Thomas Paine, hell-raising writer and Founding Father, today would have had to write it in reverse: “These are the souls that try men’s times.”
Look what they’ve done to my game, Ma, Part I:
The biggest big league baseball stories continue to make little news and noise as Rob Manfred and his Merry Band of Team Owners continue to rob from The Game and keep it.
Sunday, the latest in what has become an annual series of Red Sox-Yankees games that start and end late on Sunday nights for ESPN dough, became an inevitable head-on, greed-driven wreck.
Although the announced crowd — the Yankees, presumably with satirical intent, now refer to customers as “guests” — was 41,869, or 84.3 percent capacity, Yankee Stadium, as a matter of logic and what ESPN couldn’t hide, was half empty. And the best seats, as per new Yankee Stadium’s norm, were consistently shown to be conspicuously vacant.
Now, if the 41,869 figure was fabricated, that would strongly suggest MLB and/or the Yankees were lying.
However, if that number represented the total tickets purchased, that would be at least as bad as a lie; that would mean thousands of tickets for a Red Sox-Yankees weekend game played in decent weather in shiny new Yankee Stadium couldn’t be given away!
Sunday night’s half-empty Stadium was a greed-on-greed crime against The Game. Yankee Stadium went half-empty for a Sunday Red Sox-Yankees game because TV money demanded it start at 8:05, coupled with tickets so expensive that the best seats went even more empty than they would have for an afternoon start.
What happened — or didn’t happen — Sunday night on ESPN and in Yankee Stadium served as an indictment of MLB, its team owners (especially the Yankees’) for having abandoned the good of The Game in exchange for fast money, much of it becoming fool’s gold.
MLB has become good at that. Recall the MLB/MLB Players Association conspiracy of money-driven silence and neglect that seeded and reaped the Steroid Era?
And Manfred, eager to have MLB and its teams get a cut of sucker-bet losses provided by young, male fans, this season declared that unregulated online gambling operations such as FanDuel and DraftKings are not gambling enterprises — never to explain why MLB teams and their owners would otherwise invest millions in them.
With so much media — ESPN, FOX, MSG, NBC, Turner — similarly invested in gambling-on-baseball losses, MLB escaped the thorough public spanking and embarrassment it richly deserved.
The fact Sunday night’s Yankee Stadium disgrace didn’t make much news — it’s not as if ESPN and MLB’s other TV and radio partners, anchors and hosts were going to make news of it — doesn’t make it any less of a disgrace among those who know the score.
As was simply but brilliantly put by Keith Murray, a Yankees fan from both Annapolis and way back: “I just called the Yankees. I wanted to know why no one sits in the best seats.”
Look what they’ve done to my game, Ma, Part II:
By anyone’s practical, sensible definition, Antonio Bastardo (and here I thought I had it bad walking around with “Mushnick”) saved Sunday’s game in San Diego. Anyone except MLB and its stat-centric, numbers-don’t-lie adherents to and parrots of junk science.
Bastardo entered with the Mets up, 4-3, bases loaded, none out. Whiff, whiff, pop-up. Give that man two kewpie dolls!
But Jeurys Familia pitched the ninth, so he was credited with the save. Bastardo was awarded a hold, a newish, everyone-gets-a-trophy stat through which pitchers are given statistical credit for jobs well done, barely done, poorly done and for not tracking mud on the carpet.
Had Bastardo had the first batter bounce into a 4-6-3 double play — a very good result — he would have been condemned to a blown save, which appear in box scores as BS, so often the case.
Look what they’ve done to my game, Ma, Part III:
While the NFL and its obedient media now reflexively call off weeks “bye weeks” — an absurd inaccuracy too late to fix — baseball has hatched and nurtured its own.
As noted by up-late reader Bruce Welsch, Tuesday in Los Angeles with the Mets and Dodgers tied in the ninth, SNY’s Gary Cohen said: “The Mets have had one walk-off loss, this year … that was in Philadelphia. The Mets have not had a walk-off win at Citi Field.”
Silly redundancies, such as stats accumulated in “the month of May,” are often the offspring of silly unions. “Walk-off” losses can only occur on the road; “walk-off” wins only at home.
We began with Thomas Paine, we close with Supreme Court Justice (1902-31) Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A good catchword can obscure analysis for 50 years.”
ESPN misses the boat coming and going with Lewis, McDonough
For a network that pretends to break every story, ESPN always seems the last to know.
In Sean McDonough, this week named to replace off-to-NBC Mike Tirico on “Monday Night Football,” ESPN has a man it should have prominently placed 16 years ago, when he returned to ESPN.
McDonough’s a good-hands, good-faith guy. He doesn’t pander to undeserving coaches or easily suffer players given to acts of extreme self-worship and counterproductive team play. Even better, he figures he’s not speaking to viewers who don’t know or can’t see any better. Imagine that.
Given that ESPN sprinted to sign a Ray Lewis, it also figures it would take years for ESPN to know what it has in McDonough.
Lewis’s departure from ESPN this week was typical ESPN. It craved Lewis for his on-field, remorseless, illegal, often-fined head-targeting brutality, à la ESPN’s mirthful Monday night “He Got Jacked Up!” segments.
That Lewis had pled to an obstruction of justice charge in a double-homicide, remains a person of particular interest in the still-unsolved murders, and reached a financial settlement with the families of the murdered, couldn’t stop ESPN, either.
But what ESPN forgot to check was whether Lewis, hired to communicate his thoughts to national audiences, was even a modestly qualified clear-speaking communicator. He too often wasn’t.
That’s ESPN! It quickly hired Lewis when he should have been eliminated from consideration, while McDonough, who always warranted center-stage consideration, was promoted through a process of elimination.
Pardon moi, Pierre
Upon further review, I wronged NBC’s Pierre McGuire when I claimed here Monday that he didn’t correct his hollered error during Game 5 of the Islanders-Lightning NHL playoff series. McGuire said a double-minor on Tampa Bay’s Ryan Callahan would result in a 5-on-3, when it clearly was a four-minute 5-on-4.
While McGuire didn’t say “My bad,” he did explain his confusion in making that bad call, and that was spoken and heard as a correction. My bad; my apology.
