With Mike Francesa on vacation, longtime WFAN veteran Joe Benigno was filling in as one of the hosts for the afternoon drive-time show. To have fun on a Friday, producer Brian Monzo and co-host Gregg Giannotti played an amazing prank on Benigno.
The pair wrote a fake article touting a new sabermetric stat championed by Billy Beane: FLUMP. They even promoted the prank on Twitter:
We are going to trick Joe at the top of the hour. We made up a fake saber metric stat that we are saying the mets are using. Don't miss it.
— Gregg Giannotti (@GioWFAN) August 21, 2015
Joe hates analytics in baseball. This fake story we wrote may make him explode. Coming up right now on @WFAN660
— Gregg Giannotti (@GioWFAN) August 21, 2015
https://twitter.com/BMonzoWFAN/status/634792869535043585
There’s nothing quite like a stat with a funny acronym to make people who despise sabermetrics filp out. And in the article, they managed to hit on all the right buttons to light a fire under Benigno – skipping starts for Matt Harvey, references to Stephen Strasburg and Rick Peterson, and the creation of “Sabermatricians Weekly.” It all led to an irate Benigno ripping FLUMP limb from mythical limb in a fantastic bit of audio.
Here it is via RN’s Funhouse:
It may be a fake stat, but I’ll go to my grave saying FLUMP > TWTW.
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