Nearly 60 years ago, Mad magazine, a satirically inclined children’s publication before it was elevated to National Lampoon, invented a game called “43 Man Squamish.”
Mad included a diagram of plays showing 43 players running in 43 different directions, a comical absurdity that likely inspired the StatCast graphics that networks buy and present in earnest to show 43 pitches thrown in 43 different directions or 43 balls hit in 43 different directions, giving viewers about eight seconds to examine, consider, and understand them.
43-Man Squamish also lives on as a process that allows viewers and listeners to enjoy radio and television broadcasts of the most famous team in sports history: the New York Yankees.
And it was made impossible by the greed, arrogance and lax planning of Rob Manfred and team president Randy Levine, making this a task so tedious and confusing that even Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Sisyphus would have preferred to take a vacation rather than attempt it.
To watch the Yankees on TV this season, again due to financial greed, you will (almost always) have to buy access to a host of other networks, including YES (which is now showing significantly fewer games), Fox, FS1, ESPN, TNT, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Roku, the A, E, I, O, U and sometimes the Y networks.
The announcers? Well, just at YES we have Michael Kay, Ryan Ruocco, David Cone, Paul O’Neill, Todd Frazier, John Flaherty, Jeff Nelson, Joe Girardi, and a few ex-Yankees to name a few later. Try and identify them.
The only constant is Meredith Maracowitz, as she tries to decipher what Aaron Boone meant without saying anything worth hearing or repeating.
At the very least, Transparent Diversity Hires Carlos Beltran and Cameron Maybin could be distinguished as professional communicators who were hired and assigned to us without any communication skills.
The only thing that will remain the same on the radio is Suzyn Waldman and that the game will be broadcast on WFAN.
Other than that, it’s spinning the wheel and, in some cases, hitting the underdog with a tail.
As Waldman lazily peruses the sponsored “Intercity Scoreboard,” the small sponsorships that appear almost every pitch and the “Official Lucite Picture Frame of the New York Yankees,” there’s a daily, nightly game of guessing who’s sitting next to her.
Five have joined Waldman this season, and at least a sixth is expected to join next month.
As if the list of bad Yankees ideas for radio and TV had run out, Craig Carton, who has virtually disappeared from TV and radio since being hired by Fox/FS1 and who impressed Fox with his record of serving time in federal prison at Lewisburg after being convicted of fraud and theft, will be sitting next to Waldman next month to call three Yankees games.
As WFAN producer Al Dukes angrily and courageously put it, this was a betrayal of basic decency by all involved, given that Carton, who appeared on WFAN for more than a decade, had mocked Waldman’s Yankees coverage that he heard on WFAN.
Not that she was immune to ridicule, Carton was hypersensitive to criticism of her on-air pee-and-poo content and was often downright cruel — one of the keys to being a successful radio presenter, but also one of the hallmarks of a bully.
Ah, I digress, but back to the point: the bottom line for one of the most famously successful teams in sports history is that the Yankees just don’t care about their fans.
I wish Nelson had been a man of fewer words.
I’m a big fan of former Yankees pitcher Jeff Nelson’s analysis — if you can find or watch his Yankees games on TV — and he gives us food for thought. The problem is, he keeps us thinking, even though we’re no longer hungry.
He too often has the nasty habit of becoming Fox’s John Smoltz, losing viewers by over-analysing every pitch, which too often leads to duplicity and audience sleepiness.
Last weekend in Baltimore, a pitch that nearly struck Alex Verdugo in the head was mysteriously identified as Nelson’s “sinking fastball.”
It’s television, Jeff, and sometimes you just have to keep it television.
Thanks for the laugh, Bob Newhart. Real laughs, not the “Wow!” after raunchy laughs that are commercially confused and sold as comedy.
At 94, Newhart provided solid evidence that clean comedy is often far funnier and more creative than fart noises.
I rediscovered Newhart’s genius for slow beats and deadpan moments on YouTube, thanks to the hollowness and fake laughs that often plague the NFL Network pregame shows just after noon on Sundays.
Speaking of dull comedians who rely on vulgar material, Kevin Hart remains a staple of sports broadcasts for superficial reasons: He’ll join lead news anchor Lester Holt and drug arrest and weapons possession gold medalist Snoop Dogg in promoting and presenting the Olympics on NBC/Peacock.
Meanwhile, the world has been allowed, even invited, to a situation where the employment and deployment of riot police and arson squads alone could be costly for the Paris Olympics.
Russo holds himself back to Stephen A’s standards
Chris Russo lashed out at ESPN/SEC Network’s mild-mannered, patient host Paul Finebaum last week. Why? Russo felt that USC’s football program was stronger than Finebaum thought.
Russo and Stephen A. Smith feed off each other, both craving attention for ranting about everything that’s worthless and changes nothing.
ESPN has seen so much demand that they are now focusing on WWE wrestling.
For two years he called servile Joe Tessitore a “moron.” acting Stupid, right? — The narrator of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” and before that the guy who played the fool on ESPN Boxing and detailed the fights.
The New York Times ran an article last week about how news organizations must weed out “fake news.”
Does that include the fake news, the outrageous lie, spread on social media by Times tennis reporter Ben Rosenberg, who claimed that ESPN tennis commentator Doug Adler called Venus Williams a “gorilla” while praising her “guerilla tactics” to take the net?
Cowardly ESPN, fearing that the Times would never pursue the obviously false claims – lies – spread by its correspondent, quickly fell for the colossal fake news story, fired Adler as a racist, and destroyed his career, his health and his reputation.
The Times does not even see fit to suggest that it aided and abetted such hateful and harmful fake news.
So yeah, I will continue to criticize this issue, just as I would if an innocent athlete was given a life sentence. Shame on you.
Perhaps because Fox cameras and microphones were busy all over the venue, John Smoltz didn’t struggle much during the All-Star Game. He even put up some impressive statistics.
In 1989, he became the youngest pitcher to lose an All-Star Game, while Nolan Ryan became the oldest pitcher to win an All-Star Game – an age difference of 20 years!
