Last updated: 7:11 am
June 27, 2008
Posted: 3:52 am
June 27, 2008

IT hardly seems possible, but in 2008 one can tune to an all-sports New York City radio station to hear a ballplayer being ridiculed and run-down because the show's hosts couldn't figure out exactly what he said, because they lost a word or two to the player's Spanish-accented English.

Worse, what Craig Carton and Boomer Esiason did to Mets pitcher Oliver Perez, Wednesday on WFAN, came the morning after Perez was beaten by a bad team, the Mariners, yet he was good enough to still make himself available to produce the sound bite that gave Carton and Esiason the opening for their cheap kicks.

Even worse, is that the opening that brought Carton and Esiason together to form a WFAN team was created when Don Imus, after years of providing hateful, schoolyard bully, put-down radio, was finally fired for it.

But radio has no better ideas, thus the "morning zoo" concept is manufactured for delivery here, there and everywhere.

Carton, after all, was hired to replace a trash-talker because he was a noted low-brow artist at his previous stop, where he mocked, among others, a Korean-American mayoral candidate by ridiculing the man's accented English. He also went after the wife of then Governor of NJ Richard Codey after she revealed that she was suffering from postpartum depression.

And the day Carton's canned for finally going too far, station ownership and management will pretend to be appalled by his inexcusable and indefensible conduct, the kind that "doesn't reflect the standards of this station nor its ownership."

And on that day his apologists will point to all the charity work he does, as if adding one big right to one big wrong somehow equals a whole lot. You know the drill.

And then the search for the next Don Imus/Craig Carton will ensue.

If only Perez hadn't bothered to learn any English, Carton and Esiason would have had nothing; they'd have had to find someone else.

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Speaking of WFAN and English-as-second language Spanish accents, Chris Russo, Monday, noted that Omar Minaya, during his press conference to introduce Jerry Manuel, had "a communicative problem."