Mike and The Angry Puppy

Part of my day-to-day life on Long Island used to be listening to WFAN, New York's all-sports station. The great thing about WFAN, besides broadcasting the Mets' games, was that the broadcasters were for the most part, very baseball-centric. When I listen to sports radio in other markets baseball generally takes a back seat, especially to college sports, of which I have zero interest.

So I would listen to WFAN all the time, pretty much any time I was in the car, often yelling at the radio when I thought a caller or commentator was saying something I completely disagreed with. I spent a lot of time yelling at the radio during the evening "drive-time" program - Mike and The Mad Dog. Mike Francesca is a big Yankees fan, and his counterpart Christopher "Mad Dog" Russo is a big Giants fan. They probably spent more time talking about baseball than anything else, but listening to them also kept me up to speed on the other sports that I followed less closely. For instance I knew Jets coach Herm Edwards was terrible at clock management and that Glen Sather was ruining the Rangers, even though I rarely watched any of the games.

I miss WFAN. ESPN has an affiliate down here, but my morning commute is too short to get into "Mike and Mike" and the weekends are filled with talk about college basketball and NASCAR. Lately I have considered subscribing to the YES network on DirecTV for $12.00 a month, just so I can watch Mike and The Mad Dog when I get home from work. However, some of the things I've read in the papers (online of course) this week have made me very glad I haven't heard the broadcasts.

It seems some of the callers, who are routinely moronic, but also Chris Russo, have been discussing on-air the suggestion that Mets GM Omar Minaya has been particularly aggressive in signing Latino players. They point out that of all the players Minaya has signed or traded for, they are predominately from Spanish-speaking countries.

This really irritates me. Why should anyone care where the players were born? I just want the best players possible, and in case anyone hasn't been paying attention, currently the best players in baseball (A-Rod, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Albert Pujols, Carlos Delgado, Miguel Tejada, Carlos Beltran) happen to be Latino! Is part of the job of the GM now to make sure he has an ethnically balanced clubhouse?

Over at The Eddie Kranepool Society, Kranepool is also outraged. He says the discussion reminds him of Daily News comlumnist Fillip Bondy and filmmaker Spike Lee:

As we know when the Wilpon/Doubleday/Cashen group took over the Mets started to become a team to be reckoned with. Most of the media wrote and reported the rebirth of the Mets with positive stories all that is but Bondy. Bondy’s big story was that the Mets were “too white” in fact he interview some African-American’s who said they felt they could not root for the Mets because they had too many white players. That column still pisses me off to this day.

Spike Lee is a little racist sh*t ass. Lee had been a Mets fan his whole life but he also felt the Mets were too white and has made that statement many times. So that’s why he switched to rooting for the Highlanders. The same Highlanders that were as bad as the Yawkey Red Sox when it came to integration.

It's funny, I moved down south, where part of the stereotype of a Southerner is of a racist. How ironic that back home in "sophisticated" New York, this kind of racist crap is still perpetrating the airwaves.