Late in June, SNY ran an ad on ESPN New York telling fans to check out New York Mets broadcasts featuring “the best booth in baseball” on the network.
The only issue was the SNY ad ran during The Michael Kay Show, meaning fans of the voice of the New York Yankees heard a commercial indicating the Mets’ team was better than Kay’s on YES Network.
Now, Mets game analyst and pitcher for the 1986 championship team Ron Darling is coming to Kay’s defense.
“I honestly, 100 percent felt Michael’s pain,” Darling said on The Show podcast with Jon Heyman this week. “I mean, just change it to, ‘catch Gary, Keith and Ron on SNY.’ It doesn’t have to be, ‘the best booth in the game.'”
Mets great Ron Darling talks here about the “best booth in baseball” controversy, and he sympathizes with Michael Kay. We also talk a lot of baseball, the Mets and pitching with Ronnie
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Darling’s response paints a picture of Kay doing a full-on live read for SNY, which is not exactly what happened. The ad was simply played during a commercial break on ESPN New York.
But Kay was understandably bothered that his MLB booth was insulted during a break in his radio show, saying, “I think they should feel that way, and I feel that way [about the YES booth]. But you also have to be somewhat out of a mindset of being completely clueless to run that on THE MICHAEL KAY SHOW.”
The Mets’ booth on SNY later poked fun at Kay over the ordeal. It probably didn’t help when Awful Announcing readers ranked the Mets booth No. 1 in baseball while the Yankees booth fell to No. 22.
It’s nice of Darling to take a moment to reach an olive branch out to Kay here. Hopefully, ESPN NY’s ad sales team will learn its lesson and avoid such a problem in the future.
