If one didn’t know better Sunday, one would have thought Luis Guillorme had just hit the second “Shot Heard ’Round the World” . . . then planted the Mets’ flag on Neptune.
In a 10-inning game determined by artificial additives — the automatic extra-innings runner at second — Guillorme bounced a game-ending hit down the right-field line, signaling the start of the kind of obligatory celebration previously known only at Disney World, where New Year’s Eve is nightly celebrated for the enjoyment of kids who don’t know what day it is.
These game-over demonstrations have become so standardized as to be hackneyed, unconvincing if not insincere, and just plain silly, if not stupid — even in a game that now features players making self-celebratory gestures for reaching first base on a bloop hit.
And they have all the conviction of a restaurant wait staff gathered at your table to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Sunday’s parade began with SNY’s Gary Cohen screaming so hysterically he sounded as if his parachute failed.
It then included all the new-requisite actors, with Daniel Vogelbach serving, as reader Jim Heimbuch suggests, as the “Mets’ designated Gatorade bucket dumper.”
Yep, the Mets, with MLB’s highest payroll, were 44-50! No school Monday!
Sunday’s game was loaded with the usual incomprehensible senselessness. Dodger’ manager Dave Roberts, aka “Aaron Boone, West,” in a 1-1 game removed reliever Alex Vesia. Had to.
Vesia was exhausted. He’d just recorded one, two, three outs — on just four pitches!
Sunday would have been a good day for real-deal baseball fans to have their formaldehyde changed. In the 8-7 Yanks’ extra-innings loss at Colorado, a game the Yanks owned, 4-1, after seven, Boone got to work sabotaging his team with his usual break-what’s-fixed solution as two relievers each blew a lead.
As reader Rich LePetri sagely notes: “Only Boone can find relief pitchers to lose the game, twice, in the same game.”
Throughout this one, YES’s “tell-all” strike zone box was, again, way out of whack.
If Gleyber Torres’ strike zone actually begins below his belt, as seen on YES, he should take every pitch.
But Sunday’s winner belonged to — who else? — the all-sports network that wrecks everything it touches, ESPN.
With that night’s Astros at Angels, one could reasonably predict that the speculative future of Shohei Ohtani would be of primary focus.
But early and then often, ESPN made it clear that the game — a good one, too — was a mere prop to display Ohtani watching it from wherever he stood or sat and countless crowd shots of Japanese fans holding and waving Ohtani signage.
ESPN again went out of its way to make insufferable TV, thus it was Ohtani to the ninth-inning power.
Late in the game, as reader Andrew Eckman sent in a screenshot, the Angels, up 7-3 after seven, an ESPN graphic showed the Angels’ “win probability” to exceed 100 percent, which is both impossible but finite.
Mathematically, according to ESPN, the Astros couldn’t possibly win.
Minutes later, the Astros won, 9-8.
I’d have led with this afterward on “SportsCenter” — a game that had less than zero chance to be won by Houston was won by Houston.
The impossible had occurred!
But that would mean that ESPN actually pays attention to what it presents to the nation — and would have us digest as serious.
Three MLB games on TV here Sunday, all of them a burden on the good baseball senses.
Fox buys into questionable USWNT behavior
The last U.S. Women’s World Cup soccer team, despite winning it all, also won the widespread condemnation of many Americans for the team’s obnoxious center-stage behavior, from public vulgarities, to excessive showboating, U.S. anthem-kneeling and mockery of opponents, to running up the score, 13-0, over Thailand, to captain Megan Rapinoe’s relentless all-about-me “leadership.”
Right-headed Americans and the rest of the world recognized this team as graceless, classless, bad winners.
And so, U.S. rights-holder Fox has responded as modern TV does as a matter of conditioning then habit: It’s selling this year’s team for its promise of even more rotten conduct by posing its players, five at a time in promos, as scowling Nike “mean girls.” Brilliant marketing.
Fascinating that Johnny Bench would publicly speak an ugly stereotype of Jews as cheap.
His public record might have served as a self-warning to keep such a prejudice to himself.
In 1993 Bench was fined by the New York City Dept. of Consumer Affairs for fraudulent advertising claims made on two home shopping networks, including the claim that his autograph on a baseball sells for the “sensationally” low price of $130 each when they retailed at the time for $35.
Bench also claimed to a female caller to one of the home shopping shows that the purchase of a few of his autographed baseballs will, in time, pay the college tuition of the caller’s children or grandchildren.
Yeah, those penurious Jews will get you every time, Johnny.
Not for nothing, but why do so many crooks target a poor, small town such as Mayberry?
Jeff Van Gundy done dirty by ESPN
ESPN had one credible, valued broadcast “A” team: Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson on NBA telecasts.
So, in a move that brings to recall swapping Sean McDonough for Joe Tessitore on “Monday Night Football,” ESPN has dumped Van Gundy.
And if it was an inside influence move — Van Gundy was too critical for the NBA’s comfort — ESPN should’ve told the messengers to take a hike.
Who did van Gundy irreconcilably upset? Not viewers.
And what was the NBA going to do if ESPN insisted on retaining Van Gundy, not cash ESPN’s checks?
Eliminate ESPN from the next contract bids? Fat chances.
I don’t know the exact reason for this move, but if it depended on ESPN’s courage to back its employees, Van Gundy didn’t have a shot.
OK, so it may have taken six seasons for Michael Kay, David Cone and the rest of YES’s Yankee on-air crew to begin to hint that Aaron Boone’s one-inning-and-out relief strategies provide what viewers can’t miss — aid, comfort and late-game wins to the opposition — but they’re getting there.
Does it strike Boone that these spin-the-dial relievers are mostly former starters who can pitch well beyond three outs? Or that he manages games that count as if they’re spring training games or tryout camps?
And one is left to assume that Brian Cashman would manage the exact same way, thus the Yanks signed Gerrit Cole for $360 million to have him, on a good day, pitch six innings.
Reader Vincent Gugliuzzi on the name of Fox’s newly formed MLB studio team of Alex Rodgriguez, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter: “Two Cheaters and a Jeter.”
After six innings in Anaheim on Monday, the Yanks had struck out 12 times. Total: 17 K’s in 10 innings. That’s 17 K’s in 30 outs against five pitchers in a 4-3 loss.
Makes you wanna rush out to buy Amazon Prime.
