Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo has joined the pile-on and blasted Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. And Alex Rodriguez caught some shrapnel in the process.
Russo ripped Cashman for his recent whining about the 2017 ALCS and the Astros’ cheating Wednesday during his weekly ESPN First Take joust with Stephen A. Smith.
“What a joke,” Russo said. “Hey Brian, look at the statistics.”
Mad Dog then proceeded to run through a litany of numbers and anecdotes summing up the Yankees’ offensive ineptitude in the series, as well as prior and subsequent postseason failings. And then — like his former partner, Mike Francesa — he went in for the steroids what-about kill.
“Lastly, in 2009, when the Yankees won the [World Series] and beat the Phillies, A-Rod. You know what he did in that postseason? He hit .365, six home runs, 18 RBI. He dominated the postseason. And let’s be honest, he was lit up like a Christmas tree. The Barry Bonds of the east coast. … So I’m going to hear [Cashman] now moan and groan a championship series where the Yankees, four games in Houston, hit .156. They couldn’t score. They couldn’t hit the Astros pitchers. … I don’t want to hear from Brian Cashman. It’s about time the Yankees go to a World Series again and win one of these things.”
Smith called Cashman’s griping “an utter embarrassment” and “egregious,” but added what the Astros did was an “unfair, unethical, amoral advantage.” And then the two titans of the sports talk debate do what they end up doing with every topic they discuss: They started screaming over each other, more guttural noises than actual words, while wildly gesticulating until Mad Dog made a wild historical reference — in this case, he mentioned the 1919 Reds that won the World Series over the Black Sox — before host Molly Qerim sent them to commercial.
God bless America.
