It may very well be that you know what you're getting when you have Andy Van Slyke on your sports radio show. I certainly don't know, although if I had to guess it would probably be something like Salty Baseball Man Talking Shit About Everyone And Everything Inna Four-Beers-Deep Stylee. Van Slyke's appearance today with Frank Cusumano on St. Louis' CBS Sports 920 reveals that I would have been right in that guess, although it would very much have been a guess. Maybe you already knew that. Maybe you have given a great deal more thought to Andy Van Slyke than I have of late. It wouldn't be that difficult.At any rate, Van Slyke joined the show a few minutes before 11 a.m. this morning and…I don't want to say he sounded like someone who'd already had like four beers, but I'm not really going to say that he didn't sound like that. Whatever the case, Van Slyke took the show on an abrupt 15-minute detour during which he piloted his personal Real Talk Express the wrong way down all manner of one-way thoroughfares without signaling or anything. It's not quite clear why Cusumano had Van Slyke on—Van Slyke was a fine player when George H.W. Bush was President, but he was fired by the Mariners at season's end—but it is instantly clear why Van Slyke himself is there. He is in the building to drag some dudes. Any dudes. As many dudes as he can fit into 15 minutes. You can listen to it here.If you don't have time for that, here is a brief rundown:
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- Van Slyke responds to Cusumano's first question—it's about Yasiel Puig, who's teammates with Van Slyke's son Scott—by saying "between you and me," into an open mic, and then proceeds, coyly, to say that Clayton Kershaw asked the Dodgers front office to trade Puig. He's been on the air for maybe a minute at this point.
- In response to a question about Jason Heyward, Van Slyke swerves into oncoming traffic and changes the subject to Robinson Cano, whom Van Slyke says had "the worst single year of an everyday player I've ever seen in twenty years at the big league level…just the most awful player I've ever seen." It wasn't work ethic, Cusumano offers hopefully, he tries. "He does," Van Slyke says after a beat. "Sometimes." He goes on to call him "the single worst third place every day player I've ever seen for the first half of the season. He couldn't drive home Miss Daisy if he tried… He couldn't get a hit when it mattered. He played the worst defense, I mean I'm talking about the worst defensive second baseman I've ever seen in twenty years in baseball." Van Slyke concludes that Cano's season—he hit .287/.334/.446 and was worth about 3.5 wins above replacement, by the way—cost the GM and hitting coach their jobs, and eventually those of the entire staff. He also shits on Fernando Rodney, but that's kind of justified. He's been on for about five minutes, now.
listening to Van Slyke like pic.twitter.com/TPGinwWxiC
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- At which point Van Slyke bangs a u-turn on two tires. Howard Johnson was actually fired not because of Cano, but because the people "upstairs" wanted to hire Edgar Martinez as hitting coach, because he matters so much to the franchise. He goes on to say that "a hitting coach is sort of like taking your kids to day care, and then picking them up…You might teach a kid to build a block every now and then, if they're willing to learn. Some three-year-olds are. But you're basically dealing with a bunch of three-year-olds, spoiled athletes."
- It quiets down for a while as Van Slyke praises Stephen Piscotty and Randall Grichuk, although Van Slyke finds time to call out Colby Rasmus as stupid. "He's going to make almost $16 million next year," Van Slyke slurs, "and he's not the sharpest nail in the tool box."
- A Van Slyke digression about the looming threat of "mind coaches"—not psychiatrists but, like, something else—gives way, just a few minutes before the hour, to Cusumano soliciting Van Slyke's take on Gary Pinkel and Missouri. Van Slyke, it turns out, believes that "the truth is more important than the emotion," and that the football players asking to be treated like humans on the campus of their state's flagship university "did not chase the truth." Anyway, the last words Van Slyke says are "it ended up being Obama's fault, because of Obamacare."