Here’s some news that’s even more of an outrage than Melky Cabrera getting a $938,800 raise this year:
Newsday’s Neil Best reports that Steve Phillips is joining ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast booth. As if Jon Miller and Joe Morgan weren’t insufferable enough. Good grief.
Talk about torturous. It wasn’t enough to have to hear Joe Morgan blathering on against Moneyball, and reminiscing about the Big Red Machine, each Sunday night broadcast. It wasn’t enough to have to put up with Jon Miller screaming “The Splitter!” every five minutes and overly enunciating Carlos Beltran’s last name as “Bell-TRON.”
Now we’re going to be “treated” to Steve Phillips blathering in the Sunday night broadcast booth. In this bad economy, the fact that Phillips not just has a good job, but just got a promotion, is an outrage.
As Squawker Jon would undoubtedly agree, Phillips was a lousy Mets general manager whose shining accomplishment was trading for Mo Vaughn. And he’s just as “good” a broadcaster as he was a GM, which is to say, he’s the worst. Has anybody ever turned on ESPN specifically to hear Phillips blather on baseball? I don’t think so.
Remember, this is a guy who announced in the summer of 2006, after Alex Rodriguez had a three-error game, that A-Rod’s career would never recover, and that the Yanks should trade him while they still could get something for him. Too bad for Steve that Alex only went on to have the best Yankee season since Mickey Mantle the following year.
Maybe Phillips was still trying to justify him passing on A-Rod (remember the whole 24 and 1 brouhaha?) when Phillips was the Mets GM. But it was still pretty ridiculous.
The Yankees, of course, are frequently on ESPN’s Sunday night baseball, between Yanks-Red Sox and Subway Series games. And I wish I could just mute the sound and put Sterling and Suzyn’s radio broadcast on. But the problem is that thanks to the seven-second or so delay on ESPN’s so-called “live” baseball broadcast, the game ends up being out of sync.
There needs to be a solution for this. You know how you can hit the SAP button to get the Spanish-language broadcast? Why can’t ESPN offer an NAB button – for Non-Annoying Broadcast, and have people in the booth who don’t get on fans’ last nerves? Heck, I’d rather even hear the gruesome twosome of FOX’s Tim McCarver and Joe Buck to ESPN’s terrible new trio, and that’s saying something. Please, make it stop!
What do you think about Steve Phillips? Tell us about it!
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