Lee Mazzilli... Just Not That Good

(Note: Sip will be in with a post later this afternoon.)

I love SNY, I think that's understood. Gary, Keith and Ron -- what more can be said? I was reading ESPN's game recap this morning and in the background of the highlights they showed on ESPN Motion you could hear the St. Louis broadcasters describing the action. Every time I hear an opposing team's broadcasters I'm reminded, without fail, of how bad most broadcasters are. Tune in to Channel 30 some time if you need a refresher.

But we who watch SNY are lucky. There's the three guys we watch the games with every night. There's Chris Cotter, a legend in his own time. There's Julie Donaldson... holy cow. There's Brian Custer, who may be the slickest broadcaster in the game.

Of course, not everyone's a revelation. I'm pretty sure Gary Apple sucks. He's smug and does not strike me as particularly well-informed, but the fact is that I don't watch Daily News Live often enough for it to be a problem for me.

One show I do watch often enough for poor broadcasting to be a problem for me is (Northfork Bank) Pre-/Post-Game Live (brought to you by the all-new Nissan Pathfinder). And it's here that we have a problem.

The problem is Lee Mazzilli. Simply put, Mazzilli is bad right now. He's brusque and is generally unfriendly-seeming. Just like we invite Gary, Keith and Ron into our living rooms to watch the games with (in a sense, at least), so too do we invite the Pre-/Post-Game Live team into our homes to discuss the games with. If one of those people is kind of a jerk it's problematic.

As it is, Mazzilli seems like kind of a jerk. His problem isn't just that he looks and sounds more like a member of The Sopranos than a sports commentator, it's that he doesn't seem to have a grasp of the broadcasting basics.

For instance, when your co-anchor, Matt Yallof in this case, asks you a question about Paul Lo Duca and what he brings to this lineup, you don't start talking about how Jose Reyes, David Wright, Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado are MVP candidates, which Mazzilli did on Post-Game Live last night.

And that's another thing -- Yallof and Mazzilli appear to have no chemistry, and I'm inclined to blame Mazzilli. Yallof is your typical outgoing broadcaster. I don't think Yallof is great, but he's perfectly fine in my book, and more to the point, I've never seen him have a lack of rapport with any of his co-anchors in the past.

With Mazzilli though there's no trace of camaraderie, even to the point that when Yallof calls him "Maz" it sounds forced.

Is there still hope for Mazzilli? Of course there is. It's not that he's inarticulate or uninformed, it's that he's unpolished. He doesn't answer questions directly; he doesn't sound open and engaging, he sounds closed and dismissive; he interjects with unnecessary confirmations like "yeah" or "right", which is particularly distracting and odd-seeming when he's off-camera, and all the while he does it in a gruff-sounding tone.

No matter how well-versed you are in a subject, broadcasting is extremely difficult -- I appreciate that. The difficulty is in mastering the back-and-forth exchange; it sounds easy, but it's not.

What surprises me is that SNY would have hired somebody so rough around the edges, and somebody who had no chemistry with the man he'd be joining in the studio, Yallof. They must have tested these guys together, right? How didn't they notice?

I've got hope for Mazzilli. It's the third game of the season and he's still getting used to the assignment. For now though, I'm sorry to say that Mazzilli is making his broadcasts painful.

I'd be curious to know what other people think about Mazzilli. Does anybody agree with me here or am I on my own on this one?

Oh, and yeah, sweeping the Cardinals felt fan-fucking-tastic.

- A.F.O.M.G.