WFAN testing Suzyn Waldman with Craig Carton is shameful betrayal to Yankees fans

Roughly 60 years ago, Mad Magazine, published for kids with a bent toward satire before they graduated to the National Lampoon, invented a game called 43-Man Squamish.

Mad included play diagrams depicting 43 players running in 43 different directions, a comical absurdity that perhaps inspired StatCast graphics that networks purchase then seriously present to show the direction of 43 pitches and/or 43 balls hit in 43 directions — all to be inspected, considered and absorbed by viewers in about eight seconds.

43-Man Squamish also lives on as the process through which viewers and listeners are encouraged to enjoy the radio and TV broadcasts of what we’re often reminded is the most storied team in sports history, the New York Yankees.

And that — by greedy, arrogant and neglectful design of both Rob Manfred and team president Randy Levine — has become impossible, a task so cumbersome and confused that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Sisyphus would all take a personal day rather than give it a shot.

Watching the Yankees on TV this season, again by bottom-line financial avarice, one must buy (almost always) access to YES (now featuring many fewer games), Fox, FS1, ESPN, TNT, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Roku and the A, E, I, O, U and Sometimes Y Network among several others.

The announcers? Well, on just YES, alone there’s Michael Kay, Ryan Ruocco, David Cone, Paul O’Neill, Todd Frazier, John Flaherty, Jeff Nelson, Joe Girardi and a former-Yankee to be named later, try to identify.

The only constant is Meredith Marakovits , who tries to decipher what Aaron Boone meant while saying nothing worth hearing or repeating.

At least transparent diversity hires Carlos Beltran and Cameron Maybin were distinguishable as professional communicators who were hired and assigned to us without the ability to communicate.

The only constants on the radio side are Suzyn Waldman and that the games are heard on WFAN.

Other than that, it’s Spin the Wheel and, on some occasions, Pin the Tail on the Flunky.

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There’s the daily/nightly guessing game as to who is seated beside Waldman as she indolently reads the sponsored “out of town scoreboard” and the endless, almost pitch-by-pitch nickel-and-dime sponsorships — “The official Lucite picture frame of the New York Yankees.”

This season we’ve counted five fellas joining Waldman. And there will be at least a sixth come next month.

As if the Yanks on radio and TV were running low on bad ideas, Craig Carton, virtually vanished from TV and radio since being hired by Fox/FS1 — Fox was impressed with his bio, which includes a stretch in Lewisburg’s federal penitentiary following his conviction for fraud and theft — is scheduled to call three Yankees games while seated beside Waldman next month.

As WFAN producer Al Dukes angrily and bravely said , this is a betrayal of minimal decency by all parties, given that for over a decade while on WFAN Carton mocked Waldman’s Yankees broadcasts heard on WFAN.

Not that she was immune from mockery, but Carton, extremely sensitive to criticism of his own pee-pee and poo-poo on-air content, was often downright cruel, cruelty being among the keys to radio hosting success — as well as the mark of a bully.

Ah, but we digress as we regress. The bottom line in the bottom-line world of the most famously successful team in sports history is that the Yankees don’t give a Ralph Houk’s rectum about their fans.

I mostly favor the analyses of ex-Yankees pitcher Jeff Nelson, provided we can find and/or watch the Yankees telecasts he’s assigned to work. He feeds us food for thought. The problem arises is that he continues to feed us when we’re no longer hungry.

He’s too often in the nasty habit of becoming Fox’s John Smoltz, who loses audiences by performing autopsies of every pitch. And too much too often makes for double-talk and viewer drowsiness.

Last weekend in Baltimore, a pitch that nearly hit Alex Verdugo in the head was curiously identified Nelson as “a sinking fastball.”

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It’s TV, Jeff, sometimes just let it be TV.

Thanks for the laughs, Bob Newhart, the real kind, the clean kind and not the “Wooo!” substitutes for laughter following crudities that are commercially confused and sold as comedy.

Newhart, who was 94 , provided sustaining proof that clean comedy is often far more funny — and creative — than the sound of flatulence.

I rediscovered the slow-beat, blank-look genius of Newhart on YouTube, often just after noon on Sundays thanks to the repetitive emptiness and phony laughter within NFL network pregame shows.

Speaking of unfunny comedians who rely on crudity, Kevin Hart for some superficial reason, remains a must-have addition to sports telecasts. He will join lead news anchor Lester Holt and Snoop Dogg, gold medalist in the drug-arrests and weapons-possession events, within NBC/Peacock’s Olympics come-ons and presentations.

Meanwhile, the world having become what it has been allowed and even invited to become, the Paris Olympics are likely to lose a fortune on just the employment and deployment of riot police and arson squads.

Chris Russo last week raged at placid, patient ESPN/SEC Network host Paul Finebaum. Why? Russo felt that USC’s football program is stronger than Finebaum thinks.

Russo and Stephen A. Smith are rubbing off on each other, as both are starved for attention by hollering about anything and everything that isn’t worth a damn and changes nothing.

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Figures that ESPN has become so needy it’s now going heavy on WWE pro wrestling.

It has named servile Joe Tessitore, for two years the play-dumb -—he was just acting dumb, right? — voice of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” and before that the play-dumb blow-by-blow man on ESPN boxing.

The New York Times last week carried a piece on how the news media must eliminate “fake news.”

Would that include the fake news — the outrageous lie — disseminated on social media from Times tennis correspondent Ben Rothenberg claiming that ESPN tennis analyst Doug Adler called Venus Williams “a gorilla” when he had admired her “guerilla method” of poaching the net?

Cowardly ESPN, fearing a Times follow-up that never came because of the obvious false claim — the lie — distributed by its correspondent, quickly fell for that preposterously fake news, firing Adler as a racist, destroying his career, health and reputation.

The Times has never even seen fit to hint that it aided and abetted such hateful and harmful fake news.

Yeah, I’m going to continue to hammer at this, same as I’d do for any innocent sports figure sentenced to life. Shame on me.

Perhaps because Fox cameras and microphones were busy all over the lot, John Smoltz wasn’t too hard to suffer throughout the All-Star Game. He even delivered a neat stat:

In 1989 he was the youngest pitcher to lose an All-Star Game while Nolan Ryan was the oldest to win one. They were 20 years apart!

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