PERHAPS it’s in response to Met management’s disposal of Tim McCarver. Perhaps it’s just my imagination. But Mets’ broadcasts, TV and radio, now feature a daily insult or three. In-yer-face, in-yer-ear insults to the intelligence of a constituency that once was treated with respect.
For crying out loud, Matt Franco, running hard from first with two out, scores on a dropped fly ball on a windy night, and you’d think, over the next few days, that Franco had established a new standard in baseball excellence.
What if Franco hadn’t been running hard? What if he’d jogged through the fly ball and finished at third? Would this have been ignored as standardized play? Was there a good reason for Franco not to have run hard with two out?
Mets radio and TV broadcasts are beginning to lose their long-time identity as a safe haven for the objective fan. They’re starting to ring like propaganda, like management-processed baloney.
I love Bob Murphy and I always will. But Wednesday night, when he told WFAN’s audience that Met fans were unfairly booing Bobby Bonilla because Bonilla “practices hard and plays hard,” I nearly swerved off the turnpike.
Anyone who has studied Bonilla’s particular style of play throughout his 13-year career holds empirical knowledge that Bonilla does not play hard. That he’s playing on a bad leg today doesn’t explain years of healthier play during which he appeared to be playing on two bad legs.
Say nothing, Murph, before telling us something that simply isn’t true.
Compounding matters Wednesday was the normally forthright Gary Cohen. When Murphy finished his preposterous defense of Bonilla, Cohen praised Met fans as “among the most knowledgeable” in baseball, but then chided them for their totally unwarranted treatment of Bonilla.
If it’s totally unwarranted, then explain why so many knowledgeable fans have Bonilla so wrong. Perhaps they have little sympathy for a player who has for years displayed little enthusiasm for the games they patronize, not to mention that Bonilla can be a pain in the neck off the field, as well.
While I’m not an advocate of booing ballplayers, the booing Bonilla receives from Met fans is hardly inexplicable. Yet Cohen and Murphy said they were mystified by it. They even sounded serious.
Let’s stick with the radio side. Ed Coleman, pre- and post-game host and part-time play-by-player, interviewed Turk Wendell prior to Tuesday’s game. Coleman’s questions were delivered in a hushed, reverent and overly patronizing fashion, as if Coleman were Wendell’s publicist and therapist.
For pete’s sake, this was Turk Wendell, not the Dalai Lama, not even Sean Penn.
Perhaps because Wendell comes across as flaky – he leaves me with the impression that his flakiness is an exercise in practiced self-promotion – Coleman felt compelled to address him as if he’s some sort of delicate icon. [See news magazine TV shows’ interviews with Dennis Rodman.]
TV side has been no better. Sunday on Ch. 11, after referring to the Mets as “we,” Keith Hernandez apologized. He called “we” a nasty habit he’s trying to break. Good.
But boothmate Gary Thorne had a stunning response to Hernandez’ candid expression of failed professionalism: “It doesn’t make any difference,” Thorne told Hernandez with great emphasis and conviction.
Imagine that. Hernandez, in a noble effort to be heard as an objective broadcaster, apologizes for sounding like a shill, then Thorne, veteran professional broadcaster, tells him – on the air – that there’s nothing wrong with reporting a game to a New York audience by referring to the Mets as “we.”
Thorne might’ve said, “Just keep working on it, Keith, you’ll fix it.” He might’ve said nothing. Instead he told Hernandez that “It doesn’t make any difference” if he sounds like an unmitigated homer.
On cable, Fran Healy is not shy to criticize, provided his target plays for any team except the Mets. Marlins’ outfielder Mark Kotsay was taken to task at length by Healy for not running hard for a fly ball. But when a Met performs similarly, the act is either ignored or rationalized.
In Healy’s world, all the Mets are either doing “a terrific job” or a “a great job.” The pitchers, the catchers, the pinch runners, the first-base coach, the GM, the batting-practice pitcher. Great job. Terrific job.
It’s insulting. And, on the heels of McCarver’s removal, highly suspicious. Regardless, never before have we tuned to Met broadcasts to be confronted – assaulted, really – with such unyielding expressions of gratuitous pandering.