SportsNet N.Y. announcers Ron Darling, Gary Cohen and Keith Hernandez called Wednesday night's Cardinals-Mets game from Citi Field's Pepsi Porch, "the overhang in right field, where a broadcast table was set up with monitors, microphones and stuff they needed to do their job," according to Bob Raissman of the N.Y. DAILY NEWS. Wednesday's game was not "the first time SNY's crew had been on location, having once worked from the upper deck" at Shea Stadium, but "this particular remote was bizarre." Raissman writes, "Other ways to describe it are self-indulgent, gratuitous, distracting, funny, unusual, original, infuriating and revealing." For those "who actually tune in to watch a baseball game, not to see what the voices are eating during the tilt, it was distracting." Raissman: "It's a good idea when announcers can watch a game from a different angle, a different perspective. It's not such a good idea to give viewers a close-up look of Hernandez putting ketchup and mustard on a hot dog before he starts chomping on it while the game is being played" (N.Y. DAILY NEWS, 7/22). After the first hit of the game, Darling said, "As soon as this ball goes down the line, a little knuckleball that Schumaker gets past Duda who was playing even with the bag, Gary Cohen had to stand up and look down and to his left to try and find the ball from Carlos Beltran." Cohen said he "would compare (the view to) Spring Training" and added, "I have had the opportunity a couple of times to sit down on the Berm at Port St. Lucie. It's a little bit lower but it's the same general perspective." Hernandez said, "The one difference I see being up here as opposed to behind the plate? The game looks hard up here. From this angle, the game looks hard again. Sometimes from where we sit the game goes slower, it looks easier, 'How does he not get that ball, how could he not catch that?' Here you can see why" ("Cardinals-Mets," SNY, 7/20).
