You can ‘tell’ who has misaligned priorities

I BELIEVE in “tells,” things that tip the hands of humans to indicate what kind of person they are, episodes that gauge their values.

So, this month after the Jets’ first-round, fourth-overall draft pick, Sauce Gardner, spent $50,000 to buy jersey No. 1 — the number he wore in college — from fellow CB D.J. Reed, I considered it a tell. Gardner’s priorities are likely out of whack. Fifty grand is a ridiculous amount to spend on vanity plates.

I wrote similarly in 2020 after the Jets selected OL Mekhi Becton — 6-foot-7, 370 pounds— with the 11th-overall pick.

The tell: Upon signing with the Jets, Becton bought himself a huge necklace of gold and diamonds. It carried his nickname — in case he forgot it or preferred to read it upside down, I suppose — “Big Ticket.” He was proud to report that this piece of excessively conspicuous, consumption cost $175,000, evidence of his post-college scholarship values. Yep, a really big ticket.

This told me that Becton needs some more turns of the bolts to have his head fully screwed on.

Since, then Becton has been a well-financed (he signed for a guaranteed $18.5 million) washout. After a knee injury limited him to just one game last season, he reportedly weighed (and appeared to be) in excess of 400 pounds. He then missed this season’s OTAs to be with his girlfriend for the birth of their child.

Though coach Robert Saleh said Becton is “fine” by his standards, when the lineman finally reported, he appeared to have eaten the partridge, the turtledoves, the swans, the French hens, the geese and the pear tree.

The “tell” tells me tales, then I tell you. Do I make myself misunderstood?

➤ Thursday night, Yankee Stadium. Astros in town, a game between the two best in the AL.

Good game, too, though Houston manager Dusty Baker refused to win it — replacing two consecutive three-up-threedown relievers with a 6-3 lead to find a third, Ryan Pressley, who, as the analytics-minded might’ve noticed, allowed three hits, two walks and four earned runs — in one-third of an inning.

Throughout the telecast, YES couldn’t help but show dozens of background shots of hundreds, more likely thousands, of empty, up-close, field-level, good-to-best seats. You know, the usual.

But Yankees president Randy “Empty Good Seats” Levine, both on WFAN and ESPN Radio-NY in March, claimed he was sickened by the mere thought of a lockout canceling the games and The Game he loves.

In 2009, when this Yankee Stadium opened, “Bottom Line” Bud Selig claimed during a pregame interview with Michael Kay that the media had made exaggerated, “unfair” claims of too-expensive ticket-pricing. He said he’d “personally inspected” all pricing and found all tickets to be “affordable.”

With many seats priced from $650-$1,500 per game, it was a preposterous and perhaps dishonest claim then, and remains conspicuously and shamelessly preposterous, 13 seasons later.

Wonder what Selig’s groomed successor, Rob Manfred, thinks still causes all those empty best seats, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video or Peacock?