McCaffery

Since the season ended, Klentak was “reassigned” fromhis GMpost, and pitching coach Bryan Price retired. Typically, those two positions, along with the manager, will be targeted for blame. So that’s two Girardi buffers already gone.

Girardi was good with his players, was a valuable communicator and bridge to the fans, and has enough bona fides asamanager tobe trusted to get it right the next time the Phils are required to play 162 games. Thatwill occur soon enough.

“There are no excuses for next year,” Girardi said, “because we’ve been through this once.”

And no more free passes.

••• The whole idea of spectator sports, or at least so it once was believed, was for them to be played and for people to watch.

Once again: Players play, spectators spectate.

It was an honest enough arrangement, no?

So why would any ballparkmanger, TV producer or sane individual believe that adding artificial crowd noise improves the experience?

To do so in an essentially empty stadium, as the Phillies did this summer, is its own form of disrespect.

But for TV directors to encourage it is to effectively break the No. 1 rule of news-event presentation: Don’t invent something that is not there.

That trend began when directors decided it was OK to slap computerized advertising on playing surfaces, the graphics so vividly real that viewers might believe they actually existed. The fake crowd noise is a descendant of that deceit.

Where does it end? Will it eventually be OK to make it appear that a home run ball soared to the wrong side of the foul pole? Outrageous? Well, already, already directors have influenced what people believe they are watching with an artificial, arbitrary and out of context strike-zone graphic.

Televised sports will never return to a time when someone stuck a camera in the upper deck and let it roll. But manufacturing activity to fool the consumer is as annoying as it is dangerous.