As most of you all know, pending a healthy physical, Jason Bay will soon be introduced to the masses in a press conference within the next few days. While I’m as excited as most of you about his addition to the team, one thing still puzzles me about the events that led to his agreement with the Mets. How did WFAN’s Mike Francesa get the scoop, and manage to keep it such a secret?
Like most of you, I search the web daily looking for breaking Met news. When I visited the Mets.com message board, there were several threads saying Francesa would have a “major Mets announcement” on Tuesday’s show. After reading a few threads I decided to check out my usual sources; the Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, MLB.com, CNN/SI, ESPN.com, The Seven Train To Shea and Mets Merized Online. But none of these fine websites had anything to report… yet.
As soon as Francesa broke the news at 2:07 PM, it wasn’t long before the Jason Bay signing went viral in the Mets blogosphere.
What strikes me as strange in this whole deal was how did Mike Francesa pull this off?
None of the beat writers had any advanced knowledge and even the normally reliable baseball insider, Jon Heyman, was seemingly left out of the loop. So who fed such a major scoop to Francesa, was it the Mets?
It would seem so, but why would the Mets bypass their own SNY cable network and give it to WFAN’s Francesa, someone who is known to be a huge Yankees supporter and a Mets hater who constantly takes shots at the Mets?
If they had their reasons to break this on WFAN, why not do it via two well known Mets supporters (and frequent guests on SNY) Joe and Evan?
Are the Mets grooming Francesa to take over for the revered, but aging public relations VP, Jay Horwitz?
Obviously not, but still it’s all very curious.
Maybe the Mets felt that by tossing the big man this scoop, he’d go easy on them in the upcoming season?
I wouldn’t bet on that.
