Employees pay price for ESPN wastefulness

IT KILLS me to see so many people again laid off at ESPN when for years we’ve watched it waste millions of dollars on predictably rotten decisions.

Three-in-a-booth, sideline reporters who have no business being there, pregame shows so packed with people that each has time to speak one sentence, big-name hires — Brent Musburger, Ray Lewis, Bobby Knight, Lou Holtz, Magic Johnson (twice) — who added nothing but cost a lot, plus shipping and handling.

Not only is ESPN losing subscribers while spending a fortune on rights fees, but also it has spent an additional fortune trying — and often succeeding — to destroy every game it touches.

This season, ESPN’s Sunday night MLB telecasts have shown a pre-planned eagerness to shove the games aside in favor of in-game features and indiscriminately placed distractions.

Last Sunday, it sent seven people to serve as on-site voices in and just before the Nationals-Mets game on Wednesday, to save money, it jettisoned 100 employees.

With Washington up, 4-3, the sixth inning ended with a sensational 3-6 double play. The Mets appeared confused, as if first baseman Ryan Zim

merman had fielded the onebounce blast in foul territory. But off ESPN went to commercials.

When it returned, ESPN immediately presented a minibio of Daniel Murphy, complete with a photo of him as a kid. Fine. But it couldn’t have waited? That spectacular, disputed, inning-ending, gamechanging double play? ESPN was too busy not covering the game to cover the game.

ESPN has determined for us that the primary live act in baseball — the pitcher throwing toward the catcher — be decorated with a misleading, irrelevant, one-size-fits-all computerized strike-zone box. Whatever that costs ESPN, it is a waste of money.

“What would ESPN’s producers do,” asks reader Eu

gene Klechevsky, “if I held a dragon cutout in front of their TVs while they’re trying watch ‘ Game of Thrones’?”

I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars ESPN has spent the past 20 years to research then present hundreds of thousands of statistics that are both laughably stupid and reveal ESPN to have no grasp of what it purports to know best — sports. But I could’ve saved ESPN that fortune, too.

And though ESPN now presents us with “exit velocity” stats — who knew that a line drive is hit harder than a high fly ball? — 100 ESPN employees this week were directed, with all due velocity, to the doors marked EXIT.