COHEN'S CORNER SPORTS

The Yankees are in hot pursuit of the Boston Red Sox with the second best record in Major League Baseball at 31-15. Now, the Bombers return home for a crucial home-stand against the Angels and Astros. I talk about the Yankees with Karen Vankat on this edition of the Open Mike Podcast.

The NFL and its owners unanimously approved a new National Anthem policy that will require all players to stand for the anthem when they are on the field or face a fine if they found kneeling. As good as that sounds, the policy is chuck full of loopholes, and little detail on how the league intends to enforce the rule, meaning that Roger Goodell and crew made a rule built more on lip-service than actual reform. By it's definition the policy says it "requires players to stand IF they are on the field during the performance," while giving teams and players an easy out, specifically the " option to remain in the locker room " during the National Anthem. If any player is found kneeling during the Anthem, the franchise is subject to fines (we don't know how much), and teams will have the option to fine any players and personnel as it deems necessary. First, when the hell did the National Anthem become optional? It's like saying you don't have to...

There was a time, not too long ago that Jose Bautista, A.K.A. Joey Bats, was one of the most feared hitters in all of baseball. After bouncing around from the Royals, Orioles, Mets (whom he never suited up for, initially) and the Pirates, Bautista finally found a home in Toronto with the Blue Jays where he would become a perennial All Star. In his second season in a Jays uniform, Bautista blasted 54 home runs and drove in 124, taking all of Major League Baseball by storm. A year later, he duplicated the effort with 43 home runs in 2011. Soon Bautista was a superstar. Best known for hitting long home runs and flipping his bat in celebration of a postseason homer against the Texas Rangers in 2015, Buatista had built the case for a potential Hall of Fame career. Then the bottom fell out. Bautista's production slipped drastically in 2016 and 2017. Once a 40-home run hitter, Bautista couldn't do better than blast 23 homers in 2017 as his skills quickly diminished. In 2016, a...

Former Jets draft bust, Christian Hackenberg is on his way to Camp Chucky! The Jets shipped Hackenberg to the Oakland Raiders for a conditional seventh round pick, ending one of the most bizarre and failed quarterback marriages in franchise history. And that is saying something. Hackenberg never saw the field in his two years with the Jets. For a team that won a grand total of 10 games since 2016, Head Coach Todd Bowles preferred rolling out the likes of Josh McCown, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Bryce Petty, and even Geno Smith over Hackenberg. It was clear from the jump that the coaching staff never believed in the former Penn State quarterback's ability. Hackenberg must have been so bad in practices that the coaching staff didn't want to throw him out to the wolves in realtime. That is a huge indictment of Hackenberg's ability. It is ironic that the trade went down just hours after the quarterback blasted the Jets coaching staff for failing to give him "information to...

METS 3 - D'BACKS 1 Michael Conforto’s bat came to life Friday night in a big way as the Mets defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks 3-1 at Citi Field to open up a 3-game weekend series. For a young player who has done so much, Conforto has taken a lot of criticism this year for his slow start to the year. Fans and media alike have pointed to his lack of power, fearing that the Mets brought him back too soon in his recovery from shoulder surgery. For one night anyway, Conforto was the star of the show. A 4-for-4 evening with two RBI in a game the Mets had to win to stay above .500 against a quality team in the Diamondbacks, who have been atop the NL West since they said ‘play-ball’ on March 29. Conforto started his big night in earnest when he caught a hanging knuckler from Zach Godley and stroked it in to left-center, scoring Asdrubal Cabrera to make it 2-0 Mets. It was the first time the Mets had scored multiple runs in the first inning since May 6, a 3-2 loss to the Ro...

On this edition of the Open Mike Program, I welcome in Rick Laughland of 24/7Sports to get his take on the struggling New York Mets. Coming into their game on Friday, the Mets stood a game over .500 at 20-19. Can they turn it around?

Is Noah Syndergaard the next Mets startingpitcher on the hot seat?  With Matt Harvey no longer a member of the New York Mets, pitching coach Dave Eiland gave a cryptic description of Noah Syndergaard’s performance this year during the Mets off-day telling reporters: “I just don’t know where all the expectations came from,” Eiland said. “He spent 2-1/2 half years in the big leagues? So, I don’t know where all the expectations came from, I wasn’t here for all of that, but he has yet to do a whole lot at the major league level.” The stinging criticism of Syndergaard comes hours before he toes the rubber for the Mets against his old team, the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday night. While Eiland’s comments are extremely hard, there is some merit. Syndergaard has not been as dominant as the Mets had hoped coming into the season. Keep in mind, Syndergaard made only seven starts last season after missing a huge chunk of the season due to a partially torn lat muscle in his pitc...

YANKEES 9 - RED SOX 6  Woah! The Yankees have done it again. A team that continues to define and re-define the term "never-say-die," the Yankees stormed back to beat the Red Sox 9-6 at the Stadium to capture their second straight win in the series, and 17th victory in its last 18 games. The Yankees, who now boast a MLB best 26-10 record have leapfrogged the Red Sox for first place the AL East. There is something special about this club. Not only do the Yankees have a bunch of great, young players, they a team that fights tooth and nail every single night. There is winning, and then there is hating to lose. This team hates losing. The detest it so much that they find and invent news ways to win ballgames on a  regular basis. And every night a new hero rises to the occasion. On Wednesday it was two of the elder statesmen of this ball club: Neil Walker and Brett Gardner who  led the way for the Bronx Bombers. There the Red Sox were leading 6-5 in the bottom of the ...

REDS 2, METS 1 - 10 Innings  The 2018 New York Mets season is fading into oblivion. A team that once started out with so much promise after an 11-1 start is now a game over .500 after a 2-1 loss to the worst team in baseball, the Cincinnati Reds, Wednesday afternoon. What a disgrace. To make matters worse the Mets opened the game batting out of order, a mistake that can only be pinned to manager Mickey Callaway. The lineup card that Callaway handed to the umpires had Asdrubal Cabrera batting second and Wilmer Flores batting third, but the card sent out to the press box and posted on the dugout wall had the two hitters switched. The miscommunication created a ton of confusion for the Mets who couldn't figure out where their own hitters belonged. Flores batted second and struck out, then Cabrera doubled. The umpires finally realized what was going on and called Cabrera out because he batted out of order. Cabrera's nullified double was then credited to Jay Bruce who didn...

The Mets have rid themselves of Matt Harvey, and in so doing may have addressed their longstanding catching problem. In a trade between two teams trying to get rid of problems, the Mets sent Harvey to the Cincinnati Reds for catcher Devin Mesoraco. While Harvey's issues have been well documented, the Mets are getting a catcher in Mesoraco who has spent a better part of the past four seasons on the disabled list. Since putting together an All Star campaign in 2014, Mesoraco has not lived up to the billing since. He has played in only 133 games since 2015, with the most games he has played in a season during that stretch of 56 back in 2017. Injuries have been a problem for him. Inconsistency another. Mesoraco is a lifetime .233 hitter, and is a mediocre defensive catcher. Still, this is a guy who has a lot of power in his bat. At his best, Mesoraco hit 25 home runs and drove in 80 in 2014, making him the first Reds catcher to do so since Johnny Bench back in the 70's. If ...

The red hot New York Yankees won again Sunday, and they did again in dramatic fashion. After watching Aaron Boone remove Domingo German from a no-hitter, only to watch the Cleveland Indians tee off the Yankee bullpen, it looked like Boone was in store for two days of second guessing before the Yankees open up a series with the Red Sox. Instead, the Yankees comeback, and rookie Gleyber Torres played the role of the hero, saving both the Yankees and Boone from the wrath of talk radio junkies everywhere. Torres three-run blast in the bottom of the ninth gave the Yankees a stunning 7-4 victory over the Indians, completing a three game sweep of a team many expect to win the AL Central. The Yankees are now 15-1 in their last 16 games, having swept the Twins, Angels and Indians. New York also took three-of-four from the Astros last week. It has been fun times for the Yankees of late, as they have channeled their inner 2017-selves to make 2018 as good as many expected. A team that was ...

0-6. That is the Mets record coming out of a six-game home-stand as they were swept away by the Atlanta Braves and Colorado Rockies, two teams that looked light-years ahead of where the Mets want to be at this point in the season. All the good feeling that New York built up during an 11-1 start is now gone. The Mets are now just two games over .500 at 17-15, and look more and more like a team in complete free-fall. New York’s problems go well beyond Matt Harvey, who was designated for assignment on Friday. The Mets problems are manifold. They can’t hit, they fail at situational baseball, their starting pitching is erratic, the bullpen is stretched out way too thin, and injuries are stacking up. Sunday’s 3-2 loss to the Rockies was more of the same for the Mets. Even when things appeared to be going right, they went terribly wrong. A 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first inning became overshadowed by Yoenis Cespedes’ apparent hip injury.   Cespedes clarified a so...