A.P. Discuss SNY Thread

[Guest Edgy DC]

Darling just seemed sleepy and stoney with the Nats last year.

He did as a player also, though.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

That's because he thinks too much.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

I like Mets Fast Forward, where you get the game in an hour in the morning.

[soupcan]

Did you catch Darling's comment about the trivia question?

The question was: Who was the last VP to throw out the first pitch in a Washington DC home opener?

The answer was Somebody Sherman in 1912.

Darling went on to say that Sherman was Taft's VP. Taft was a Yalie and had a special seat behind homeplate at Yale Stadium that was basically a double-wide because of Taft's girth.

Boola-Boola (yawn).

[metirish]

I think Ron might suffer from a very high IQ.

[seawolf17]

It's a terrible curse that some of us bear, but we do it well.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

metirish wrote: I think Ron might suffer from a very high IQ.

That's one of the things I always loved about him.

[Guest Edgy DC]

I think he suffers from being sleepy and stoney.

[metirish]

While rooting around for info on Darling I found this, I didn't know he pitched in the greatest college baseball game of all time, and against Frank Viola no less.

http://www.answers.com/topic/ron-darling

[soupcan]

Old news irish. Any Mets fan worth his salt knows this.

It was pretty common knowledge in the early 90's when Darling and Viola were Mets.

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

There's some good stuff on Young Ron Darling in the book Dollar Sign on the Muscle, which I whore every chance I get. The book follows the 1981 draft, when Darling was selected by Texas in the first round.

One thing I associate with Ron Darling is John Darling, a comic strip that ran in Newsday around the time the Mets acquired him. What was interesting was that both Ron Darling and John Darling had reputations as pretty boys who while accomplished professionals, tended to mind themselves too much. John Darling was a newscaster IIRC.

The same artist does, or did, Marvin.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

And Smokey Joe Wood was in the stands watching the game.

[metirish]

] Old news irish. Any Mets fan worth his salt knows this. It was pretty common knowledge in the early 90's when Darling and Viola were Mets.

In my defence in the early 1990's I was living in Ireland and probably had never even heard of the Mets let alone Ron Darling, so I learn everyday.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

Somehow, I don't know where or when, John Darling was murdered. I know this because Les Moore, a character in Funky Winkerbean wrote a book about the case.

The John Darling art does have the same style as Marvin. Could it have been written by the Funky writer?

[Guest Edgy DC]

Has either team been back to the College World Series since then?

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

Great story! I met Tom Armstrong once at an event. His nametag read: JOHN DARLING


From Toonpedia:

]JOHN DARLING Medium: Newspaper comics Distributed by: North America Syndicate First Appeared: 1979 Creator: Tom Batiuk John Darling was not a long-running, well-known, highly popular comic strip. It was not an extremely important strip in the history of comics. It was not the most significant creative outlet for any of comics' great geniuses. It has only one real claim to fame � but that one's a doozy! On August 3, 1991, the day before the strip ended, its title character was murdered on-stage, in full view of the readers. Title characters of comics had been murdered before. The Comet went out in a blaze of gunfire, for example, tho a couple of decades later the publisher relented, and he got better. And a villain blew up The Doom Patrol in the final issue of their DC comic book; but there, readers were given to understand that if the publisher became convinced the comic could be resurrected, sales-wise, then the characters would be resurrected as well. John Darling was intended to stay dead, and did. The John Darling character was created by Tom Batiuk (rhymes with "attic"), best known for Funky Winkerbean, which he created, writes and draws. Darling was originally a walk-on character in the Winkerbean strip, an appallingly shallow, thoroughly self-absorbed talk show host. He made a big hit with readers, and was brought back over and over. He eventually became the first of two Winkerbean characters (the other being Ed Crankshaft) spun off into strips of their own. Darling's began March 25, 1979. Given the character's line of work, naturally, it was replete with caricatures of real-life media personalities � in fact, so media-saturated was the strip, many papers carried it on the TV page instead of with the rest of the comics. Batiuk wrote John Darling, and it was originally illustrated by Tom Armstrong. In 1985, Armstrong left to devote his full attention to his own strip, Marvin, which he'd created in 1982; and the art on Darling was taken over by Gerry Shamway. When the Darling strip was canceled (crowded off most papers' TV page by the 1980s explosion of channels that required listing), Armstrong returned to draw its final three weeks � including, of course, the character's shooting death. Batiuk had two reasons for closing the strip as he did. First, he wanted a boffo ending, one that people would talk about and remember. He certainly achieved that. Second, he was having a contract dispute with North America Syndicate (Sally Forth, Mark Trail), which distributed the strip, over ownership of the character, and made a decision to leave John Darling unusable. And yet, the character was used one more time. In 1997, long after the dispute had been resolved in Batiuk's favor, he had Les Moore, a major Funky Winkerbean character, write a book about Darling's murder � and, in the process, solve it. To write that story, Batiuk had to solve the murder himself. He hadn't had any particular murderer in mind originally, but poring over the John Darling storyline, found enough clues to nail the felon. Other than the fact that, like mortals, he survives through his descendants (his daughter Jennifer is a regular character in Funky Winkerbean), that may well have been John Darling's last gasp as a viable character. Like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, he is still dead.

[Guest Edgy DC]

Things I remember about John Darling

1) John worked for Channel One, when there wasn't such a channel on anybody's dial.

2) He kept his back issues of People magazine and had them bound.

3)This exchange:

Frame One:

John Darling

(beaming moronically at camera/reader): And we're here talking with Terry Bradshaw, star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, in town this week to face our own Maulers. Terry, there's some speculation that the Steelers may be looking past the Maulers toward next week's big showdown with the Houston Oilers. Is there anything to that?

Frame Two:

(No lines, just Bradshaw beaming moronically.)

Frame Three:

Bradshaw:

Looking past who again?

[soupcan]

metirish wrote: In my defence in the early 1990's I was living in Ireland and probably had never even heard of the Mets let alone Ron Darling, so I learn everyday.

I figured as much irish. Just giving you a hard time.

[metirish]

No problem Soupcan, I knew that, meanwhile you are Jeff Reardon.....he has to be Irish.

[Guest GYC]

http://www.metsblog.com/blog/_archives/2006/4/13/1884402.html

]04:29 PM - Oops: Cohen Comments Off-Air, but On-Air ...posted by Matthew Cerrone... �this is priceless� During SportsNet NY's post-game interview with Willie Randolph from the team's locker room, the producers apparently forgot to shut off Gary Cohen's and Ron Darling's microphones, as they listened to the interview from the broadcast booth� Therefore, during Randolph's interview, viewers could hear Cohen's under-the-breath comments, for instance� Asked if Victor Zambrano fulfilled expectations on the day, Randolph responded, "Well, like I said, I didn't go into the game expecting anything in particular.�� Cohen them remarked, "That's an understatement�He just downplays everything."� Darling followed by saying, "Well, what do you expect him to do."� Randolph continued with regards to Zambrano, "Well, he started to labor after the fifth, but the first time out you can't expect him to be on the top of his game."� Cohen then remarked, while laughing, "You can never expect him to be on top of his game, because he never is."� �ouch, but true�remember, folks, cohen is a mets fan, just like you and i�frankly, on radio he was pretty critical of the team�however, since going to television, he has been a tad more, well, professional, i guess�i�m glad to know he is still thinking like a fan, though�

I love it.

[metirish]

Excellent, the guys hear that listen to the Mets on MLB say that the inbetween innings talk between Gary and whoever is carried live, it's priceless.

[Guest martin]

email response i got from comcast jersey city:

"As of now we do not offer Sports Net New York in HD"

damnit. isnt SNY part-owned by comcast? and i still can't get the HD feed? i would have thought i was the most likely person to get the hd feed, having comcast and all. i thought i would be the guy laughing at the other losers with time warner or the dish or whatever. but instead i am the loser.

[Centerfield]

Is there a separate commercial thread? I was watching the replay last night and I want to know what idiot decided to air Derek Jeter commercials during Mets telecasts. And I know, I was watching the replay, but SNY should know that if anyone is sitting through a replay of the game, they must be a pretty big fan.

I will never EVER buy anything from the Tri-State Lincoln Ford Mercury dealers.

And with that video game commercial, did anyone else notice that the commercial starts out with Beckett saying he's not going to go low and away, with Jeter mirroring, he's not going low and away, only to have the pitch end up low and away?

[metirish]

I saw that CF and pretty much thought the same as you, like go to fuck Cappy.

[Guest KC]

I meant to post this before, is Keith Hernandez on some kind of "suspension"
or whatever because of something he may have said during a SNY broadcast?

I didn't hear the entire call, but the morning show on WFAN (it was a substitute
host) had someone saying something that Keith slipped up and is now paying for
it? Is there any truth to this? Was it an anti-Mets slip up or did he say something
about some woman's jugs in the stands or something on a camera pan? Or is it that
Darling and him will routinely rotate around with Gary being the main dude?

[Elster88]

I haven't heard anything but the first thing that comes to mind is calling Nelson de la Rosa a monkey.

He makes a lot of remarks about the stereotypical Latino ballplayer too. The casual listener might not know who Keith is, let alone his ethnicity, so their might be some complaints there. I doubt this one really, just speculatin.

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

I thought of the monkey comment, too.

Keith Hernandez isn't Hispanic or Latino, though, if I remember his genealogy correctly. I think his name comes from Spanish (as in from Spain) ancestors.

Am I remembering that right?

[Centerfield]

Hernandez and Aguilera, I believe, both have Spanish (as in from Spain) heritage.

I remember hearing Keith say something cutting edge last week that I wondered aloud whether he could say it, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it was.

[metsmarathon]

the casual listener should consider that such comments regarding "stereotypical latino ballplayers" would generally refer to baseball skills and styles that are the result of social and cultural ideosyncracies, and not biological or genealogical.

but people are idiots, and offend too easily.

[Elster88]

He doesn't actually use the phrase "stereoptypical Latino ballplayer", just makes a lot of comments along the lines "Latinos do this" or "Latinos play like that". Again, the quoted text is not actual quotes.

Like I said though, I doubt there were complaints about it. Just sticks in my mind when I hear it because of this PC-crazed world that we live in.