PIX11, Michael Kay and Paul O’Neill said zip about that.

On the next pitch, Andujar grounded into a double play. Nurse!

Later in a game the Yanks ended up losing 6-1, Gary Sanchez, oblivious to all that matters despite the annual assignment of coaches to tutor him, caught a third strike then headed to the dugout. But as pitcher Alex Abreu, body language in incredulous mode, signaled, there were only two out.

O’Neill laughed, as if we all should be amused by a big league catcher’s career disinclination to pay attention. Kay said, however, “It’s somewhat troubling that the catcher doesn’t know how many out there are.”

When Sanchez came to bat in that game, booing could be heard. Why? Might it be for the two cheap-shot sucker punches he landed on Tigers players during a 2017 hassle? With the shoving over that day, he hit Miguel Cabrera, who was on the ground and already engaged, then blind-sided Nick Castellanos with all he had.

But not a word from Kay or O’Neill.

The next day in Detroit, a 6-2 Yankees loss, the Tigers had six hits and eight walks! (That’s baseball, Suzyn!) And Sanchez killed a rally, tagged out due to oblivious baserunning.

That game ended with the bases loaded. After Giancarlo Stanton walked on four pitches (although a three-run homer wouldn’t have been enough), Aaron Judge batted. Now a home run would tie it.

But Judge swung and missed at two pitches below the strike zone, then stood and watched strike three, a meatball down the middle. Game over, court dismissed.

Sanchez, back in the lineup Tuesday, against the Rays, killed another rally when he was again thrown out — this time between second and third — due to mindless baserunning.

Also in that game, first baseman Ford headed to the dugout thinking there were three out. Well, he only missed by one.

On Wednesday, Clint Frazier, batting .185, stood at home and watched his game-ending blast land all the way back — in the first row.

If Boone were a Little League manager, after these games he wouldn’t even have taken the kids for pizza.

Penalty on NBC for botching NHL graphics

Of graphics and common sense: Throughout the Stanley Cup playoffs, NBC has presented a backwards graphic during power plays. Instead of the logo of the team with the man-advantage alongside the penalty clock, the logo of the team that’s down a skater appears.

How does the NHL’s national network get that wrong?

And YES’s score box graphics, showing both pitcher and batter, remain superior to SNY’s that only note the pitcher.

Good for YES. But now it’s time to lose that fat, all-the-time “THE YES APP” graphic. We get it. Even if we haven’t gotten it, we get it.

This column used to joke that if the money were right, big leagues would prevent games from being seen on TV. But here we are. Again.

Wednesday’s Mets-D’backs game was the latest to be sold — auctioned — exclusively for minimal viewing, this one via YouTube. If you’re scoring at home, put it down as “Bottom Line” Bud Selig to Rob “The Verb” Manfred.

A week from today, a Friday, no Yankees game is schedule to be played. And all rainouts now foretell seven-inning doubleheaders.

As 18th Century French Queen Marie Antoinette was reported to have said upon her visit to Citi Field, “Let them eat $14 Subway $5 Footlongs.”

Tired of being dealt the race card? Everywhere the Nets’ Kyrie Irving has played (when he’s in the mood to play), first Cleveland, then Boston, he has left hometown fans and patrons badly disregarded. Then, as a matter of self-generating prophecy, he blames their booing him on “subtle racism.” And the media buys it!

This week, Irving childishly stomped the center court Celtics’ logo — just to make it clear he’s above it all.

Irving, impossible to root for among those already excessively compromised, is another who demands respect in exchange for none.

What We Love, Allegedly: Not at all surprising to hear from golf fans who much preferred COVID-depleted galleries to the return of attention-deprived louts screaming “Get in the hole!” and “You da man!”

And they don’t believe the pandering network voices who claim we all love that crowds are back.

Last postseason we were told we all love how the Braves’ Marcell Ozuna makes the game fun, when he mimed a selfie after hitting a home run — even if many considered such immodesty sickening.

Yet that’s the junk MLB presents in promos as baseball at its best. Think Ozuna mimed any selfies during the two days he just spent in jail after being charged with assaulting his wife?

Belmont honor for late son of racing executive

In tomorrow’s Belmont — post scheduled for 6:49 regardless of NBC’s usual sucker bait — Hot Rod Charlie will be wearing a pre-race blanket embroidered with #RunningforJake, to honor the memory of Jake Panus, a 16 year-old passenger killed in a car accident, this past August. Jake was the son of Jockey Club exec Stephen Panus.

On Tuesday, LeBron James, who lectures on what’s wrong with the world outside of Communist Nike China, again abandoned his team — heading to the locker room with the Lakers losing big late to the Suns. This time, he explained his departure as getting an early start for treatment.

It’s great that the Mets’ Pete Alonso, given to speaking vulgarities, will host a one-day baseball camp for kids in August. Here’s hoping no kid asks him what the F stands for in LFGM.

Paul O’Neill’s long-winded, worthless “Keys to the Game” on Saturday, prevented Michael Kay from preceding the first pitch with his played-out “Let’s do it!” — one of Kay’s many silly, self-determined and self-defeating gimmicks.

So maybe O’Neill’s Keys weren’t that worthless.

Oh, those zany student-athletes! This week an ESPN-ranked Virginia Tech football recruit, linebacker Isi Etute, was charged with second-degree murder. He was majoring in Human Development. Seriously.

The school announced he has been suspended. Seriously. He must’ve violated unspecified team rules.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Vulgar sports fans are only following many players' example

Breakfast with stars became routine for pair of old pals

Chris Carrino's courage puts Kyrie Irving's 'load management' to shame

Retiring Marv Albert is so much more than a broadcasting icon

ESPN's Bob Baffert-Alex Rodriguez cheating contradiction

From the Desk of Dooley Noted:

Rules are rules. They’re meant to be observed and enforced — except by those who make them and the exceptionally entitled.

Thus, U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi broke her COVID-19 restrictions when she went to have her hair done, and then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after declaring N.J. beaches closed in 2017, had a family day — his family — on a N.J. beach.

Last week, two NBA players, Kristaps Porzingis and LeBron James, broke the league’s COVID-19 protocols. Porzingis went to a strip club, James to a celebrities-thick promotional launch of a tequila.

Only Porzingis, fined $50,000, was punished. James, an often reckless advocate for social and racial equality, was given a pass. Another pass. The NBA says James escaped a fine because the promotional party’s organizers required all in attendance to be vaccinated or tested negative. Yet, other than by blind faith, how could the NBA possibly know everyone who attended was kosher?

Most sports fans couldn’t help but notice this, which the NBA no doubt hoped they wouldn’t. The media, naturally, out of mortal fright, mostly gave it a low-away pass. That’s one of those unwritten rules rarely broken.

Meanwhile, we eagerly await James’ next lecture on what’s wrong with the world — with the exception of his and the NBA’s Nike factory workforces in Communist China. Say, do the profits from his overpriced signature sneakers help fund those Chinese prisons that house pro-democracy activists and journalists?

The most illogical element of that illogical play in Thursday’s Cubs-Pirates game — with two out, Bucs first baseman Will Craig tried to tag out batter Javier Baez by running him toward the plate rather than just stepping on first; a sliding run scored and Baez wound up at second on a subsequent throwing error — is that Baez is notorious for not running to first base.

But the most absurd part is that Baez, before again heading for first, stood near home giving the safe sign as his teammate scored when all any Pirate with the ball had to do was step on first and the inning would be over, no run having scored due to the force out at first.

Yet now Baez will be known for one of the great hustle plays in video-recorded MLB history. The play, however, was courtesy of big leaguers who either had no idea how many were out or were deficient in the most fundamental elements of baseball.

But analytics don’t cover that.

Among the funniest things I’ve read was stenciled to a door in old Tigers Stadium. It read, “Visitors Clubhouse, No Visitors.”

But reader Don Reed has sent a newspaper clip attributed to the Reuters wire service. It read: “The dispute arose after Citigroup, Revlon’s loan agent, accidentally used its own money, last August, to repay an $894 million loan.”

Well, accidents, such as paying back loans, happen.

What once would have struck us as an incredibly impossible box score has become the analytics-infused standard MLB variety. For example:

Monday, Brewers 5, Padres 3. There were a total of 11 hits and 23 strikeouts. Eight pitchers. The 8 ¹/₂-inning game ran 3:12.

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Late in Tuesday’s Rockies-Mets game on SNY, Gary Cohen noted the Padres’ Al Ferrara in 1970 was the first and last victim in Tom Seaver’s streak of 10 consecutive strikeouts. Ferrara was the last out of that game.

Cohen then mentioned that later in the 1970s he was watching TV’s “The Match Game” when Ferrara appeared as a contestant. Small world.

Same thing here. I was watching an old black and white documentary about one of the most significant episodes of World War II, when the “The Bridge at Remagen,” the Ludendorff Bridge, was captured mostly intact, thus making it the only bridge that allowed the Allies to cross the Rhine River into Germany.

That bridge eventually collapsed, killing 28 U.S. Army engineers.

Among those interviewed on the Western bank of the Rhine was a a U.S. combat engineer from Buffalo, a field-commissioned lieutenant named Warren Spahn.

There was no mention that as a civilian Spahn, a Purple Heart recipient, had already pitched four games for the Boston Braves. After three years of WWII service, Spahn went on to win 363 games, and four more in the World Series.

As for Ferrara, who attended Brooklyn baseball mill Lafayette High, he dabbled in acting and once appeared in an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” Always a character, Ferrera, on “The Match Game,” gave his occupation as a “freelance piano dealer.”

Dilemma voided. What if Bob Baffert’s Medina Spirit, following a failed drug test after winning the Kentucky Derby, had next won the Preakness, which he did not? With a shot to win the Triple Crown, do you think the NYRA would have dared bar the horse from running in the Belmont?

For the NYRA to have waited until two days after the Preakness before excluding Baffert’s latest drug-flunked horse seemed a case of post-betting, more a case of let’s-first-see-what-happens rather than good-faith conviction on behalf of clean horse racing.

Still strikes me as conspicuously incongruous — even creepy — that ramblin’ gamblin’ Phil Mickelson continues to wear the endorsement cap of KPMG, the huge international accounting firm, unless it’s because Mickelson has had trouble accounting for himself.

Consider that he narrowly avoided an indictment for insider trading stock fraud, instead paying a $1 million fine, while his investment tout, Vegas business pal and big-stakes gambler Billy Walters, was fined $10 million and sentenced to five years in prison.

As of Friday, Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe was batting .196. He had struck out 59 times in 168 at-bats, 35 percent of the time. But he has hit nine home runs — all that matters. This year’s MLB strikeout rate is 24 percent, up from 16 percent in 2005. But that was before analytics.

The Rockies have left town after losing three of four to the who-are-these-guys Mets. The Yankees are in Detroit. Every time we look up the Yankees and/or Mets are playing a very bad team. All have the same in common: Swing as hard as they can, even with two strikes. Analytics!

As a matter of recurring neglect, SNY often scrolls the final score of the previous night’s Mets game during early morning reruns of that game. Good way to lose — and anger — even a small audience.

Colleague Ian O’Connor’s column on Bob Cousy on Friday reminded me of a message my wife left for me: “Bob Koozi returned your call.”

Now that May is over, John Sterling has determined that he can now start to give listeners players’ batting averages. Earlier this season he declared it was too early for him to bother providing us such info.

The Yankees are so short of bodies, they’ve re-signed Giuseppe Franco.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Retiring Marv Albert is so much more than a broadcasting icon

ESPN's Bob Baffert-Alex Rodriguez cheating contradiction

UCLA legend John Wooden nearly became Pirates manager

MLB keeps finding new ways to destroy the game

Roger Goodell should be ashamed of his insufferable NFL

Saturday was to be one of those nice, spring DVR days. Record everything on TV, grab my transistor radio — that trusty, rusty relic — and sit in the yard.

Nothing could bother me. I’d already had my angry moments trying to reseal one of those Ziploc bags.

First stop, WFAN, where the Nets were home against the Bulls — the friendly, relaxed good-listen team of Chris Carrino and Tim Capstraw. Perfect.

Early on, Carrino sounded pleased to report that Kyrie Irving had just scored. Then, after doing the quick math, my blood stewed angry.

Carrino, 51, for years has suffered mightily and increasingly from FSHD, Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy. It steadily wastes away the body’s muscles and nerves, making standing and walking difficult, falling easy.

Carrino soldiers on. He doesn’t miss games, doesn’t call in sick or despondent. He travels by a hydraulics-equipped SUV that helps him load and unload his wheelchair and/or medical scooter.

Years ago, before a Nets’ game in the Meadowlands, I watched Carrino slowly and painfully ascend a mountain of stairs carrying broadcasting gear and game notes to reach his broadcasting position.

I didn’t know whether to applaud or cry. A matter of pity? Somewhat. But also a matter of jealousy. I could never be as courageous as Carrino, and grateful never to have had to take such a test.

The man is beyond brave. He’s uncomplaining, relentless, devoted to his craft and damned good at it.

Team, coach and fan-undermining star Kyrie Irving, since joining the Nets, has been portrayed with sympathy, sensitivity and even admiration for missing games because something or other bothers him, annoys him, causes him emotional and social distress.

And Saturday Carrino sounded pleased for Irving after he scored — a residual of Irving’s decision, on this day, to play basketball in exchange for $33.3 million in annual but seasonal pay.

I would never put Carrino in a position to answer such a question, but as his condition has become a colossal physical burden, I wonder what he thinks of NBA players missing games to “load management” to ease their physical burden.

Besides, he does his public speaking about FSHD at fundraisers for the Chris Carrino Foundation.

“Load management.” Imagine Chris Carrino dutifully reporting a player’s absence due to “load management.”

Grodin priceless treasure, even on sports

Don’t know how, why or when — he might’ve called about something I wrote about Pittsburgh, where he was raised — but Charles Grodin, the comedic actor who died this week at 86, became a good friend.

Grodin — “Chuck” — wasn’t so much an acquired taste as he was a required taste. His inscrutable presence, as often witnessed as a guest of Johnny Carson and David Letterman, was an exercise in the defensive assault. He reversed every Q and A.

He volunteered me to be on a radio show with him, an NPR program if I correctly recall. Why me? “In case he asks any sports questions.”

Well, he did, about boxing. Before I could answer, Grodin revealed he was the “Western Pennsylvania high school kick-boxing champion.”

The host was impressed. “What weight class?” he asked.

“All of them,” Grodin said.

Don’t look now, but Corey Kluber’s no-hitter Wednesday was pitched in total defiance of analytics.

Ya think if he’d allowed a double in the sixth inning he’d have been pulled after seven, the pre-scripted appearances of Chad Green then Aroldis Chapman to wishfully follow?

The same day as Kluber’s no-hitter, Padres starter Joe Musgrove was pulled after seven scoreless, two-hit, 11-strikeout innings. The predetermined eighth- then ninth-inning men would follow.

And who can forget when Casey Stengel yanked Don Larsen in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series rather than allow him to face the Dodgers for the third time through the lineup?

If we didn’t expect better, it couldn’t be worse. TV remains so driven by deceit that we by now should be conditioned to being suckered.

Saturday’s Preakness coverage on NBC withheld important info in order to hold its audience. “Minutes To Post” was ignored then, after the race, the payouts went missing — NBC even cut to commercials — until well after they’d been posted at Pimlico.

The next day, with the Stanley Cup playoffs beginning and no standard game-start times to rely upon, NBC was eager to let all know that Islanders-Penguins would begin at noon.

Got it? Noon. We were stuck having to believe it.

However, the game, as per NBC’s prior knowledge, began at 12:30.

I remain convinced that one reason Bob Costas stepped away from NBC is that he grew tired of being a center-stage party to the network’s dishonest productions and promotions — especially when he was expected to anchor Olympics coverage pitching “plausibly live” events that had ended many hours earlier.

Costas often tried to subvert NBC’s perfidy by reporting the scheduled starting times to the minute. And that included the scheduled first pitch of World Series games.

Kyle finally clubs his Cubs!

Those who know better are still habit-formed to suffer ESPN’s rotten grasp of sports. They’d substitute the chant of “DEE-fense!” with “CON-text!”

Perhaps stat-deluded stat feeders were the last to know that after six years with the Cubs, Kyle Schwarber is now with the Nationals. Tuesday morning ESPN repeatedly scrolled that Schwarber on Monday “hit his first career home run vs. the Cubs.”

Did it matter that it came during his first career game against the Cubs? Not to ESPN.

WFAN’s Weekday Boomer Esiason, Monday morning: “Why does anyone feel the need to send out any tweets at all?” Agreed and amen!

As CBS’ Verne Lundquist said, “The most dangerous word in our language has become ‘Send.’ ”

The NFL again has sold its soul to TV. Check this season’s NFL schedule. What are presumed to be the least attractive matchups are scheduled for the most patron-friendly times, Sundays at 1 p.m.

And if any of those presumed “bad teams” show up as good teams, their games risk being “flexed” to late afternoons or prime time.

Yet, according to Roger Goodell, “PSLs are good investments.”

Nice take on YES from Michael Kay with Wednesday’s final out: “Corey Kluber becomes part of forever!”

SNY continues to produce and present clever promos that have the same thing in common: They’re not the least bit clever.

When to know when to switch the radio dial or just turn it off? When you hear, “When we get back, we’re going to break down last night’s game.”

From reader Louis Motola: “With Marv Albert’s retirement, my childhood officially ends at 64.”

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

ESPN's Bob Baffert-Alex Rodriguez cheating contradiction

UCLA legend John Wooden nearly became Pirates manager

MLB keeps finding new ways to destroy the game

Roger Goodell should be ashamed of his insufferable NFL

David Cone's fallacious ump trashing part of the lunacy on sports airwaves

There are sounds that belong to us, to New Yorkers, and to nearby turf dwellers Ralph Kiner, on “Kiner’s Korner,” would call “your Tri-State Lincoln-Mercury dealers.”

Among those New York sounds: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” the shrill squeal of subways braking as they pull into stations, conversations in Shea ended by the sudden roar of jets headed to LaGuardia, Bob Sheppard’s “Leading off for the Yankees. …”, 20,000 in the Garden chanting “DEE-fense!”

And Marv Albert.

The sound of Marv Albert as a sound belonging to us needs no explanation or examination. After 55 years of calling Rangers, Knicks, NBC boxing, Ch. 4 sports anchoring, 53 appearances on David Letterman, then the NBA at large, we get it — soon to be “we got it.”

Monday, Albert will announce his retirement at the close of his call of TNT’s NBA Eastern finals.

What would you have me now do? Address his sound, his approach, his style? Why would I waste your time on what you know?

Yet none of us have experienced Albert in the past tense.

He was peerless as a play-by-play man in that he made all of his dozens of color analysts the best they could be. That was perhaps his greatest talent. He would kid, coax and question until his partners relaxed and delivered.

He wanted everyone around him to be the stars, from Sal “Red Light” Messina, to John “Johnny Hoops” Andariese, to Mike “Czar of the Telestrator” Fratello, to stat man Art “The Dart” Friedman.

Consider that no-gimmicks Mike Breen, who in 2004 replaced Albert as the Knicks’ TV voice and credits Albert as an early and lasting inspiration, Friday was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Albert was inducted in 1997.

Albert made sure not to allow the announcement of his retirement collide with Breen’s induction, possibly diminishing its thunder.

In an egocentric business overly populated by the famous and insecure, Albert was what’s known as “a mensch,” a you-first gentleman.

If “Yes!” was shtick, as opposed to an excellent short-form description of a successful jumper, it was the only shtick he performed. It was copied and repeated in gyms, schoolyards and in office wastebasket games for decades — not as shtick, but as a salute.

Albert is surprisingly shy, a by-product of his modesty. He appreciates and politely responds to public recognition and admiration as it comes on the street, in cabs and in restaurants, but he’s more accustomed to it than comfortable with it or comforted by it. He even politely suffers fools.

He has never big-timed anyone, never thrown his weight around. In restaurants he routinely chose the table in the back, never needing to see how many could see that “Marv Albert is right over there!” He didn’t need any of that.

That was “a tell,” because many celebs choose to be seated facing the entrance, to watch people recognize them. Howard Cosell was infamous for dining with both eyes on the nearby front door.

Albert’s abundant sense of humor is a residual of his sense of the absurd. It can be described as childish, disarming and you-had-to-be-there funny.

At a restaurant one night, I was feted with a surprise birthday cake and “Happy Birthday” glitter strewn about the table. The nearby diners sang to me then applauded. Albert had let the maître d’ know it was my birthday. Except it wasn’t, not even close.

His wife, Heather, rolled her eyes, indicating she’d seen this before.

He loves games of any kind, from stoopball to tennis. At nearly 80, he’s still a kid waiting for you to come out to play. A party he threw included his ideal of top-notch entertainment: Lou Goldstein, a Catskills “King of Simon Sez.”

No one prepared for a game as thoroughly as Albert — as if 55 years in, his career depended on it, as if he might otherwise be canned.

Before he left home or a hotel to call a game he’d hunt down anyone and everyone who could provide a little more, a little extra, something worth noting when time allowed. He never disregarded an audience with vacant, time-killing filler.

He never knocked anyone on the record, not even Jim Dolan, who allowed Albert to leave MSG Network, but he was appalled by those who showed up to serve an audience without preparation or knowledge of what’s what with both teams.

In the end — and that’ll be soon — Albert treated broadcasting as a service industry. And he was at our service, and as much a sound of New York as any we’ve heard.

As an alleged journalist, I try to be, at most and at best, friendly, but never friends with those I’m assigned to cover. Albert made that impossible. And he never asked or hinted for anything in return. Marv Albert didn’t need me. And I confess: I cherish his friendship.

Carton ruins Roberts, can’t ‘sell’ free doorbells

During his years teamed with Joe Benigno on WFAN, Evan Roberts kept it clean.

Now, teamed with low-brow Craig Carton, and likely as a matter of unwritten obligation, Roberts spits out crudities and coarse phrases. More sad than surprising.

While we’re here, it’s unlikely Carton’s parole officer would approve of his personal, on-air endorsement of a product sold in a highly dubious manner, maybe even a con.

Carton has been pitching a home security company offering “free” doorbell security cameras “to the first 40 WFAN listeners” who respond.

Though it’s doubtful these cameras are up for grabs, no financial strings attached, the ads have been repeated on consecutive days.

Despite Carton’s personal endorsement, the company apparently can’t find 40 WFAN listeners eager to own a free doorbell security camera? To think Carton was imprisoned for fraud.

Francesa babbles about Baffert on Fox

Fox News last week was suckered into presenting Mike Francesa as a horseracing expert in view of trainer Bob Baffert’s Kentucky Derby winner possibly being disqualified for illegal drugs in its system.

Francesa could offer nothing worth knowing, as he didn’t know any more than anyone else who read a newspaper. But he was always full of it as a self-anointed horse expert and accomplished tout, despite having never picked a winner on WFAN in scores of tries.

That he owns horses only qualifies him as also owning what trainers mockingly call “owners’ knowledge” — knowledge presented as bad guesses.

Francesa once raged on WFAN that Baffert should be sanctioned for conflicts of interest for training more than one horse entered in Triple Crown races. For all his knowledge, Francesa was unaware that this is not an uncommon practice. He just raged, on and on, calling Baffert a bad guy.

Later that week, Baffert was on with Francesa. Francesa kissed his fanny. He never even brought up what he’d said about him.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

UCLA legend John Wooden nearly became Pirates manager

MLB keeps finding new ways to destroy the game

Roger Goodell should be ashamed of his insufferable NFL

David Cone's fallacious ump trashing part of the lunacy on sports airwaves

Cincinnati Reds go out of their way to avoid controversy

Hardly matters what you order, it now will be served with a topping of preposterous and a side of ridiculous.

Sunday night, as the Phillies played the Braves, ESPN’s ceaseless, repetitive, attention-diverting scroll ensured that every few minutes we read that Bob Baffert had been charged with scandalizing the Kentucky Derby as the Baffert-trained winner, Medina Spirit, tested drug-dirty.

Shame-shame on Baffert — again. Another horse-racing calamity, this time in its most prestigious event.

At the same time, Alex Rodriguez, twice scandalized drug cheat/liar, called the game as ESPN’s lead, we-couldn’t-hire-better, couldn’t-be-prouder MLB analyst. ESPN is accomplished at putting the “con” in contradiction.

Tuesday, The Post’s Josh Kosman reported that Nets’ part-time star Kyrie Irving had invested money in a minority-owned, operated and staffed — segregated? — consulting business that “seeks to provide a more equitable process that eliminates systemic barriers to entry,” no examples of offenders given.

It therefore stands to reason that if Irving’s NBA employment standards are applied, his employees, for any and all reasons — events that cause emotional distress, the need to cease working for days at a time for personal, unexplained reasons — will be allowed, if not encouraged, to disappear, no risk to continued employment.

Given his NBA employment history and tens of millions of dollars in pay, how could Irving ask, let alone insist, on better from his employees?

Back to Baffert. This week he recalled a past incident in which he claimed a groom ingested cough syrup then urinated on his horse’s stable fodder, which was then eaten by his horse (the equivalent to: “My baby brother ate my homework”). This type of “alibi” does nothing to exculpate numbers that create more suspicion than legitimate glory:

Just two full-time thoroughbred trainers in recent history have had win percentage rates as high as 32 percent, an incredibly high thus dubious rate as per the achievements of Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong and the afore-noted Rodriguez: Baffert and Jason Servis.

Last year Servis was indicted on federal charges as part of a horse-drugging ring that included trainers and veterinarians. This year, Baffert’s latest Derby “win” has wrecked Saturday’s Preakness.

Still, for all Baffert’s “success” — he’s in racing’s Hall of Fame — he has been hit with five recent horse drug-busts. Yet he now asks that you consider him a victim, specifically, as he later said this week, of the sweeping “cancel culture.” You’d think his name is being removed from schoolbooks.

Fine. He’s a victim of the cancel culture. But how does that explain that once again the trainer of championship horses — and now one to have won the latest Kentucky Derby — is again the last to know what goes on in his barns? Aren’t the labels of medications read before application?

At best, let’s give Baffert the benefit of the most extreme doubt: He’s innocent. In that case he’d be guilty of negligence in the extreme — yet again.

What’ll it be, Bob, regular or high test?

MLB strategy: Keep changing pitchers until you find way to lose

As long as our good senses have been invaded by analytics and their upper-case statistical abbreviations, why not add more significant abbreviations, those that distinguish wins from losses.

Saturday, with Max Scherzer doing a Cy Young number on the Yankees — after 7 ¹/₃ innings, he’d allowed one run, one walk, two hits and struck out 14 — the Nationals registered a GLPC, a game lost to pitch count.

Though the Nats didn’t have worry about a pinch hitter — it was a DH game — and held a 2-1 lead, Scherzer was pulled after his 109th pitch — once, as David Cone recently said on YES, no sweat for starters.

Next, entered Daniel Hudson who faced two batters. He made all gone on seven pitches, one strikeout. But manager Dave Martinez, as per standard MLB analytical lunacy, wouldn’t be happy until he found relievers to blow the game. He succeeded.

This was a GLAPC — game lost to absurd pitching changes, now as common as the RBI.

Then there are the daily/nightly BLFTR stats — bases lost, failure to run.

Tuesday, the Yanks stayed hot, beating the Rays with five players in the lineup batting .200 or under. The Rays started five at .193 and below. Lots of strikeouts, balls hit into the shift. The new same-old.

Why are such senseless, game-determining realities not subjected to analytics?

When Kenny Mayne began as an ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor, he was well worth our time and attention. He was creative, clever, effectively sarcastic, and he seemed to know his stuff.

But Mayne painted himself into a corner of his own choosing. He became inextricably attached to his detached, downbeat, on-air persona, so much so that his act became an act — worn, weary and, worst of all, predictable. Wedded to the off-speed changeup, he needed to throw different pitches.

Now, after 27 years and diminished presence, he’s out, having refused diminished pay. Pity.

Stats take place of words

Enough! Now, both YES and SNY, in detailed graphics and extended chitchat, are breaking out the kinds of pitches and percentages of different pitches that pitchers throw to record outs.

This is, at best, circumstantial, parenthetical info that can be covered by Ron Darling or David Cone with words such as, “The slider is his best pitch.”

Meanwhile, what we’re supposed to be enlightened by only further erodes why we’re there — to watch the bloody ballgame!

Good take by WFAN’s Maggie Gray on Mets call-up catcher Patrick Mazeika, the one with the bald top and hillbilly beard and ability to hit infield ground-ball game-winners: “I don’t know if he looks as if he’s from the past or the future.”

Still Missing Jim Spanarkel: YES part time Nets analyst Richard Jefferson remains in the habit of making non-stories and self-evident stories very long.

During Yankees telecasts, that fat “THE YES APP” appears on the screen at all times, even when another graphic appears as Michael Kay reads a promo for the “Major League Baseball Ballpark App.”

Two elderly gents chatting on a park bench. One says, “Ahh, my wife’s an angel.” “You’re lucky,” says the other, “mine’s still alive.” … Hey, some of my best friends are women.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Exploiting shift is just the start of playing true winning baseball

MLB whiffing and becoming a waste of time

ESPN, CBS turn blind eye at Masters to Tiger Woods' haunted past

Yankees broadcast orchestrates pathetic Gary Sanchez coverup

MLB All-Star Game relocation is senseless, crazy

Tuesday night on YES, David Cone was on a roll.

In the fourth inning against the Braves — in another game that challenged the better senses to find something, anything, more sensible — Cone spoke of how he was inspired as a kid by watching Luis Tiant manipulate batters and “improvise” throughout a game.

“I think that’s part of the lost art in pitching, nowadays. You see maximum effort, maximum velocity, starters going fewer innings, and that ‘improv’ allowed you to pitch more innings, give different looks.

“I don’t blame the pitchers, nowadays, they’re just not allowed to go as far as we were allowed to go. If I had 100 pitches after five innings, I had two or three more innings left. I wasn’t done after five; I finished with 130 pitches.”

OK, got it. Good stuff, too. But one question: Why? Why has that changed? That’s the part no one who gets it gets.

It’s not as if such management has reduced injuries. Seems every team’s IL is packed with pitchers far more than ever. So again, why, and to what good end?

But “modern” baseball is loaded with good questions in search of good answers.

Simultaneously on SNY, Cubs “star” Javier Baez, batting .200 and infamous for his failures to run reasonably hard to first base even during postseason games, was busy striking out four times in his four at-bats, swinging as hard as he could, trying to hit home runs even on pitches well outside.

Gary Cohen noted that Baez has thus far struck out in half his at-bats. He’d finish the night having struck out 31 times in 60 at-bats. Hideous.

Yet as a free agent after this season, bidding for Baez is expected to reach a total of roughly $200 million.

Again, why? But in this case, why should he bother to run to first base?

History being retrofitted with ‘walk-off’ labels

If only sports telecasts were subjected to quality-of-of-life graffiti/vandalism laws.

As if there isn’t enough screen clutter on YES’ Yankees games, they now include a large “THE YES APP” graphic in the upper right, not to mention the live-play distraction that has the YES app sell superimposed on the back of the mound plus another pitch appearing in crawls along the bottom of the screen.

Thus YES App promos during live play occasionally appear in triplicate. But it’s the perfect gift for those who want instant word of DH Giancarlo Stanton’s $29 million per season whiffs and return-to-dugout-exit velocities.

SNY’s Cubs-Mets went into ESPN-like graphics mode Tuesday, informing us that this is the 105th anniversary of the first game played at Wrigley.

That should’ve been enough, but added to the text was that the first game in 1916 was won by the Cubs, “in the 11th on a ‘walk-off’ run.”

But beside the fact that the foolish, one-phrase-fits-all expression didn’t make the scene for about 95 more years, all games won by “walk-offs” — whether in the ninth inning, in extra innings and now, as per MLB’s sorry doubleheader sorcery, occasionally the seventh inning — are won on “walk-offs.”

This brought to mind two ESPN graphics written in fluent sports stupid: 1) All four of the walk-off home runs allowed by Mariano Rivera “came on the road.” 2) Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ’Round the World” was a “walk-off home run” that won for the Giants “the 1951 NLCS.”

There was no NLCS until 1969, but how could America’s all-sports network possibly know that?

In what became a 16-4 Mets loss to the Cubs on Wednesday, attention-thirsty Pete Alonso — a conspicuous, check-me-out presence despite a conspicuously poor second season — hit a two-run homer to make it 7-4, then did an exaggerated, rehearsed home run skit with star newcomer Francisco Lindor, who entered hitting .171. They acted as if Alonso’s had just won the game.

Though hard to miss, neither Gary Cohen nor Ron Darling said anything about this, but I would’ve liked to hear what they thought — what they honestly thought. Why would Alonso be so eager to appear so foolish?

The common thread among all these sports gambling operations is shamelessness.

Allen Iverson — afflicted by bad cards, bad bets, bad losses and bad scenes in casinos (he was banned from an Atlantic City casino for urinating into a trash can, tossed from two Detroit casinos for rotten behavior) — is now the TV advertising star for the entrée of an Australian-based sports book.

Makes you wonder whom Iverson beat out for the gig.

Torres not alone in discontent

When/if it ends for Aaron Boone, it should be for no other reason than he got what he expected: the least his players could do.

Wednesday, he passed on another opportunity to show he’s the no-foolin’ boss, this time by not pulling Gleyber Torres after he jogged to first in a close game and another loss, making an easy out of what could have been a base hit on a swinging tapper in front of the plate.

But Torres, batting .186, was indulged by Boone, then excused/explained by David Cone as “frustrated.”

He is frustrated? How about the thousands of Yankees fans paying to watch this top-tier junk on YES, not to mention those who bought tickets to watch in winter weather?

Even the wisest, most wary horseplayers bow before what they can’t resist. They’re often called hunch bets, based on nothing more than the imagined wink in their direction by a four-legged, or, in the case of Mike Soper, a call from above.

Soper, a longtime pen pal, is a Georgetown, D.C., chef (try his mushroom barley soup), mixologist and author. He was also friends with the three Walsh Brothers from Albany, N.Y. Last week, the eldest, Richard, a prominent Albany attorney and Saratoga horseman, passed at 77. The viewing was Sunday.

Also on Sunday, Soper perused the racing entries and stumbled upon “Mr. Walsh,” a winless entry in the eighth at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky. How could he not? “The spirit moved me,” Soper explained.

Off at 16-1, Mr. Walsh paid $34.40.

New Jersey’s Monmouth University’s delayed-by-COVID football team Friday plays at Texas’s Sam Houston State. It’s a Big South vs. Southland Conference playoff battle. Yet Monmouth, the Big South rep, isn’t even in South Jersey.

Sunday, YES producer Josh Isaac produced two Yankees pregame shows — one taped for streaming — from the studio in Stamford, Conn., then drove to Brooklyn as an emergency fill-in producer of Nets-Heat. Who does he think he is, Kenny Albert?

Question for Rob Manfred: In your new, seven-inning games, should the “seventh-inning stretch” be observed after the game or in the fifth inning?

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

MLB whiffing and becoming a waste of time

ESPN, CBS turn blind eye at Masters to Tiger Woods' haunted past

Yankees broadcast orchestrates pathetic Gary Sanchez coverup

MLB All-Star Game relocation is senseless, crazy

NCAA Tournament coverage ignores Kelvin Sampson's ugly past

Imagine the big league team that breaks spring training to demonstrably declare: “You may beat us, now and then, but never at the Game of Baseball!

“Hi, Sparky Fungobatz here, to talk a little baseball with ya.

“You wanna play the shift against us? Knock yourselves out. We have been drilled to beat the shift with ‘other way’ swings for RBI doubles and singles into inviting, conspicuously empty spaces. And we know how to bunt, another way to earn an important base hit rather than another defeated walk back to the dugout.

“We’re the team that understands that the shift can place an opponent’s defense in peril, not just our offense. So go ahead, show us your shift.

“Pitching? Don’t wait for us to cull our bullpen in search of the one guy you can clobber. If we’ve got a guy out there who’s making life tough on you, starters included, we’re gonna stick with him. Crazy as that sounds!

“Hustle? We will not be out-hustled. If a guy jogs when he should be running, if he home-plate-poses a double or triple into a single, he will immediately be pulled. We don’t care if he’s embarrassed or angry; he brought that on himself. We don’t run a day camp, our guys are paid — and many paid extraordinary amounts — to play winning baseball.

“The guilty can’t defend the indefensible, and our manager will not indulge their feelings to excuse them. He wasn’t hired to be their human resources pal, to suffer their minimal or zero efforts. He was hired to win games and give our fans and our franchise their money’s worth.

“The quickest way to home plate is to run there. And that applies to all of our players. How many games per year are decided by hustle or the absence of it? Six, eight, 10? We’re gonna win all of them!

“And our first-base coaches will not be allowed to glad-hand one of our guys in the process of hitting a home run. He should be well past first base, running on contact. We’re going to use our spikes as intended.

“Our designated hitter, especially with two strikes, will be tasked with putting the ball in play, not striking out trying to hit the ball 500 feet.

“And no bat-flipping or any similar acts of ‘me.’ We’re a team: we’ll win with class, lose with class. You hit a double? Prepare for the next pitch and the next batter, check the defense. No ‘check-me-out’ signaling to the dugout.

“Keep your head in the game, not your face in the mirror. Save all celebrations for the final out — after we win.

“Let other teams dislike us only because we beat them, not because we’re obnoxious. Such conduct will not cost us a single fan or customer, quite the contrary. We’re not interested in pandering to fools by acting like fools.

“Social media? Keep it clean, keep it civil, or keep off.

“On defense, if you want to catch flies with one hand, increasing your chances to drop the ball, go ahead. But the first time you drop one — allow an opponent to reach base for no good reason — you’re coming out.

“We will allow nothing short of smart play to reflect on our team and its manager. Before road games, we’re even going to throw balls against the outfield walls to gauge what to expect.

“So shift away! Within a month no one will again dare. There’s a price to pay in left field as much as in right!

“You couldn’t root — and hard — for a team like ours?

“So baseball fans, this is Sparky Fungobatz, signing off until next time, when we discuss the best way to sit out a three-hour rain delay.”

Of course, the preferred, proven managers to enact such a sensible, winning, no-compromise plan — the kind who instructed folks such as Aaron Boone when he played, for example — are mostly dead.

MLB hierarchy embraces ‘strategy’ of WWE

In what might be a reflection of where Rob Manfred and the commissioner’s office feels MLB should be headed, Brian Stedman, 44, has been hired as MLB’s executive vice president of strategy and development.

Stedman spent the past seven years serving in the same capacity for Vince McMahon’s WWE.

Interestingly, former McMahon executives once assiduously avoided listing him and the WWE, and before that the WWF, on their employment bios. The embarrassment was too great.

Playing with fire, continued: Looks as if 20 will again go in the Kentucky Derby — a frightening total of inexperienced, mostly unreliable and often flighty 3-year-olds to send into a gated land rush in service to owners’ egos and expensive entry fees.

No horse race, even with seasoned entries, should logically include more than a dozen, 14 at most. They’re young animals. And jockeys are not crash-test dummies.

Transfers easier for players

Real college students, when attempting to transfer, run into serious academic credit transfer issues. Apparently, with scores of college basketball players in the transfer process, this significant issue is not an issue.

Playing it straight and simple, Aaron Rodgers was a solid guest host of “Jeopardy!”

The swipe I took at YES’s truck for negligence in failing to show the Rays’ Austin Meadows at the close of a half-inning after he’d been hit by a pitch, was unfair. YES was mostly working off a Bally Sports Sun feed.

Cleveland vs. White Sox on Thursday: Batters struck out 14 times against four pitchers. Not one batter in the Tribe lineup was hitting over .250. Eleven batters in the 22-strikeout game were not hitting above .185. Elsewhere, Orioles DH Anthony Santander struck out three times in three ABs — in one of those new-age-compromised seven-inning games.

Everyone deserves multiple second chances — provided they can play ball. Often arrested and suspended defensive end Aldon Smith, the latest in a series of Adam “Pacman” Jones-types to be indulged by the NFL, has signed with the Seahawks. Meanwhile, a league that pretends to be concerned with brain injuries, has added a regular season game to total 17.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Yankees broadcast orchestrates pathetic Gary Sanchez coverup

MLB All-Star Game relocation is senseless, crazy

NCAA Tournament coverage ignores Kelvin Sampson's ugly past

Deshaun Watson's sexual assault attorney has history of shadiness

Charles Barkey missing his own hypocrisy in spot-on E.J. Liddell abuse rant

Show of hands: How many of you are stupid? I mean buy-the-Brooklyn Bridge stupid?

By now, one would think it’s time for TV to cut it out. Instead, it remains tethered to the notion that its audiences are predominated by the gullible and unworldly, thus all audiences are to be treated like suckers. And not one network chooses to distinguish itself as the one that considers its viewers as worthy of better, smarter.

So who’s stupid?

Even those who wouldn’t recognize a con if it were sold with multiple, fill-in-the-blanks certificates of authenticity, now know that this 25-year anointment of Tiger Woods as a saint on earth was a media con. Again, it wasn’t enough that he was the world’s best golfer, he additionally had to be the best son, best husband, best father and finest human being.

But if that had been you instead of Woods, the one who, unimpeded at almost double the speed limit, rolled his SUV off the road, you’d have been charged with a pile of negligent driving charges — even while hospitalized and before your blood results returned.

But certified, Sheriff’s Department ignorance was granted him. How could any credible law enforcement have not known of or chosen to ignore Woods’ previous 2017 passed-out, drugged-driving conviction? Woods was the celebrity beneficiary of intentional official negligence from the moment his SUV finally stopped rolling.

Yet, CBS’s shared telecast on ESPN on Thursday unplugged live Masters coverage for a lengthy, hallowed homage to Woods, still at the top of humanity’s leaderboard.

Woods’ absence was noted by ESPN’s Masters host Scott Van Pelt, the reason unspoken. “Tiger knows that the competitors here are thinking about him,” he preached.

He then threw it to Curtis Strange, who recalled Woods’ Masters accomplishments, specifically heading into the waiting arms of “his family” — as if he were the first and only Masters or hop scotch champ to be greeted by loved ones.

Van Pelt: “It was impossible to miss a young man hugging his father in ’97, and that man, now a father, [two years ago] hugging his children in the very same spot.” Ugh.

Woods, now on at least two self-inflicted occasions — a third was when he crashed his car while on the narcotic Ambien after that fight with his now ex-wife — is lucky to be alive, lucky his kids still have a father, lucky to have not caused serious injury or death to the children of other parents.

Had he taken someone’s life, he could have been charged with vehicular manslaughter.

And his serial infidelity that inspired his then wife to go after him with a golf club? Shhhh.

For him to still be sainted on the national telecast of a major as a gift from above was designed to be swallowed by the tiny fraction of fools still available to be fooled. That’s supposed to be all of us. Again. And it’s nauseating. Again.

Of course, there was the more standard TV dishonesty to suffer.

Oh, look! There’s Mike Weir, 2003 Masters champ, with a long putt on 18. Hadn’t seen him all telecast. He’s 13 back, so why now? Because he was about to sink that bomb. What pure, mystical TV prescience to arrive at that moment!

Paul Azinger, now with NBC, during his brief Fox golf career, slipped and told the on-air truth about such “live” coverage: “If he hadn’t have made it, we wouldn’t have shown it.”

Gleyber passing English

Despite defensive lapses, give Yankees shortstop Gleyber Torres credit.

Last week the Venezuelan with just four years in the bigs stood for a pregame interview on YES, and through faulty English, nevertheless understood and answered Meredith Marakovits’ questions to the best of his English-speaking ability. It’s clear he’s working on his English.

Gary Sanchez, after seven seasons with the Yankees and before that with the club’s farm teams, still can’t be bothered. He still relies on an interpreter, still as deficient in English as he is in fundamental baseball skills and awareness.

How did I know that 43-year-old Paul Pierce, fired last week after his Instagram Live video proudly co-starring barely dressed female dancers, was — at best — a bad choice, but ESPN didn’t? Or was he another good ESPN choice because he was a bad choice?

I blew it here Friday. Last year’s World Series went six games, not seven.

Line of the week belongs to YES’s Michael Kay. After Paul O’Neill marveled at how detailed the game’s weather forecast read — 13 percent chance of rain — Kay said, “If it does rain, we’ll have its exit velocity.”

Not that I’m Charles Oakley, but if I promise to stay off Jimmy Dolan’s case, will he retire my number? I’ve already heard he’d like to hang me from the Garden’s rafters.

Showboat gets punished, so his skipper gets mad

Talk about missing the larger point …

Reds outfielder Nick Castellanos has appealed his two-game suspension for taunting, and nearly igniting an all-in brawl against the Cardinals last week. Castellanos, who performed a check-me-out bat-flip home run versus the Cards on Opening Day, this time slid safely home then stood over St. Louis starter Jake Woodford to show him his rub-it-in unsportsmanlike side. The Cards had had enough.

Reds manager David Bell defended Castellanos: “I’m disappointed that Nick was suspended even though he did not initiate physical contact. I am hopeful that when baseball is played with emotion, the players will be protected from dangerous and unnecessary retaliation.”

Emotion? That’s pure, pandering rationalization. Castellanos had again acted like a creep and this time was treated as one.

But Bell’s legit gripe should be with commissioner Rob Manfred — who has endorsed MLB’s “image” campaign to encourage kids to play and enjoy baseball through every manner of excessively immodest, me-first conduct, from bat-flipping to plate-posing in self-admiration.

MLB Network now packages such boorish behavior as why we love baseball and how it should be played. The brawls and near-brawls never make the cut.

Of all the absence of foresight in replay rules, the utopian ideal that human error will be removed, when it’s only transferred or further emphasized, is the greatest failing.

Replay rules underscore the human condition, as umpires naturally become less decisive and less confident in their calls.

That replay did not apply to the end of the Mets’ win over the Marlins on Thursday, when Michael Conforto allowed himself to be hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, did not mean that passing this buck to the Downtown replay police didn’t enter the mind of home plate ump and human being Ron Kulpa, who became Mea Culpa, admitting that the pitch that struck Conforto was a strike.

Gosh, baseball used to be such a great game.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

MLB All-Star Game relocation is senseless, crazy

NCAA Tournament coverage ignores Kelvin Sampson's ugly past

Deshaun Watson's sexual assault attorney has history of shadiness

Charles Barkey missing his own hypocrisy in spot-on E.J. Liddell abuse rant

March Madness ignores NCAA's most disturbing truths

Ever drive to Florida? Many miles before you reach Dillon, S.C., you begin to be broadsided by large highway billboards pitching a highway stop near Dillon called “South of the Border,” a Mexican-themed establishment that apparently sells eats and enough fireworks to declare war on Canada.

The South of the Border beckoning never quits. You see them every few miles telling (or warning) you that you’re coming closer, so don’t miss it! Buses are welcomed!

One day, curiosity had to be served. We pulled in. We entered a huge, empty parking lot to find that South of the Border was nearly empty of customers. The sell had overwhelmed both the senses and the reality.

That’s much like watching Yankees telecasts on YES. They mostly open to Michael Kay emoting overwritten, excited and often trite come-ons to stay tuned to watch something extra special. Then it’s on to his tired “Let’s do it!” just before the first pitch. He often sounds like the master of ceremonies at a Cub Scout jamboree or Professor Harold Hill selling tubas to local yokels.

It doesn’t yet strike him that this kind of sell is unnecessary given that he’s selling a telecast to those already watching. It’s silly and insulting, but Kay is not alone among hosts of live sports telecasts. The biggest golf events are always preceded by long, syrupy come-ons to watch what we’re already in place to see.

The YES sell doesn’t end with the first pitch. It’s next customized to fit players.

Sunday the Yanks were down, 3-0, to the Blue Jays in the second, when Gary Sanchez, with one out and one on, flew out on a 3-2 pitch. David Cone was left impressed. It seems anytime Sanchez doesn’t strike out or blocks a pitch in the dirt is cause to celebrate the end of his conspicuous, repetitive deficiencies, so often ignored.

So Cone concluded Sanchez “is seeing the ball very well” and we’d just witnessed him in “a good at-bat.”

Nonsense. Another believe-what-you’re-told, ignore-what-you-see con. It was a miserable at-bat, as Sanchez fouled off a 3-1 pitch that was considerably low and outside. A walk to make it two on and one out had been lost to yet another indiscriminate Sanchez at-bat.

And to be told differently — that we should be impressed by what we’d just seen from Sanchez — was another hollow, even pathetic sell.

Wednesday, Sanchez was nearly forced out at second when he jogged from first on a Gio Urshela single to right. This time, after a replay showed Sanchez’s usual disinclination to play winning baseball, Cone was left to conclude that his desultory jogging was “indefensible.”

Given that Sanchez issued the incredible offseason complaint that no one explained to him why he was benched during last season’s postseason — was he unaware that he’d become a chronic, two-way liability? — Aaron Boone on Wednesday had the opportunity to provide a here-and-now example. Boone should’ve pulled him from the game.

But Boone seems to manage on a wish, hopeful that we don’t know better. He explained that Giancarlo Stanton, now a $29 million per year DH, was due a rest — after three games.

And, as seen and heard during his pre- and postgames on YES, Boone always seems satisfied with the least his players can do, thus he’s seldom disappointed. Should have brought him some fireworks from South of the Border.

Managers can’t wait to pull plug on effective starters

The Game Has Changed …

Let the record show that in the Mets’ first game since Rays manager Kevin Cash blew Game 7 of the World Series by prematurely pulling starter Blake Snell, Mets manager Luis Rojas pulled Jacob deGrom with a 2-0 lead and having thrown just 77 pitches.

After deGrom’s reliever Miguel Castro pitched a scoreless seventh on nine pitches, Rojas pulled him, too. Soon the Mets were 5-3 losers.

Yesterday, the Marlins blew a 2-1 lead in the ninth when Don Mattingly pulled reliever Yimi Garcia, after an untouchable eighth, for transient Anthony Bass, a closer without portfolio, who finished with a blown save and the loss.

Wednesday against the Yankees on YES, the Orioles began the 10th with a “Manfred man” automatically on second. It would have been first and third, one out, had O’s batter Maikel Franco bothered to run out a grounder that was bobbled by Jay Bruce at first. But Franco had presumptively stopped running.

The DH continues to be diminished by self-afflicted folly, as it mostly just adds to all-or-nothing strikeout totals. Wednesday, Royals DH Jorge Soler struck out three times. Monday, ex-Mets catcher Wilson Ramos was the Tigers’ DH. He K’d four times.

And for those who still believe that MLB’s replay rules are “about getting it right,” there was the end of Thursday’s Marlins-Mets.

This one has made the rounds: The Pirates struck out 44 times in their first four games. Over 151 games in 1958, Bucs shortstop Dick Groat struck out 23 times.

Groat, 90, remains a beloved figure in Pittsburgh, where the All-American basketball player at Duke is the color analyst on Pitt radio broadcasts.

He’s also the uncle of golf star Brooks Koepka, who Thursday at Augusta finished 2-over in the first round of the Masters.

More friends and family: That was Joe Girardi’s kid, Dante, playing third for Florida International vs. Miami on ESPN on Wednesday night.

Anthem just for ‘willing and able’

Even the national anthem is now prefaced by a political disclaimer. Monday night’s NCAA Championship began with the public address announcer inviting those “willing and able to please rise.” The option — the freedom — to stay seated was always available, now it comes with a reminder.

Guess it was easier for WFAN’s Marc Malusis to defame Adam Gase as “a moron” now that Gase has left town.

Commercials on Mets telecasts are pitching a “limited edition” Nolan Ryan keepsake for $130. It’s a bat. A Nolan Ryan bat! He was a career .110 hitter. I’ll take three!

In 2018, Mets manager Mickey Callaway infamously explained that he didn’t have Dom Smith bunt in a 10th-inning sacrifice situation because Smith “has never bunted in his professional career.” So Wednesday, when Smith feigned a bunt, surely Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling would be on it. But they missed it.

From reader Greg Marotta: Mickey Mantle will miss tonight’s game due to “soreness.”

What a shame. Now the Mets’ Jeff McNeil has become an immodest bat-flipping, home plate-poser. Cohen, Hernandez and Darling seemed good with it, even if I suspect they weren’t.

In 1928, the Republican Party ran Herbert Hoover for president with the slogan, “A chicken in every pot.” That political slogan could now be, “Some pot in every chicken.”

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

NCAA Tournament coverage ignores Kelvin Sampson's ugly past

Deshaun Watson's sexual assault attorney has history of shadiness

Charles Barkey missing his own hypocrisy in spot-on E.J. Liddell abuse rant

March Madness ignores NCAA's most disturbing truths

Marvin Hagler part of biggest sporting event I witnessed

Perhaps it’s time for a significant third political party, the Surprise Party. It would represent the most vastly underrepresented U.S. citizens, those who value and even practice common sense.

MLB’s All-Star Game this season has been removed from the Atlanta area, a city with six black mayors among its past seven, because, at least in significant part, Georgia’s newly passed voting rules have been deemed by some as racist.

“Why are they racist?”

“Because we said they are.”

“OK, that’s good enough for us!”

The claim of racism is now so prevalent throughout the United States that it remains astonishing that hundreds of thousands will do anything — anything — to live in this horribly racist, fascist country via illegal entry across our southern borders.

OK, so, so as a matter of protest, this All-Star Game is lost to Atlanta, which doubtless would have paid homage to the recently deceased Henry Aaron.

Now whom does this decision hurt? Racists, real, suspected or imagined? Or airport workers, hotel workers, restaurant workers, cab drivers, ushers, vendors and on and on? Those punished will be most in need of an economic kick-start, provided COVID-19 restrictions are eased or lifted. Brilliant strategy!

China is plenty good for our Olympic teams and Nike baseball uniforms, but Atlanta will not be suffered by big league baseball.

But sports now capitulates to any group screaming “Racism!” to try to avoid being labeled “racist.” And the good folks in my life are sick of the endless media, commercial and sports-delivered presupposition that they’re all racists in need of an immediate overhaul.

The Surprise Party would never advocate or yield to such senseless political extortion and a further detachment from our sports based on selective claims of racism, as per their blind pandering to the insidiously and erroneously named, radical organization Black Lives Matter.

The Surprise Party would focus on ending the most significant but intentionally ignored racism — the thousands of blacks and Hispanics of all ages annually murdered by blacks and Hispanics in our cities. Crazy, I know.

But it’s all a con. The retirement of North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams last week inspired a salute from his longtime Duke rival, Mike Krzyzewski — who celebrated Williams as a man who not only cared about the game, “but more importantly, the people who played it.”

So then why did Williams plead total ignorance when it came to light that his UNC career and successes were in part predicated on systemic academic fraud in maintaining player eligibility through high marks in no-show, no-work classes?

How is it possible he cared most “about the people” who played for him when he didn’t know or perhaps even care if his recruits would leave UNC with a functional education, starting with the ability to read and write?

How did his star guard Rashad McCants make the academic Dean’s List — four A’s in his four classes — when, by his own admission, he didn’t attend a single class? Or was that for perfect attendance at practice?

As the college’s highest paid employee, didn’t that matter to Williams or UNC?

Save it, Coach K. You’re full of it, and I suspect you know it.

New Mets owner Steve Cohen is another who is either detached from reality or doesn’t yet know the business of baseball.

He recently said he’d like to see a restoration of Mets Saturday afternoon games: “Why not? I don’t see why we can’t do that. It’s better for the kids, right? We want our next generation to enjoy being at the ballpark and enjoy their affiliation with the Mets, so I think we should do that.”

Why not? I don’t think I have to explain to a multi-billionaire hedge-funder that the answer is money. MLB — and Rob Manfred already made the hollow claim that kids are his top priority, while allowing the Mets to eliminate all Saturday afternoon home games — sells its soul and authority to network TV, which, for the sake of ratings and maximum payments to MLB, insists that its flagship Saturday games, east of the Mississippi, begin no earlier than 4:05 p.m.

That goes double for large TV market teams such as the Mets. The early Saturday afternoon games that served us as entry-level catnip for lifelong baseball fans have been auctioned to the highest bidder. If Cohen can reverse that reality — and he can’t — at least show us the courage of that conviction.

Cohen also said that naming former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to the Mets’ board of directors was because Christie is a devoted Mets fan, thus “this is not about politics.”

Exactly. Christie, a Republican, won the office then watched his approval ratings among all constituents plummet as he showed himself to be an arrogant, trash-talking bully so self-entitled he ordered Jersey beaches closed on the same day he took his family to the beach.

He was elected as a matter of politics, but grew disfavored as a matter of taste. He kicked sand in every voter’s face.

Then there’s Hedy Weinberg of the American Civil Liberties Union, who claimed that the common sense move by several states to limit girls’ sports to biological females — hard to believe this has even become a legitimate issue — is a “shameful” attempt to legalize bias.

To ensure fair play is now shameful? Perhaps Weinberg would be pleased to watch the girls in her life crushed in competitive sports against naturally stronger, faster and larger biological males. But even those who otherwise fully support transgender rights recognize that stacking the deck is antithetical to sports.

So support the Surprise Party.

… I approved this message.

Season striking out early

Saw something on ESPN on Opening Day that was mind-blowing: Against the Dodgers, the Rockies tied the game with a squeeze play, the kind of baseball long ago lost to home run, strikeout and into-the-shift redundancies. It even helped Colorado win the game!

Other than that, more of the same. Lots more. Games dead on arrival with 20 or more strikeouts. In 10 innings, the Twins struck out 17 times. In eight innings at bat — 24 outs — the Tigers struck out 14 times. The Cubs struck out 13 times in nine innings.

On YES’s Yankees telecast, after the 10th inning began with a Blue Jays runner on second — he went on to score the winning run — David Cone lamented that this ridiculous rule was approved, but a more sensible both-leagues DH wasn’t. Yet designated hitters have become designated swingers, immersed in the home run-or-strikeout malaise. All-or-nothing DH Giancarlo Stanton whiffed three times.

Finally, even if it was Opening Day for the national pastime, YES had no time, need or inclination to air the national anthem from Yankee Stadium. These preposterous days, one is left to wonder if the anthem was deemed inappropriate and offensive.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Charles Barkey missing his own hypocrisy in spot-on E.J. Liddell abuse rant

March Madness ignores NCAA's most disturbing truths

Marvin Hagler part of biggest sporting event I witnessed

The late Joe Tait could have been NY sports radio legend

The March Madness broadcast downer networks should have seen coming

One of my favorite sports sideshow characters has become Rusty Hardin, a Houston-based big shot attorney given to winning photo-op attention with eye-raising claims, countrified sound bites and boasts — even if they make no sense.

Hardin is now representing the Texans’ openly disgruntled quarterback, Deshaun Watson, who has been accused by more than a dozen females, including multiple massage therapists, of trying to treat them as rub-a-dub sex workers.

Hardin first came to our attention in 2008 when his client, MLB pitcher Roger Clemens, was scheduled to testify about his purported use of drugs to illegally enhance his career.

It was then Hardin had the bright idea to escort Clemens to the offices of those congressmen and congresswomen who were to solicit his testimony about his alleged illegal use of PEDs. Hardin and Clemens brought with them publicity photos of Clemens for the famous pitcher to autograph for those who were to interrogate him.

A dumb, transparent idea to court pre-testimony Congressional favor? Absolutely. But in some cases, it worked.

Clemens, in another breach of common sense and judicial conduct, also posed for photos with those charged to get to the bottom of his drug use, as administered by a former MLB strength coach, Brian McNamee — an ex-NYC cop who became a personal trainer.

Those congressional stop-and-chats and fan-photo and autograph sessions ran over two days.

Yep, as long as Hardin and Clemens were in town, they figured they’d stop by those selected congress folks’ offices to say, “Howdy” to those who were to soon quiz Clemens.

Among those who fell for this ploy was Brooklyn Rep. Edolphus Towns, who seemed delighted by the private time Clemens, a famous Yankees player, after all, suddenly had decided to devote to him — as if there were no catches involved or intended.

For crying out loud, Towns’ deputy chief of staff posed for a picture with Clemens, his arm around her shoulder. The judicial process, at Hardin’s direction, was contaminated before it had begun.

Still, the Congressional Q&A of Clemens did not exonerate him. Hardly. He still struck the sensible as a covert user or abuser of illegal PEDs as administered in his home and his rear end by someone considerably less than a licensed physician. Clemens explained, “I’m a trusting person.”

And a taped conversation Hardin claimed would be the smoking gun that would prove McNamee lied about injecting Clemens with steroids proved to be nothing of the kind.

Afterward, Hardin was asked why Clemens chose McNamee rather than a genuine doctor to treat whatever it was that ailed him.

“Do you call a doctor every time you don’t feel good?” he answered.

Well, barrister, where needles and injections come into play I’d answer, “Yes, unconditionally.” How would Hardin choose to be injected with a medical curative, by an amateur, someone who likes to play doctor?

Hardin’s defense of NFL star running back Adrian Peterson for the brutal beating of his 4-year-old son with a tree branch was rationalized and defended by Hardin of a mere duplication of how Peterson was raised. With Hardin’s guidance, Peterson accepted a plea deal to avoid a felony child abuse case.

So now Watson’s future has been entrusted to Hardin. I’d say that 16 accusations of sexual malfeasance are tough to sell as a conspiracy to get to Watson’s money. But Hardin hasn’t yet begun to distribute Watson’s photo and autograph to those entrusted to pass judgment. He’ll come up with something.

Yet to transition from transistor

Tales of the Transistor: With baseball returning any minute, I spied the one non-baseball item that I find synonymous with baseball — my transistor radio. About 20 years ago it cost me eight bucks, and it remains Ol’ Reliable.

At night I’ll sometimes eschew televised baseball to find a game — any game from anywhere — on that transistor. And I’ve been doing that since the third grade. I’d swipe change from my mother’s wallet to buy 9-volt batteries for nighttime, under-the-pillow listening.

To that end, reader James Torbik recalls trying to listen to Johnny Most call “my” Celtics’ games on WBZ Radio when his aunt flipped on the kitchen’s overhead fluorescent tube lights. “My radio reception immediately turned to deafening static!”

We had fluorescent tube lights in our kitchen, too, except ours also flickered. But we still share both that memory and the pain.

WFAN host/FanDuel shill Maggie Gray now pitches parlay bets — a fools’ play with lousy payoffs — as a good wager to make. She even claims to place a few parlays herself.

Why not reveal her two- or three-game parlays before the games so we can all judge how her parlays made out? And let us know what the payout was if and when she wins one.

Odd, Gray didn’t mention or even hint at her great interest in sports gambling prior to FanDuel’s sponsorship of WFAN. Now she’s Riverboat Ruby.

Ex-Gov. on Amazin’ Board?

Can Mets owner Steve Cohen be so detached that he’d think the pompous, self-entitled, my-rules-don’t-apply-to-me ex-Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, is a good choice to join the Mets’ Board of Governors?

Soon the rare bird in Division I college basketball will be the one who plays four years with the same school. Though the team just missed making the NCAA Tournament, at least five recruited University of Cincinnati basketball players have filed to transfer.

Graphic of the Week was delivered by ESPN’s ACC Network: Florida State baseball’s 6-5 win against Central Florida was it’s “First Walk-Off Win Since 2020.” (Thanks to reader Bob LaRosa for the screen-shot.)

Though it’s good to read that the Giants conducted due diligence on WR Kenny Golladay to learn that he’s a team-first guy, video of his play with the Lions tells a different story. With Detroit he wasn’t the kind to make a catch then quickly return to the huddle. He was too busy strutting around and walking downfield in self-aggrandizement — no matter the score.

Carl Erskine, at 94 and always a gentleman, is still doing Zoom appearances for the pleasure of Brooklyn Dodgers fans. And it’s his pleasure, too.

Gee, Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman makes himself tough to like. His tweets are too often vulgar, inflammatory and boastful.

An improvement in CBS/Turner NCAA Tournament coverage is their closer attention to free-throw stats. They count, and often for plenty.

With Sunday the first full day of Passover, I’m reminded of the blind man who was invited to join a family at their Seder, the evening friends and family meal and service that begins the holiday. Handed a piece of matzo, the blind man runs his hand over it then looks up and says, “Who wrote this junk?”

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

Marvin Hagler part of biggest sporting event I witnessed

The late Joe Tait could have been NY sports radio legend

The March Madness broadcast downer networks should have seen coming

Knicks legend Clyde Frazier would have been flabbergasted by this madness before

Empty apologies only add to confusing sports madness

Years ago, when Frank McLaughlin, then Fordham AD, attended one of those feckless NCAA reform conventions, he was stunned to see and hear Jerry Tarkanian, basketball coach of notoriously lawless UNLV, support the most stringent rules and punishment proposals.

He later asked Tarkanian how his reputation as a renegade was in such defiance of his law-and-order positions. Tarkanian, leading with his inscrutable facial expression, explained that he hoped his competitors would take the new rules seriously, because he wouldn’t.

McLaughlin never knew if Tarkanian was busting his chops. But he didn’t think so.

With the NCAA Tournament, a billion-dollar TV property, back in mass view, a look at the college basketball coaches enshrined in halls of fame finds many who ran far afoul of NCAA rules as a means to their NCAA Tournament ends, and reveals their schools’ willingness to play their kind of ball. The repetitive play of both parties was the wink and nod.

And early on in this tournament it seemed that significant, whatever-it-takes recruiting truths were evaded.

Utah State, losers to Texas Tech on TNT on Friday, had two players from Poland, one each from Canada, Portugal, Australia and Ukraine. Was that so irrelevant — or damning — that it was ignored by announcers Carter Blackburn and Debbie Antonelli?

It might’ve been fascinating to learn that the Ukrainian, Max Shulga, attended high school at the Basketball School of Excellence in Torrelodones, Spain, just a short bus ride to a state college in Logan, Utah, 5,200 miles away. Or did he ship from Kiev, 5,700 miles out?

Jim Valvano, now ESPN’s sanctified version of Our Lady of Guadalupe, was available to star on ESPN because his operation and operatives were caught cheating too many times while he coached North Carolina State. Its 1983 national championship aside, by 1990 the state school could no longer indulge the scandals on his watch.

Soon, big-name college coaches who were fired for running runaway programs found TV networks to be eager and enriching, no-questions-asked, easy-money employment havens.

Not that the schools found religion. NCAA investigators were hired, and for bigger dough than they were making, by big-time sports colleges to serve as specialists in recruiting and eligibility-loopholes.

Many athletic departments already were in the habit of assigning easily compromised rah-rahs as academic advisers to best ensure sustained eligibility while sacrificing academic integrity in “service” to players who soon returned from where they came, unable, despite their collegiate scholarships, to read, write, balance a checkbook or speak functional, discernible English.

Now the NCAA, via its basketball tournament, has been returned to the men and women of TV, those who know better but say the opposite.

Jim Nantz, Clark Kellogg, Grant Hill, Kevin Harlan, Tracy Wolfson and others will line up to tell us that the coaches are special humans, all great men, when the one thing they have in common is doing whatever it takes to win a basketball game for the colleges that serve as their teams’ fronts.

More than 40 years ago, Arizona State football coach Darryl Rogers spoke an unfortunate and lasting truth: “They’ll fire you for losing before they fire you for cheating.”

Networks strike out by employing A-Rod

So now what? Now that Alex Rodriguez’s credibility is so low, it seems his fiancée doesn’t trust him?

Well, he’ll remain MLB’s most visible and rewarded disreputable recidivist drug cheat and liar and the nation’s star prime-time Sunday MLB presence, speaking his all-knowing contradictory nonsense, as well as serving as the weekend star of Fox’s worthless MLB studio show.

Seems he’s still the team guy who scoured the stands during a Yankees playoff game in the hunt for “babes” then sent a ballboy to plot their rendezvous.

Seems he’s still the same guy who lent his fame, presence, visage, name and hard-learned drug lessons to an organization combatting lethal steroid use in high school kids — only to betray that organization and those kids by further juicing to further enrich his fame and fortune.

TV execs know what’s best for us. And in Rodriguez, two national MLB networks have determined that we’re smitten with him — and remain smitten with him — when we’re sickened by him.

Why? Is it because TV can’t do any better at half the cost? Or because TV thinks we don’t deserve any better? Or is it that TV hires dolts as its shot-callers?

So now what? Nothing, that’s what. We’ll be back to ESPN shooting heartthrob A-Rod in the booth — perhaps for a third time claiming that even-number leads are better than odd-number leads. After all, Rodriguez is among those TV’s shot-callers think we covet, we drool over, we deserve.

NBA is in 3 of a bind

WATCHING (or no longer watching) the NBA destroy itself:

At first glance one would think that Grizzlies 89, Heat 85 on Wednesday, was a good, old-values NBA game: strong defense, patient offense, determined play, well-coached at both ends.

But in such cases these days, such a low-scoring game is more indicative of a rotten-shooting 3-point game. And that’s what it was. There were 76 3-pointers thrown up — Miami was 8-for-34 (23.5 percent), Memphis was 10-for 42 (23.8 percent).

By the way, the Mavericks’ 7-foot-3 Kristaps Porzingis went into the weekend with 45 offensive rebounds, but had taken 149 3-pointers. Career: 450 offensive rebounds, 1,337 3-point attempts. Yet the No. 4-overall pick in the 2015 draft — by the Knicks — is still listed as a power forward/center.

Despite a nation in large part stuck at home and the relentless encouragement to maximize viewership by betting on the game, this year’s NBA All-Star Game TV ratings were miserable, a new low, off 1.32 million viewers from last season, and down a titanic 17 million viewers since 1993.

To hear Charles Barkley try to again fake his way through NCAA Tournament studio shows has made for the kind of put-down comedy Barkley flings at others.

Ex-NBAer Brendan Haywood, the analyst who worked Arkansas-Colgate on Turner/CBS on Friday, was good throughout, but especially early, noting Colgate’s shocking 14-point lead was in large part due to Arkansas’ unassertive defense. The defense tightened, the game flipped.

Good stat call by CBS’s Seth Davis on Friday: In its three-point loss to 15-seed Oral Roberts, Ohio State was a rotten 9-for-18 on free throws.

The radio call of the Drake-Wichita State NCAA Tournament play-in on Thursday, a Westwood One broadcast over WFAN, was Marv Albert-superb. Unless play-by-player John Sadek was making it all up, he quickly, succinctly described both logistics and play, down to a shot that hit the rim, then the backboard, before it was rebounded.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

The March Madness broadcast downer networks should have seen coming

Knicks legend Clyde Frazier would have been flabbergasted by this madness before

Empty apologies only add to confusing sports madness

Chris Russo should raise holy hell with disgraceful Pat McAfee

Coverage of Tiger Woods' 'accident' ignores reality in favor of reverence

Funny, how things work out. Or don’t.

For the past few days, New York sports fans might have been mourning the passing of one of their most beloved play-by-play voices. Instead, that willing obligation was assigned to the sports fans of Cleveland.

Joe Tait died Wednesday at 83. If you were unfamiliar with his work, that’s totally understood. He was synonymous, except for two seasons, with the Cavaliers, its first radio voice in 1970 and until he retired in 2011. But for one NBA season, 1981-82, he was ours, calling Nets’ games on WVNJ and WWRL, stations with such limited signals and impact Tait’s calls could barely be heard in the parking lot.

But he was, according to sports radio historian David Halberstam, “among the very best to call games on radio. You just closed your eyes and he transported you to the game. You saw it all.”

By the end of the 1980-81 season, Halberstam said, Tait knew he was a goner, his feuds with Cavs owner Ted Stepien irreparable. Stepien was a tyrannical, meddlesome presence similar to another Cleveland scoundrel, George Steinbrenner. Few enjoyed working or playing for Stepien.

On the last day of that season, the arena in Richfield was packed to watch the 28-54 Cavs lose, but mostly to bid big Joe Tait — he was a large, beefy man — farewell and demonstrate against Stepien. More than 20,000 chanted “Let’s go Joe! Ted must go!” Helping fill that house was the nicest thing Tait ever did for Stepien.

And then off he went to call the Nets. His analyst was Al Menendez, a pleasant, always-around Nets scout. But they described games to mostly each other.

Tait’s and the Cavs’ salvation came when Gordon Gund, a fabulously wealthy Princetonian and genuine sportsman who wore his money like a gentleman, bought the team. He brought back Tait.

Gund by then was already losing his sight to retinitis pigmentosa, so he made sure to sit near Tait in order to “see” the games. He never had a gripe with Tait’s honest on-air appraisals, nor would he ever consider flexing his owners’ muscles. Tait preferred to work alone, and Gund was good with that until he was joined by ex-Net and Cav Jim Chones.

Gund, now 81, remains, in plain English, a great guy.

So Tait died Wednesday, and Cleveland grieved. Mark of the man. Not that I’m complaining about what could’ve been. For the past 20 years, Chris Carrino and Tim Capstraw have endeared themselves to Nets fans and those who appreciate consistently good, no gimmicks radio calls.

But it’s funny how things work out. Or don’t.

Poor Patrick not first bigwig to be asked for ID

Though one can understand Patrick Ewing’s frustration in being asked for ID to enter the Garden — a minor annoyance, despite Ewing publicly sharing his anger — he is hardly the most important man ever to be asked by a mere grunt to produce his ID.

In December 1944, as American GIs, mostly green replacements, were being battered during the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans infiltrated U.S. positions with soldiers who spoke English and were wearing captured American uniforms. The call came to tighten security.

As no less a soldier than highly recognizable Gen. Omar Bradley — then commanding 43 divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest number of U.S. soldiers to ever serve one commander — entered the battle zone, his jeep was stopped by a sentry. Bradley was asked to provide identification.

There’s famous footage of Bradley, a rather blank look on his famously stony face and taciturn demeanor, producing his ID to a soldier who inspected it before waving Bradley through.

I’ve read much about and from Bradley, but never a word about being inconvenienced by a soldier who was following instructions in a brutal and critical war zone. But Ewing? He was appalled!

Why, in addition to black — Florida wore black on and for ESPN last Sunday — has powder blue become a popular “alternative uniform” color? Given that such things don’t happen by accident, my guess is that it’s because powder blue is the national color for Crips street gangs.

The Crips are particularly big in the south which, to me, explains why schools — including as Ole Miss, Florida State and the Tulane “Green Waves” — have added powder blue. Or just a coincidence?

So let’s see how this is supposed to work:

Gary Bettman and NHL team owners plan to further grow their sport by diminishing their games’ appearances on mass access regional TV. In the near future, one can anticipate attractive games in large TV markets, such as Rangers-Bruins and Rangers-Islanders, will be dangled for purchase exclusively on those streaming networks. The NHL soon will become the exclusive property of extra-pay streaming enterprises as sold to ESPN and Hulu for a reported $2.8 billion over seven years, and then marked up.

Now you see it, now you don’t! Brilliant strategy! And if we didn’t know better we’d think that untreated greed, and not the good of the sport, was the determinant factor.

Cuomo’s ticket office

Gov. Andrew Cuomo tipped his hand as to how he thinks — and doesn’t think — as far back as the 2015 Mets-Royals World Series.

Cuomo somehow came into possession of a bunch of Mets home game Series tickets, face value $125 each. He then made them available to “supporters,” jacking them to as much as $5,500 each, money ostensibly donated to his campaign chest, with the sweetener that purchasers have a meet-and-greet with Cuomo.

He engaged in what’s commonly known as ticket scalping, the barely legal political kind. Constituents who would’ve loved those tickets at face value? To hell with them. His arrogant self-entitlement came first.

Having felt some public heat, he eventually returned the tickets to the Mets.

Who are MLB’s best customers? Drunks. Same as the NHL, NBA and NFL. A recent survey concluded that the on-site MLB fans who purchase the most alcohol are, in order, patrons of the White Sox, Braves, Reds, Indians and Padres. Once in the park, they spend an average of $35-$40 on booze per customer.

The ex-Nets TV team of Ian Eagle and Jim Spanarkel will reunite during CBS/Turner NCAA Tournament coverage. Still stunning that YES dumped Spanarkel.

Yes, we know the game has changed; they all have. After 25 games, 7-foot-3 Mavericks shooting guard Kristaps Porzingis has taken 131 3-point shots, but has compiled just 41 offensive rebounds.

I’m already sick of those Capital One NCAA Tournament commercials and I haven’t yet seen one.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

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Your NBA team, up five in the second quarter, has a 4-on-2 fast break. What would you instruct your players to do? Hit the brakes and take a 25-footer, right?

For 10 seasons, 1967-68 through 1976-77, during mostly night sessions in Midtown, Clyde Frazier taught school. And thousands earned their B.A. — a degree in Basketball Appreciation.

But now even Frazier seems to have surrendered to the redundant thoughtlessness that has turned a needless, game-desperate gimmick — the 3-point shot — into standardized, all-game NBA depreciation.

Allow me to relate some “action” seen on MSG during the second quarter of Thursday’s Pistons-Knicks game:

The Pistons rebounded a missed 3-pointer taken by the Knicks’ Immanuel Quickley then headed the other way, where a running jam attempt by Sekou Doumbouya was perfectly blocked by 6-foot-11 Nerlens Noel. Perfectly. Noel swatted the ball down court to start a 4-on-2 Knicks fast break.

The Knicks, as we’re now told by the easily reconditioned, had “numbers.”

But the ball was slowly dribbled down court by 6-foot-8 Julius Randle, who stopped near the foul line — there was no teammate cutting toward the basket, nor did any appear interested — then threw it deep outside to Quickley, who missed another 3.

Instead of an easy two points off a superb block, the Knicks left with none.

There was a time when Frazier would have been flabbergasted by such play, but he sounded unmoved by it, as if he expected it or, at least, didn’t expect better.

But how many pie-throwing skits could “The Three Stooges” perform before audiences grew tired of them?

Yet imagine Frazier leading a 4-on-2 down court, no one running out in front, no one cutting toward the basket, no one making it nearly impossible to defend. Infamy! Heresy!

I get it. Two 3s are worth three 2s. But are 3s worth the loss of basketball as a two-way, speed-reliant, thinking-man’s and thinking-fan’s sport?

Thursday’s game, another NBA number short on curb-appeal, was won, 114-104, by the Knicks. And though it included just 63 3-point attempts (70-85 is about the norm these days; Warriors-Trail Blazers a night earlier included 91), Kenny Albert, in for Mike Breen, provided the stat of the telecast:

Detroit’s Wayne Ellington, the night before against the Raptors in Tampa, Fla., took 11 shots — all 3-pointers. Against the Knicks, just 10 of his 14 shots were 3s.

If this is what people of all ages want when they tune to NBA games, as opposed to video games that even kids find pointless, that’s their choice. As a once-attractive sport it just doesn’t make any short-addition or long-term sense. Then again, the only losing basketball coach in University of Kansas history was Dr. James Naismith.

One game, two broadcasts, two different realities

Tale of two broadcast crews calling the same game:

Thursday, the Rangers played at the Devils. The game was shown on two MSG channels: one by the Rangers’ broadcasting team, the other by the Devils’. We could lean on four sets of eyes.

In the first period, the Devils took a 1-0 lead on an oddity. In what began as nothing more threatening than a hard, mid-ice dump-in, the puck shot off the end boards, straight back past goalie Igor Shesterkin and defenseman Adam Fox, right back to on-rushing Jack Hughes, who scored, surprising everyone except Hughes.

The Rangers’ crew of Sam Rosen and Joe Micheletti spoke it thusly:

JM: “Bewilderment! Right?”

SR: “Shesterkin looking up [seen studying the overhead scoreboard replay]!”

JM: “Such an innocent looking play. Bounces off the board and Shesterkin just misses it. … It might be, Sam, that the boards are lively.”

He went on to tell that the Rangers didn’t have “a morning skate,” thus weren’t able to examine New Jersey’s boards.

“Oh, yeah,” added Rosen, as if they’d both suspected the answer to the mystery that cost the Rangers a goal.

On the Devils’ TV end, Steve Cangialosi and Ken Daneyko, over replays, saw it differently. No mystery: It was the result of a superb, heads-up play by Hughes.

KD: “I think there was a little confusion from the Rangers. They didn’t realize it was coming off the boards and they let up for a bit, but it comes off perfectly to Hughes, who made no mistake, shooting it to the far-side.”

Of course, we’re left to judge for ourselves. If we choose to hitch a ride, that’s the best place to be left.

Some major issues in NCAA hoops

Student-Athletics: A few years ago, CBS gave listing academic majors of players in the NCAA Tournament a shot. That became a farce when the most popular major was shown to be “General Studies” — we never knew anyone with a degree in that — and a player from a French-speaking African country was listed as a French major. Parlez vous hoops?

While we’re at it, why would players from Montreal, Sudan, Nigeria, Slovakia, Netherlands, Mali, Atlanta and Jacksonville this season choose to play for Jim Boeheim at Syracuse? That’s an easy one: the climate!

And for the uninitiated, NCAA Tournament bracketology is similar to a colonoscopy — the prep is worse than the procedure.

Local TV now seems to be sparing the credibility of its broadcasters by inserting generic bad-odds, sucker sports gambling ads into game telecasts — saving their most public employees both their dignity and potential law suits for being party to “get-rich-quick” come-ons.

Here’s a wild idea: This baseball season all broadcasters in all booths and trucks should cut way down on stats, starting with Michael Kay on YES. Too many stats are misleading, misinterpreted, irrelevant, circumstantial and easily contradicted to hold any applicable enlightenment.

Not sure how Jets safety Marcus Maye’s agent, Erik Burkhardt, best serves his client by bashing the Jets on Twitter, but he joins the legions who choose “social” media to make matters worse.

So let the record show that the media, print and broadcast, gathered to pay homage to Tiger Woods on the occasion of at least his third reckless driving episode. Keepin’ it real.

Boxing champ Floyd Mayweather is still drawing celebrities and big shots, including President Biden’s brother, to pose by his side. The same Floyd Mayweather with a history of assaults on women, including an arrest for beating the mother of his daughter and another for the beating of his girlfriend that deposited him in jail for two months. But in some stars’ cases, that’s no one else’s business.

Colleague Andrew Marchand reports that Fox/FS1 will now pay Skip Bayless $32 million over four years to retain his transparent, let’s-force-an-argument and just-make-noise shows. Heck, my sister-in-law could do the same for half the price.

This story originally appeared on: NyPost - Author:Phil Mushnick