COMMISH CAN’T SLEEP ON THIS
WE ARE about to find out if baseball is running baseball or ESPN is running baseball. In what has turned out to be a major dispute involving the game’s integrity, ESPN announced it was picking up the Yankees’ 1 p.m. July 8 game with the Blue Jays in Toronto for their 8 p.m. Sunday night game of the week. Ordinarily that wouldn’t be a big deal – the Yankees have gotten used to ESPN using them as the featured team on Sunday Night Baseball – except that this decision was announced after the Yankees and Orioles players had just agreed to make up Thursday’s rainout as part of a doubleheader on July 9.
ESPN maintained that the July 8 Sunday night Blue Jays-Yankees game had been in the books since December (even though it still appeared on team schedules and the commissioner’s media guide as a 1 p.m. game), and the Yankee players insisted they would never have agreed to adding another game on July 9 had they known they were going to have to play an 8 p.m. game the night before. If this stands, they would have to play three games within 24 hours, two on Monday with little or no sleep, as they would likely not get out of the ballpark in Toronto until midnight, go through customs, and fly to Baltimore, getting in at 4 or 5 a.m. then due back at the ballpark a few hours later.
“Hopefully it’s still happening behind the scenes and there’s pressure being applied because that’s j ust not good for the product on the field, for the safety of our guys to be having to go night game then fly into a doubleheader,” a steamed Yankee manager Aaron Boone said Sunday. “That’s ridiculous and anyone that would argue with that is not being truthful.”
According to sources, the reason ESPN picked the Yankee-Blue Jay game for July 8 was because their lead-up to the game is the All-Star voting announcement and they figured the Yankees’ presence in the Sunday night game would pull additional viewers for the All-Star show. But as one Yankee source said: “That’s just ridiculous. The All-Star show is before the game.” Another source said Commissioner Rob Manfred was caught unaware of this development and was in contact by phone with Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner and Yankee president Randy Levine, who have implored him to resolve this by directing ESPN to pick a different game for July 8.
“This is an integrity issue, plain and simple,” a Yankee source told me.
It is hard to imagine Manfred not agreeing with that. The Yankees were rained out again in Baltimore Sunday – their seventh postponement or suspended game this season – although apparently Thursday night’s game was called when there was little or no rain.
If the Yankees are forced to play Sunday night on July 8, the Yankee management and players are said to be prepared for an all-out war with ESPN in which they will refuse all interviews — pre-game, in-game and postgame — with ESPN broadcasters.
That’s the last thing baseball needs – an ugly situation leading up the All-Star Game in which one of their signature teams is refusing to cooperate with the network broadcasting it. ime for Mr. Manfred to assert his commissionership here. It should be a no-brainer. Just tell ESPN to pick another game. How hard is that? If they refuse, then we’ll know who’s really running baseball; that baseball has no problem with a team playing three games in 24 hours with little or no sleep.
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