Wednesday, September 17, 2008

EARLY RETURNS

So we've all postulated that there is going to be a winner and a loser in this internecine battle between Mike Francesa and Chris Russo. Well, I'm coming to terms that this isn't really a battle for listeners. MMD has become apples and oranges. As our astute commenters have pointed out, Mike's show will always be rooted in New York Sports. Meanwhile, Russo answers to the 'heartland' now, among others. If you are a suffering Met fan, you want to tune into Mike today. Instead of self-flagellating, you can have Mike leave the scars for you. Russo will talk about the Mets, but as is apparent in the early days of his show, he is self-conscious about being too 'New York-centric'. He used this term to preface Mets talk yesterday.

So now that we have separated the Apple(Mike) from the Orange(Russo), we can look at this as a battle for legacy. When great teams break up, we look to see who will be remembered at the end of the day. George Michael was always the favorite to make it without Andrew Ridgely and that was borne out. You could call it a push with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, although I guess the Nutty Professor wins because he's still above ground. Obviously at this blog(contributors and commenters included), the smart money is on Christopher Russo. After yesterday, Russo has become the heavy chalk, with Francesa making like AIG stock. Here's why...

First the meltdown...The cracks are showing already at Mike'd Up. Francesa's rant is too long to dissect with a fine tooth comb. But here's the headline I got from it. "Francesa admits defeat in court of public opinion." Mike was proud of the fact that he never spoke up about the situation over the summer. He had set some arbitrary deadline of Chris' show airing to state his case. Meanwhile, Russo did what any person in his position would do - Get publicity for his new show. Mike's approach? Play the sad clown and sit on his hands. Well, he's basically staked Russo a lead. Too little too late, Mike.

Second - Resources. Around the 4pm hour, Francesa started pumping up Keith Hernandez's appearance..."If you're a Met fan, this is the person you want to hear from." I don't remember Mike ever being that excited about a local guest. Along with Keith, there was a Jon Heyman and Tom McCarthy. Meanwhile, Chris was trotting out John Madden, Regis Philbin and Barry Sanders. I'm guessing that the contact list over at Sirius XM is a bit more robust than Sal Licata's. Plus, if Bruce Springstein is doing an appearance on a music channel over there, you think Russo's people have a chance of walking him down the hallway to talk with Chris? Yesterday, Russo did a simulcast with Rob Dibble and Kevin Kennedy. It wasn't a phoner. They just linked up both of their channels. It was a nice changeup. And it showed you what kind of resources Sirius XM has.

So if I'm Arnold Rothstein, Paulie Walnuts or McGonaghy from that gambling movie and I'm taking odds on who wins the legacy battle, I'm putting it all on the Orange.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gman, will you marry me?

gman26 said...

We have learned that while Loki professes to eat tacos, his diet is more diverse.

Bill.... from Hauppauge said...

From my vantage point, Howard Stern has faded into relative obscurity, when he took the money and ran. What makes it any different with Russo. What will be his so called "legacy" as HE fades into obscurity

Peteski said...

I was thinking of the M&MD breakup as comparable to Martin Lewis also. (altho it makes more sense if they were actually doing something instead of talking about other people doing stuff - but that's different story). After they broke up, EVERYONE thought we'd never hear from Dean Martin again, as chronicled by Nick Tosches in Dino. Dean had a few bombs right after the breakup but eventually became a Movie, TV and Recording Star on his own and made mad $, much more than Jerry.
You can easily make the argument that Dean had a better career.

I don't know what any of this means.

TheNextBestThing1 said...

I don't think Mike realizes that he had a head start on Dog by almost three weeks..He had a chance to keep our eyes and ears tuned into to his show, but he does not realize that he was so bad and so lazy during the month that Dog was not during radio that he ruined any chance of us staying. All he did was drive us to Sirius on that "train thats leaving the station" w/ his awful performance. ...If he loved the audience so much he would not have taken us for granted by putting such a poor product on the airwaves. Dog w/ Stern was great for Dog he let us into his life like Mike would never do and i appreciate that as a listener...Just try to picture Mike after Stern would ask him about masturbation. Howard this is garbage i dont have to answer that..Stern why Mike cuz u need mapquest to find ur penis..

And to be fair..that sometimes douche bag Mike from Montclair, called Mike brought up the fact that Mike's success on sunday was a product of the time slot and Dog's was not thus explaining the disparity in the ratings. Mike countered by saying just believe me its true Sundays are tougher to get ratings w/ no factual evidence. This was all after Mike from Mont. opened his call by kissing Mike's ass..

Anonymous said...

John Madden, Regis Philbin, and Barry Sanders?!?...what is this the Today show? Russo hosts The View??!! Does Barry have some diet supplement to promote? Those guests all suck and i would change the channel if they were on anything other than a football game, and that would only be to watch the football game (and turn off the volume). And Springsteen is okay buy 10,000,000,000,000,099,999% over-rated. Enough! I almost miss Heyman's grand predictions!!