In all fairness, I’m not sure anyone ever told Chris Carlin he was cute when he got angry, either, so that’s one card I certainly won’t be playing with Yankee broadcaster Suzyn Waldman, who unloaded on Newsday’s Neil Best earlier Wednesday.
“This one’s getting me angry, because I don’t play this card a lot, but this is as sexist as it gets,” Waldman (above) said Wednesday. “What’s the big damn deal? That I cried for four seconds of a 10-minute postgame?
“The idea that I can’t choke up because a man I went through cancer with 11 years ago is going to lose his job and I was describing his coaches crying? It’s absolutely ludicrous.” The man to whom Waldman referred is manager Joe Torre, who is unlikely to have his contract renewed. (Waldman is a breast cancer survivor; Torre has survived prostate cancer.)
“I’m not Walter Cronkite,” she said. “Who are these arbiters of journalism who are ripping me on the radio?”
“I almost understood the Clemens one, because I did get excited and it was during the game,” she said. “But who decided all this? The rules change all the time. It’s, ‘Oh, you’re a journalist.’ For Pete’s sake, I am not Walter Cronkite. I’m not talking about Iraq.
“I’m talking about a man who is so loved in this city and we all know what’s going to happen. I actually thought I was very poetic. I’m very surprised how it got out that smoothly.”
Waldman called the reaction “anti-female” and insisted she serves a valuable role.
“I take it seriously that I am a conduit between that locker room and fans,” she said. “Every person was so busy ripping me for crying, they didn’t hear what I was saying . . . If I got choked up doing it, so what?”
More anti-Yankee in some instances than anti-female, I’d hope, but given some of the anonymous blog commentary noted earlier, Waldman is not incorrect in citing misogyny.
I guess I could understand the criticism more if she pretended even for a second to be anything but a homer, or someone whose main insight into the team was fostered by something other than palling around with the coaching staff. Also, I realize Waldman provides commentary on a pro team, but radio annoucing has a long history of homerism that at times breaches into the emotional. I’d love to see some of the harsher critics listen to an SEC football game on the radio, where use of the pronoun “we” when referring to the home team isn’t particularly uncommon.
somehow i think joe torre will be doing just fine even if he loses his job.
The reaction to mock, jeer and look down at Suzyn Waldman is not anti-woman. It is anti-Yankee to a degree because you can’t take one breath in this city without having some NYY propaganda shoved down your throat.
What this reaction really is, though, is a backlash against “professionals” like Ms. Waldman who turn everything they do into an event about THEMSELVES. Its not about you, Suze. Its a ballgame, its a team and its a season. Call it that way w.o your overly emotional, “look at me, look how this affects me” BS that permeates everything you do from the phony Yogi-Swinebrenner reunion you tried to make into a Beatles reunion to your over the top, hysterical in every sense of the word reaction to Clemens sitting in GEORGE’S BOX, OH MY GOD IVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING MORE DRAMATIC IN MY WHOLE LIFE!!!!”
You, Sterling and your spoiled little brother in the TV booth, Michael Kay, try so hard to make everything personal and about yourselves that you forget that your are not part of the team and that you have a job to do.
take a break, Suze. stop calling names, this one and all the other boners in your career are on you.
^
Bravo, Fred– you wrote a masterpiece.
Three cheers for Fred for calling this self-involved fraud out. Well said.