RODICULOUS
Last thing viewers want or need is Alex overload
‘ HEY, Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! ... Wrong hat.”
And now, in its latest attempt to reinvent the flat tire, ESPN will fine-tune “Sunday Night Baseball” by adding a Manning-style supplemental broadcast featuring Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez.
How will Kay make Rodriguez more popular to an audience that knows he’s full of it? He can’t. Kay has his own problems, such as over-coming his bearing as stathappy house man on Yankees telecasts and obedient ESPN shill on his ESPN-NY radio show.
Still, based on Rodriguez’s appearances here, there and everywhere, both ESPN and Fox still feel as if we adore him, when there’s far more evidence, especially among intelligent baseball fans, to the polar contrary.
ESPN and Fox have their fingers on a pulse that doesn’t beat.
But perhaps it’s us, not him. Perhaps it’s just a matter of perspective, one we can’t share with Rodriguez being that we’re from different worlds with radically different rules, rewards and punishments.
Perhaps many are left flabbergasted by Rodriguez’s sustained popularity within ESPN and Fox because we never walked in his shoes.
After all, how many of us have been in a position to invest millions of dollars, cultivated from years of making millions of dirty drug dollars, on an NBA team?
How much dough would Rodriguez have to invest in anything had he not been a drug cheat, let alone a twice-busted one left so wishfully dependent on his lies and the public’s naivete that he became a teens’ antisteroids spokesman between busts?
Was his illegal drug use essential to creating his fame and fortune, enough to designate him as the voice and face of baseball on two of MLB’s national networks? Enough to buy a big chunk of the Minnesota Timberwolves?
Logic tells us it made a huge difference — he didn’t think those PEDS made him better at crossword puzzles.
How will this T’wolves thing work? If a star player — any of his players — tests positive for illegal PEDs, what will co-owner Rodriguez do? Hide? What if that player lies about it, even once? Will he suspend him, then give him a raise?
When Robinson Cano returned from his first drug suspension to play for the Mets on ESPN, Rodriguez gave it the Sgt. Schultz treatment, making conspicuous fools of ESPN’s shot-callers — as if none could see that coming, as if none had any idea what drove Rodriguez’s superstar MLB career, as if ESPN couldn’t find a worthy clean former player.
Or is it that ESPN just didn’t care, and still doesn’t? ESPN continues to employ and indulge Rodriquez as if he’s wildly popular among viewers, that they’re mesmerized by his contradictory, glad-handing, back-slapping baloney and milliondollar smile.
But back to Rodriguez, the T’wolves’ co-owner. What if one of his star players, benched during a playoff game, summons a ballboy to deliver his phone number to two fabulous babes he spotted in the crowd, a la Rodriguez during the 2012 playoffs? Will A-Rod make shame-shame, or ask to share the phone numbers?
Surely ESPN and Fox were and remain impressed by Rodriguez’s mode of operation throughout his MLB career and his nonsensical, artificial-filler booth blather, or they wouldn’t be so eager, and at great expense, to continue to present him as their ideal of what we not only favor, but can’t wait to savor.