There’s something to be said about legacy media members that still generate clicks. However, when those clicks hinge solely on “old man yelling at cloud”-style rage bait, it’s fair to wonder if the plot has been entirely lost. Phil Mushnick and the New York Post appear to have stopped searching for that plot long ago.
Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Post doesn’t seem too concerned about how Mushnick tarnishes both his own reputation and that of the publication.
It’s long past that point.
You can glance at the headline of almost any sports article on the Post’s website and immediately know who wrote it. Not because of exceptional talent or a distinctive journalistic voice but because Phil Mushnick has honed a particular writing style — one rooted in denigrating others and delivering some of the most thinly veiled takes imaginable.
Absolute joke that someone wrote this (yeah, you guessed who) and then someone hit publish. pic.twitter.com/v1nXAf8z1p
— Mike Mayer (@mikemayer22) December 27, 2024
He does this mainly because he’s been with the paper since 1982. And mainly because he can.
His longevity is commendable, sure, but when his takes come at the expense of sullying the reputation of his colleagues, it’s no longer an asset; it’s a liability.
But that didn’t just happen a few days after Christmas Day in 2024 — it’s been going on for years.
Spit. Rinse. Repeat.
It’s a cycle that serves no one but the clicks. That cycle continued this week, not long after the passing of Rickey Henderson.
For Mushnick, this was just another opportunity to launch into his trademark routine of taking something meaningful and twisting it into a reason why it actually sucks.
Henderson is, without question, the greatest base runner of his generation — arguably of all time. But to Mushnick, that’s just fan fiction, a comforting fairytale spun to soften the blow of losing a legend.
We’re not here to amplify his piece, but his reasoning goes something like this. And, yes, the irony in the first sentence shouldn’t be lost on anybody.
But nonsense has a way of being repeated, then clinging, then becoming legend until it’s taken for granite.
So believe what you’re told, even if it remains nonsensical that baseball’s greatest baserunner would be so expendable, changing teams 13 times in 25 seasons.
In fact, he was a poor baserunner, conspicuously and suspiciously disinclined to reach second and third base on doubles and triples in order to steal his way there to inflate his stats.
Those who know baseball beyond stats — those who examined the game as it’s played and not reported by media who look at the game through the next fad-driven numbers — know better
Henderson holds the single-season record for stolen bases with 130 in 1982 and is the only player in American League history to steal 100 bases in a season, accomplishing the feat three times (1980, ’82 and ’83). His career total of 1,406 steals is 50% higher than the previous record of 938 set by Lou Brock, who Mushnick argues was, and still is, the greatest baserunner in MLB history.
Here’s the problem with Mushnick and his decades-long tenure at the New York Post: it’s not just the clickbait headlines, outdated outrage or even the thinly veiled racial undertones. It’s that his shtick has long become predictable and tired.
You see a headline and dismiss it as “Mushnick being Mushnick,” but at what point do we stop accepting this as just a quirk of doing business? It’s less a relic of the past and more a calculated tactic to provoke readers, stir outrage and keep them hate-reading his rhetoric weekly.
It’s typical Mushnick in that he seeks to right perceived wrongs that only he is brilliant enough to see. But using Rickey Henderson’s passing as a way to try to prove this is a new low, even by his incredibly low standards.