YES broadcasts from Coney Island are getting weirder and weirder, and that's a good thing

Maybe I've gone hinky-dinky. Hit a certain age, and your egg gets poached. You spend hours wondering why the design of boy and girl bicycles is backwards, or who was the first French sucker to ever eat snails? Either way, for nearly 30 years now, various mental wards within the Yankiverse have awaited The Second Coming of Scooter - that is, the free-form announcer for which games are inconsequential afterthoughts, and the central question is not who will win, but onto what alien planet the conversation will next wander? 

Baseball is a four-hour game that features barely five minutes of physical play. The rest is a vast stretch of grown men fidgeting with their nut sacks or expertly streaming spittle onto the dirt. During those moments, the late Phil Rizzuto used to comb the human condition, musing about squirrels outside his kitchen window or the way kids preferred to play in the boxes their gifts came. Back in the '80s and early '90s, a period in which the Yankees were twice the worst team in baseball, The Scooter changed the way I listened to sports. It was Rizzuto who kept me coming back for game after game. It was he who inspired my first break in the realm of publishing. (With Mustang, of course.) 

I'm not ready to anoint David Cone as the next Scooter, mostly because there can never be such an entity. But last week in Boston, I found myself laughing at the otherworldly antics of Coney and Paul O'Neill, as they covered the series from a vantage point east of the moon and west of Professor Irwin Corey. They critiqued cold-weather fashions. They talked about food. They reminisced about great on-field brawls of the past, including some they triggered. They meandered in whatever direction their thought river flowed. At one point, they mused about the nature of talking.

"You know what's really great?" Coney said, after a brief silence. (I'm paraphrasing here.) "We're so comfortable in the booth that we don't even feel the need to talk."

"Huh? What do you mean?" O'Neill said. "I figured somebody cut my mic. I've been talking all this time."

Yeah, it's stupid. And yes, I realize that if you're absorbed in a game, such chatter can be maddening. Some fans never developed a taste for Rizzuto. But for years, the YES announcers - with their terrified pro-Yankee stances, a Fox News like devotion to the team - were boring and predictable. Maybe it's because the 2018 Yankees have lofty expectations; if this team fails, no excuses will work. Or maybe it's just that Cone and O'Neill have been bouncing off each other now for 10 years - (Coney started at YES in 2008; O'Neill in 2002) - and because he talks incessantly on radio, Michael Kay has finally learned that, on TV, less is more. But lately, watching games from Coney Island, especially with Pauly, have become prime time ice cream. 

(I should note: We've chewed lately on a sad story about Molly O'Neill's battle with cancer, and whether her brother is helping enough financially. There is no easy way to deal with a sick family member, and all I can offer is that these situations are always more complicated than news stories make them seem. That's my guess here. From where we sit, it's hard to pass judgement.)

Anyway, like I say, maybe I've gone soft. It's not that we have a new Rizzuto. But come summer, if this team collapses upon itself, nightly visits from Coney Island may become the best reason to tune in. Wouldn't that be weird?