TRUTH, YOU DARE
Rose stunned by backlash over rip of MLB Sunday night games
HOWIE Rose is beautiful when he’s angry. Who knew? “‘Beautiful’ is not a word usually used to describe me,” he calmly explained Tuesday, two days after his Sunday night pregame rant.
“And it wasn’t a rant,” he insisted. “I was just reporting.”
Yeah, reporting with a stiletto clenched between his teeth.
Dodgers-Mets, auctioned by MLB to ESPN, the latter turning it into a late Sunday night start, was past its 8:05 scheduled start and still no signal from ESPN’s in-stadium air traffic controller to begin. ESPN was stuck in standard TV stupid — a taped feature designed to encourage viewers to watch what they were in place to watch.
So into his WOR Radio microphone, Rose went off:
“The Dodgers have won their last six, and they’ll go for the season series sweep, tonight — just as soon as the network stooge down there says it’s OK to play baseball.
“The pitcher, Steven Matz, is rubbing up the ball. He’s ready to go. The home plate ump, Tim Timmons, looking suitably disgusted, just took his mask off and kind of rests it against his left hip as he helplessly stares toward he Dodgers’ dugout, where said network stooge is holding all the cards.
“So, suspended animation on the field, right now. You’ve got nine Mets standing around. You’ve got the leadoff hitter, Chris Taylor standing. It really is ludicrous.
“But now, and only now, do we get the OK, and so we’re going to have a baseball game here tonight, about seven hours later than we should have.”
That’s not reporting, that’s home-game road rage. And it was fabulous.
“I can’t believe” Rose said, “it became such a big deal.”
I can. This was the kind of news, noise and big deal that should have been made by a united sports media the day late Sunday night baseball was first sold to a network, the kind of tumult that might have shamed former com- missioner Bud Selig into reconsidering such an unmitigated moneygrab that would make baited-andswitched jerks of MLB’s customers and fans, especially within large TV market teams.
But there was no blowback, just shrugging compliance. Thus the decision went unchallenged:
Why had there never before been late Sunday night baseball? Because there was no more illogical, impractical time to start a baseball game than at 8:05 Eastern Time on a Sunday night. Only abject greed could make that happen, and that is what happened.
Rose noted for us that Dodg- ers-Mets, regardless of either team’s seasonal circumstances, are good draws. Then he noted the announced crowds for the three-games: Friday’s 7:10 start, 41,000. Saturday’s 4:05 start. 40,000 Sunday’s 8:05 start, 27,000. Thousands avoided Sunday’s game as a matter of not spending a bundle to perform as bobblehead idiots.
Others were stuck. Doug Branch, from 150 miles north, bought tickets in anticipation of what the Mets sell as Family Sunday games. After the switch, he reluctantly decided to go rather waste his money.
“We left in the seventh, arrived home at 1:30 a.m.”
This late Sunday night will be the latest in a long series of ESPN cherry-picked Red Sox-Yankees games that will finish after residents of both cities and their children have lost consciousness.
MLB could have told — ordered — ESPN to televise CubsDiamondbacks, two contending teams in a game which, if it were moved, would start at 6:10 Mountain Time, instead of YankeesRed Sox. But MLB, in the continuing role of drug-addicted prostitute, sold ESPN the right to do what it wishes to baseball.
With warm-weather region games scheduled, Red Sox, Yankees and Mets games have been and will continue to be played late Sunday nights on ESPN’s orders even in frigid, early spring conditions. Team owners, under Selig and now Rob Manfred, agreed to grab the money to do dirt to the sport and its fans.
And that ugly, indisputable reality, from its start, mostly has been given tacit certification by sports media once relied upon to protect a sport and its fans from being sold and sold out at auction.
That’s why what Howie Rose said, er, reported Sunday night — what he claimed was no big deal — was heard as a rarely spoken truth, thus a very big deal.