Since the New York Yankees are a great team again, a team on the cusp of a record 27th World Series championship, I am eager to hand out this year’s Penny Crone Award.
Never heard of Penny Crone?!
When I served as a Yankees beat reporter for Gannett a decade ago, Crone worked as a general assignment reporter on Channel 5, New York’s Fox network affiliate.
Those of us on the Yankees beat would never see Crone until the postseason, which was an annual rite of autumn for Joe Torre’s teams.
Crone, then a fifty-something bleached blonde with a voice that sounded as if she gargled with Drano, would sweep through the media workroom every day wearing a Yankees cap, on her way into the clubhouse or the stands to do the kind of fawning, pompom-waving "news" pieces for which local stations have become infamous.
While doing her stand-ups at the old Yankee Stadium, Crone wearing her Yankees cap was never heard on Channel 5 discussing the team without saying "we" or "us."
As in, "If we beat the Braves tonight, we’ll win our second World Series in a row and the third in four years. And does anybody hear think Atlanta’s gonna beat us?"
To which a crowd of onlookers, just thrilled to be on TV, shouted "Noooo!"
Anyone who thought New Yorkers were too sophisticated for such blatant shilling needed only to see and hear Crone. Come playoff time, she saw the world through pinstriped glasses.
Crone’s Yankees reports became memorable because when it came to sucking up to all things Yankees, she had no peer.
Alas, Crone continued to age. And once her face clearly revealed a woman in her sixties, Channel 5 decided to, in sports parlance, put her on waivers.
Other, much younger women and men have tried to take up the gauntlet. And if the Yankees finish off the Angels and advance to the World Series against the Phillies, a new Yankees media mascot is bound to emerge.
(I’ve got my eyes on Megan Glaros of Channel 2.)
One more thing: Any sports reporter who does not know that the Yankees have a fight song — and that the music from the Yankees’ fight song is heard before and after every Yankees broadcast on WCBS Radio — should not be working in the metropolitan New York market.
Scott Stanford is a hack, someone better suited to do sports reports in Kansas. Yet he draws paychecks from two local media outlets: Channel 5/Channel 9 (both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) and WCBS Radio.
At 8:15 this morning, Stanford opined on WCBS that the Yankees would have trouble matching up with the Phillies because "the Yankees don’t have a fight song." He then played an excerpt from the Phillies' fight song.
Here, for Stanford and other ignorant New York media types, are the lyrics to the Yankees' fight song, "Here Come the Yankees":
Y-A-N-K-E-E-S
Here come the Yankees
Let’s get behind and cheer the Yankees
They’re gonna learn to fear the Yankees
Everyone knows they play to win ’cause they’re the New York Yankees
Show ’em today why you’re the Yankees
No other way when you’re the Yankees
Whaddaya say we win a brand new ballgame
We’re gonna shout when ya powder the ball
We’re gonna scream, "Put it over the wall!"
The other team’s gonna know what it means to play the
Y-A-N-K-E-E-S
We love the Yankees
Shout it out loud
We love the Yankees
We’re really proud of our Yankees
And we’re gonna win today.
Stanford is so bad he makes me wistful for Penny Crone.
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