Talk about a Friday news dump.
Yankees fans have longed to hear it: longtime voice of the franchise Michael Kay will receive more than his occasional flash of national exposure moving forward. In an alternative ESPN2 telecast ran concurrently with the main channel’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast, the YES Network staple and host of The Michael Kay Show for ESPN Radio’s afternoon drive slate will get to unleash the less formal, irreverently-charged commentary the latter program has allowed him to harness.
Kay will be joined on the sport’s answer to the NFL’s mightily successful in its infancy “ManningCast” – featuring ex-quarterbacking brothers Peyton and Eli – by the once-disgraced, then improbably resurgent Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez. The three-time American League MVP was flexed from his “Game of the Week” color analysis post in the aftermath of his lead emcee battery-mate Matt Vasgersian’s departure.
An instant standout as a studio panelist for FOX dating back to the final days of his player career, A-Rod saw his “Q-Rating” gradually fall back to the mean once his anecdotal candor in the coveted Sunday Night second seat began disrupting too much game-flow for comfort. Though he shattered preconceived notions he would be too lenient a commentator with regard to criticizing the club who bankrolled his comeback tour, the growing consensus amongst viewers, and apparently at the network, was that too much A-Rod became too much altogether.
Thus, bumping the admitted chatterbox to the primary telecast’s dressed-down counterpart is no mere consolation prize by any party’s calculation. Unhindered by the demands to deliver that have now followed him into his post-playing career, A-Rod will inherently gel better with a master conversational facilitator in Kay, who also hosts the Emmy-Award winning CenterStage – modeled after Inside the Actors Studio – for YES.
Longtime Baseball Tonight anchor and ESPN fixture Karl Ravech has been named the new play-by-play announcer for Sunday Night’s main event, with Eduardo Perez promoted from fill-in analyst to full-time. Also joining them in the booth: former New York Yankee and Met hurler David Cone, who has proven himself an absolute guru of all things pitching theory, both old guard and new, as evidenced by his 2019 book “Full Count: The Education of a Pitcher” and analyst work for YES and FOX Sports. The 5-time World Champion who memorably tossed a perfect game at Yankee Stadium on “Yogi Berra Day” in 1999 is the rare triple threat: he values wins, spin rate, and is a second-to-none, ever-camera-ready personality who once cameoed on Saturday Night Live in drag.
It is a win for the primetime mainstay Mets across town as well, thrilled to hear Cone on the call after years of seeing him wax poetic in the booth predominantly for the Enemy. And obviously, for the Bronx faithful, it’s a long overdue course correction of epic proportions. No more are the years of Curt Schilling, John Kruk and the like oftentimes treating a Yankees v. Red Sox rubber match under the primetime spotlight as if it were a mere Red Sox Spring Training intrasquad scrimmage, a “Bloody Sock Game” rerun, or high time to overly promote someone’s new book.
