but Steve Phillips advancing a line of thought shared by a (scarily) significant number of Mets fans — that Beltran is not really all that good because he lacks “the 6th tool”, grit and should probably be traded for a “grittier” player (I can’t believe he actually said that) — certainly advances his own (perceived) agenda of bashing the Mets whenever possible.

Kahrl is right, the sports media really doesn’t have a lot to talk about sometimes, so they invent things. I now know what it must’ve been like to be a Red Sox fan and have to deal with the idiotic talk about being “cursed”. But with that meme gone, they need something else, and dumbass Minaya just gave them ammunition with his “edge” comments.

So just like the Red Sox, we’re going to have to deal with this lunacy until the Mets win it all. A scary thought.

And of course, the Mets are far from the only victims of this silliness. A-Rod, anyone?

It was that they were trying to re-establish Joe Morgan’s credibility. There was nothing in that broadcast that would ever make me want to listen to a Steve Phillips broadcast again. If a game I don’t really care about is on, and he’s broadcasting, I’m not going to want to watch only because that man is so insufferable to me at this point.

Part of Kahrl’s point was that they have to fill air time, but that wasn’t even an issue here. He was just ranting. It wasn’t like a GK&R broadcast or even a different three-team ESPN broadcast, he wasn’t even stopping to breathe. He was talking straight through important PAs and completely ignoring the game. No one even noticed that it was kind of odd that Bruce Bochy was using a lefty against three of the elite lefty-mashers of the era. They have these numbers right in front of them, but they were too busy talking about something completely unrelated to the actual game. No one questioned why the highest leverage PA of the game went to Angel Pagan, who had all of 15 PAs so far this year, only one of which was in the major leagues, because while the Mets were batting, they were talking about Pelfrey’s balks two innings earlier. It was almost like Play-by-Play would go out the window for a few innings at a time, and it was just a Steve Phillips-Joe Morgan freeform between awful powerpoint presentations and occasional game notes from Miller. Maybe they think bad graphics that look like powerpoint presentations might drum up some ratings, or that Steve Phillips has some kind of edgey “Shock-Broadcaster” persona when he does Mets games, but they’re wrong, and this can only hurt their viewership.

okay, deep breath and, a few Oms, and….. [/rant]