YES broadcasters have uncomfortable exchange

Local baseball broadcasts often have some unusual conversations that aren’t specifically about the game. But it’s even more unusual than normal for announcers to be discussing what appears to be a somewhat-strained relationship between them. That’s what happened on the Friday afternoon YES broadcast of the New York Yankees’ road game against the Chicago Cubs, though.

There, analyst John Flaherty jumped off of play-by-play voice Michael Kay’s note about Wrigley Field being in the middle of a residential neighborhood with “You weren’t very talkative on the bus this morning to the field, but as I was driving here, I was thinking it would be great to get a place that’s close so you could walk back and forth. I know you mentioned Don Zimmer living in the apartments out in center field. But I just had a lot of time to think on the team bus today, because it was very quiet.”

Kay responded to that with “So you’d rather me be chatty? I wasn’t feeling great.” Flaherty chirped back with “I haven’t seen you in a long time, right? You don’t work road trips any more when I’m on the road. So I thought we would catch up, and it quickly was evident that you weren’t in the mood, so I gathered my thoughts about how it would be nice to live close to Wrigley and walk back and forth to the park.”

From there, this took a dive into YES’ announcing scheduling. Kay said “Interesting narrative that you’re putting together, because I’ve been told by executives that you prefer to work with [Ryan] Ruocco. That’s why you two guys are matched up all the time. That’s just what I heard, I don’t know if there’s any truth to it.” Flaherty responded with “I just put together that the road trips you don’t want to go on are the ones where I end up working with Ryan Ruocco, because you don’t want to work the games on the road.”

Kay then broke out of this spat to announce an actual play, Gleyber Torres’ infield ground-out. “Ground ball to short, Swanson.” He then went back to this with “Listen, John, I don’t pick out my schedule, I go where I’m told.” And the broadcast then had 10 seconds of awkward silence before Juan Soto’s at-bat before Kay said “I’ll be very chatty tomorrow,” and Flaherty responded with “No, I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay, I was worried about you.” And Kay ended it with “I think you were worried that I wouldn’t be talking much on the broadcast.”

This was strange on several levels. For one, this didn’t come up very naturally, but rather with Flaherty taking Kay’s note on the location and deciding to dive right into complaints about him not talking on the bus. Kay then offers him a potential out with “I wasn’t feeling great,” but Flaherty goes from there to claim that Kay’s avoiding working with him, which leads into Kay’s pushback and claim that it’s the other way around. (Fellow YES announcer Ruocco got a lot of surprising mentions during this, but fortunately not anything negative.) “Ground ball to short, Swanson” is almost a Castellanos-style interruption , and the following “Listen, John, I don’t pick out my schedule” and subsequent silence is just the height of awkwardness here. (And yes, there’s the possibility this was all a bit of the two faking annoyance with each other, but if it was, they did a very convincing acting job.)

A further odd part of this is that Kay and Flaherty are both long-time YES broadcasters, and renowned ones, with 14 and six New York Emmy Awards respectively (at least as of 2019, the last time the bios on the Yankees’ broadcasters page appears to have been updated). Kay has been calling games there since 2002 (following 10 years on radio), while Flaherty has been working there since 2006 (following a 1992-2005 MLB career, including with the Yankees for his final three seasons) across field reporter, studio analyst, and game analyst roles (and even occasionally play-by-play).

Granted, YES’ extensive broadcaster lineup and Kay’s other duties (particularly The Michael Kay Show Mondays through Fridays on ESPN New York, SiriusXM, and YES) mean not everyone there always works together.  And that gets brought up here, although with varying explanations. But it’s still remarkably strange to see a veteran broadcaster like Flaherty get into an on-air tiff with another veteran and long-time colleague over a perceived slight on a bus. As some pointed out , though, this isn’t even the first odd on-air fight in New York TV history, with many thinking back to Jim Ryan and Dick Oliver’s July 2001 exchange on Fox 5’s Good Day New York :

So, you know, TV feuds aren’t solely the province of Anchorman . Let’s just hope that no one brings a trident or a grenade to the booth Saturday…

[Frank Pellegrino on X/Twitter; image of Kay and Flaherty from a May 31, 2021 YES video on YouTube]

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