OK, so you run a 75-year-old busine s that once thrived but has been losing popularity among your most devoted, longtime customers and their progeny. What do you do? 1) Ignore those customers complaints and advice? 2) Treat those complaints as quickly, smartly and long-term logically as po sible? 3) Make your product even more difficult and expensive to endure, let alone purchase? A fan holds up a Grimace OMG pumpkin sign at NLDS Game 4 at Citi Filed. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Robert Garcia Jersey Post More From Phil Mushnick Since roughly the start of this century, MLB and its national TV partners have annually chosen No. 1 and No. 3. Taking their best customers for drooling, money-to-burn saps and gawkers of product logos attached to every sight has become MLBs busine s model. Name one thing TV has done well or even marginally better during this postseason than previous postseasons. Nada, si? What does now do or continues to do worse? Gotta a couple of hours? Weve been through this, over and over. It doesnt benefit anyone or anything. Fox Sports broadcasters Kevin Burkhardt and Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz and Derek Jeter before game five between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres of the NLDS for the 2024 MLB Playoffs at Dodger Stadium. Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images The host voices and analysts are either out to drown us in hype or bad info. They talk far more than live TV logically demands. The views of live play are increasingly lost to in-game interviews; irrelevant, context-ignorant statistics; computerized, multi-colored lines tracking pitches and batted balls that allow audiences mere seconds to read, consider and apply if they determine to read them to begin with. Oh, and endle s crowd shots of fans waving hand towels that could be, for all we know and all theyre worth, file footage from the annual Diet Ginger Ale Festival in Lambertville, N.J. And you know by now what it takes to suffer games determined by managers taking their orders from computers that duplicate conditions and circumstances that can not be duplicated without complete devotion to science fiction. Plus, we can all see, by now, that the more millions paid to players, the le s theyre inclined to play winning baseball and the more likely they are to get commercial endorsements and bat-flipping roles in baseball TV promos. Kansas City Royals fans react after Jazz Chisholm Jr. #13 of the New York Yankees strikes out swing during the second inning. Jason Szenes / New York Post Are TVs exce ses, which give greater focus to what doesnt count, supposed to be an improvement from its technologically unsophisticated days, when it arrived at the ballpark only to pay full attention to the games? Instead, every advancement sends us backward. And that likely will grow worse, as someone will come up with another artificial distraction device that will cause a rush of blood to the indiscriminate heads of TV execs. Remember the Maine? No, remember ESPNs Monday Night Football Booger Mobile! Pete Alonso flips his bat in Game 3 of the NLDS at Citi Field. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post Cowherd hadnt heard about tragedy year after Call me crazy, but if I paid a fellow $6 million per to host a cable TV sports show, as Fox pays Colin Cowherd to host one on FS1, Id occasionally check up on such a hire to learn if hes any good, or at least knows what hes talking about. In the case of Cowherd, Fox execs presumably would repeatedly learn that hes as much of a fake, a steady di seminator of embarra singly rotten gue swork and obvious but unadmitted 180s as is Stephen A. Smith and Mike Francesa. But thats the busine s. Last week, as can still be heard on from reliable baloney-tracking X user @BackAftaThis, as a juicy World Series matchup. MLB has made a lot of money-first changes under Rob Manfred, but given that the Mets and Padres both still play in the National League, thats impo sible. Cowherd, who has struggled with his career bio, once produced a list of QBs he felt will never make it to the Super Bowl, let alone win it, as theyre simply not good enough. On his list, and spoken by Cowherd in the active tense, was Dwayne Haskins. He clearly did not know and mightve been the only one that the Washington then Steelers QB, and former Ohio State star, was killed by a truck while walking a highway more than a year earlier. It was a story that was, especially for $6 million per, that was impo sible to mi s. Or so one might think. Well, the highly-ranked Georgia football program took a week off from being cited for reckle s driving. Including one fatality, between 25 and 30 full-ride-plus players have been busted in just the past 18 months. Georgia wide receiver Colbie Young (8) drives in to score a touchdown after pulling in a pa s from Georgia quarterback Carson Beck (15) during the first half of a NCAA college football game against Tenne see Tech in Athens, on Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024. Joshua L. Jones / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Last week, however, receiver Colbie Young, a recruit from Binghamton who transferred from Miami, was arrested for a sault on an unborn child carried by a woman identified as an ex-girlfriend. Georgias crime-infested football program has escaped the media attention it has earned due to its perceived value to TV networks, plus pandering to Machiavellian yahoos. The SEC Network, for example, is owned by ESPN/Disney, thus, well, you tell me. Jbara stands out for great question There is no better chance to conduct a good postgame interview than to have paid attention to the game. TBS Lauren Jbara proved that after Thursdays Game 4 of Guardians 5, Tigers 4. Jbara stood with first baseman David Fry, , then a sacrifice RBI bunt in the ninth. Instead of asking one of those How important was it ? questions, Jbara asked about bunting in the ninth after homering in the seventh. And good questions deserve good answers. Fry laughed, then said that the last time he bunted was into a double play! Great stuff. By the way, for those who dont recall or werent yet born, Cleveland won that game the old-school/smart-school way. Same guy who hit the go-head homer next bunted for a two-run lead in the ninth. Whatever it took. Cleveland Guardians first baseman David Fry (6) bunts in the ninth inning against the Detroit Tigers during game four of the ALDS for the 2024 MLB Playoffs at Comerica Park. Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images It was a throw-back, good-for-better-senses ending, like a cold gla s of Foxs u-Bet chocolate milk. Johan Neeskens, the Dutch midfield star who later played and hard for the Cosmos, died last week at 73, in Algeria. Neeskens was easy to root for, as he played with a verve to win every ball in his space, where other late-career Cosmos imports only chased women in Manhattan clubs. I immediately wrote that he was a Leapin fool, American slang for playing with enthusiasm, though his European reps didnt quite understand. They threatened to sue me for defamation. A picture of the late Duth footballer Johan Neeskens is displayed prior to the UEFA Nations League, League A Group A3 football match Hungary vs the Netherlands, at the Puskas Arena in Budapest on October 11, 2024. AFP via Getty Images Roger Goodells NFL remains a great source of perverse comedy. He has allowed the Super Bowl to become an annual extravaganza starring vulgar, crotch-grabbing, N-word-spitting, gun-worshiping rappers as representatives of the NFL, yet now theres a penalty on players who make post-play gun-shooting gestures. As part of the next CBA, the NFL and NFLPA will negotiate the legality of players who make post-play stabbing motions. In other ho-hum football news, Browns $230 million (all guaranteed) QB settled his 24th or 25th whos counting? sexual a sault suit. But in Goodells NFL, Harrison Family Man Butker is for not being in line with the leagues social values. Orlando Ribalta Jersey