SNY crew excusing Pete Alonso’s boorish actions, poor play
Note to SNY crew: Stop the nonsense. Even Pete Alonso said his base running was inexcusable.
nypost.com
By Phil Mushnick
The presumption of innocence has been lost to the presumption of ignorance.
We don’t ask for much beyond being treated as reasonably intelligent. But that has become too much to ask. It doesn’t matter what we know, see or hear, we’re to believe only what we’re told to believe.
At the close of last Wednesday’s Mets telecast on SNY, boastful Pete Alonso proudly hollered his trademark obscenity, “Let’s f—ing go Mets!” into SNY’s and Citi Field’s microphones. Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez pretended that never happened. Not even a “Gee, that was unfortunate,” or a single, “I wish Pete would cut that out. It looks bad on him.”
Or even, “I love when he does that!”
And again, we were too stupid to hear or see what we couldn’t miss and what was designed by Alonso not to be missed.
Last Friday on SNY, Alonso quit on a sinking liner he hit to Cleveland Guardians shortstop Amed Rosario. After Rosario dropped the ball Alonso was still easily thrown out at first.
It was that simple: Alonso “thought” the ball would be caught. Instead of standing at first, he returned to the dugout.
Left to right: Ron Darling, Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez keep excusing Pete Alonso’s poor behavior and lazy play on the field, The Post’s Phil Mushnick writes.
SNY
It was bad presumptive baseball. Obviously.
But Cohen and Ron Darling then began to rationalize and excuse it for Alonso while speaking to us:
Cohen: “It’s a natural reaction when you see the ball go right to the fielder to stop running.”
Then Darling, who moments before praised the Mets’ “never say die” approach to highest-tier professional baseball, further challenged us to believe only what we’re told:
“It’s a natural reaction. Rosario makes that catch 99 times out of 100.”
So Alonso chose to play the odds instead of baseball?
Darling: “The play appears to be over.”
Cohen: “It’s over.”
Darling: “It’s over but it’s not over.”
So stop the nonsense. The indefensible was decorated and sold to us as something else. Postgame even Alonso said his base running was inexcusable.
Sunday, with Gary Sanchez — released Thursday — making his Mets debut, Cohen and Darling only addressed his ups and downs as a hitter. At no point did they address what we knew:
Sanchez, as deficient a catcher as most of us have ever seen, has spent half his career chasing passed balls. For crying out loud, the Yankees hired a catching tutor just for him, a waste of time and money.
But this impossible-to-ignore reality was ignored. At least until Tuesday when Sanchez allowed a passed ball — he escaped culpability for two pitches that were registered as wild pitches — and did the Dance of the Clueless in the vicinity of a pop foul he missed by several feet.
Another case of believing what we’re told rather than what we see:
Tuesday, Anthony Rizzo was demonstrably upset when he was called out looking.
On YES, Paul O’Neill, who reflexively blames umps for close calls against the Yankees, said Rizzo had a legit gripe.
On Yankee radio, Suzyn Waldman made more applied sense. She looked at a replay then said the ump had likely made a good call.
Bottom line: The pitch to Rizzo, as seen on YES, landed on the outside edge of that confounded superimposed strike-zone box. We couldn’t miss it. Thus, if team announcers are going to ignore that box or doubt its legitimacy, what is it doing on our screens all game, every game!?
Hit link for more
