WFAN’s Evan Roberts tweets everyday on his Twitter page. Most of his tweets center around the Nets and baseball.
One would think his Twitter page would about the Knicks’ surprising win against the Hornets last night. It was a signature win they were looking for. Instead, he wrote about the Red Sox acquiring Adrian Gonzalez. That was his first tweet of today.
Unreal, but that should be expected from a NY sports talk show host. All the talk show hosts on WFAN and 1050 ESPN Radio talk about for 365 days is baseball. It’s embarrassing. The Jets have a crucial divisional showdown with the Patriots Monday night, and the Knicks have a good start for their standards, but all the talkies want to talk about is baseball.
We have 10 professional teams in town. It can’t be that hard to come up with a topic about those teams. It represents laziness from the hosts. They do not work to do their homework. To Roberts’ credit, he at least talks about the other teams in town.
The rest of the talkies should be ashamed of themselves. Craig Carton has no business in sports radio, especially after his embarrassing interview with Mets manager Terry Collins the other day. Joe Benigno knows nothing about sports. Mike Francesa has been overrated for years, and he was only good when Chris Russo worked with him. Steve Somers should be in retirement.
ESPN Radio 1050 isn’t any better either. Neither stations have any interest in talking sports period. For being the flagship station of the Jets, the hosts do a terrible job covering the Jets. They spend maybe 10 minutes per show talking about the Jets, and move onto the Yankees.
Being the flagship station of the Jets, coverage should be better. But it isn’t.
WFAN’s Mark Chernoff and 1050’s Justin Craig mention the public likes baseball more than any other sports. This is hogwash. Yes, baseball is big here, but so is football and basketball.
The Giants and the Jets have good fan bases. Go to sports bars or read the message boards, and the passion can be felt from there. For the general managers for their respective flagship stations to say there is not much interest in football is insulting.
The Jets are playing for homefield advantage, division and respect Monday night, yet the talkies focus on the contract negotiations of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. It’s a waste of a topic. Everyone knows Jeter and Rivera were not going anywhere, so it’s pointless to talk about it. It’s remarkable why both sports stations went overboard on it, but whatever.
It’s sad though. Decades ago, fans would get quality sports talk around here. Hosts would talk about anything in the world of sports. There was plenty of football talk back in the day. In the ’90s, it was Knicks talk all winter long, and even in the summer. That’s a thing of the past now.
Even if the Jets win the Super Bowl, don’t expect the hosts to start being interested in that team. The Giants won the Super Bowl few years ago, and they only got a day’s coverage. There was not much talk about them during their playoff run.
It’s embarrassing. Sports radio shows in other towns talk about other sports. Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis and other good sports towns don’t spend all of their energy talking baseball only. They talk about other topics in town. Heck they even talk about what goes on in national sports. What a concept.
That should put both sports stations in town to shame. Either the stations are not creative enough to talk about other sports or the hosts have no clue.
It’s hard to blame football fans for using Sirius XM Radio for their football fix. Nowadays, fans use podcasts from bloggers to get their sports fix. One would think both stations would get a clue, but that doesn’t been the case. They believe the formula of talking baseball works.
It’s hard to argue with that strategy, but it gets old. This listener does not listen to sports talk radio anymore. There is no point listening to a talkie ramble on a sport 365 days a year. It’s boring and stale.
New Yorkers complained for years, but with no results. It’s remarkable why their comments are being ignored. Sports radio does not exist without the fans. Talkies do not become famous without listening to the public. There is this arrogance where sports talk format can survive without the fans. It doesn’t work that way.
The newspapers are no better either. Read the back pages of the Daily News and the New York Post, it’s all Yankees all the time. There are more stories about Cliff Lee than there is with the football teams. Coverage for a guy that may not be a Yankees gets more priority than couple of Super Bowl contenders. This is ridiculous.
Only in New York, this happens. It’s hard to know why. There is nothing special about baseball. It gets redundant after watching it for six months. At some point, a fan deserves a break from all this.
It’s ridiculous a newspaper has to waste its budget on covering the winter meetings. Most towns are not even going to do it. Only in New York, this happens. There’s no reason to do this.
We get the Yankees because of their brand. We know they always buy players, but it should not merit four or five pages from different baseball writers.
Then, there are the regional sports networks in town. SNY feature three sports talk shows in Daily News Live, Wheelhouse and Loud Mouths. The topic revolves around baseball, and being that they are the regional sports network for Mets baseball, it shouldn’t be surprising. To their credit, they manage to incorporate other sports in their discussions.
It would be nice if we go one day without talking baseball. It’s not too much to ask. Baseball is life here, but there has to be a balance, right? As fanatical as Boston fans are, even they know too much baseball is overload.
It’s another good reason why this New Yorker hate the Yankees. Because of them, he is subjected to baseball year round.
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