Hundley went on TV this morning—you can watch the whole thing here—to defend herself against charges that she's some kind of crazy lunatic, because she's totally not. In a lengthy interview, filled with many softly lit questions, she claims that she was not stalking anyone and that Phillips was the one who threatened her, saying he could get her fired if she spilled the beans about their sexcapades. Hundley says that she never meant to hurt anyone, "I simply wanted somebody to get upset enough to have an impact, to get me out of this horrific situation." A situation she helped create, but still ... not a picnic.

Hundley also says that she and Phillips have "resolved their issues," but still hopes that he "would grow up and take responsibility for his own actions." (That's kind of how most Mets fans feel too.) But in an all-time "where do you get off?" moment, she sorta apologizes to Marni Phillips, but does so by saying that now that she's been humiliated in public, Hundley "understands her pain." You know, the pain caused by knowing another woman slept with your husband.

"I've been called things by the public that no woman should ever be called," she said. "I couldn't go a day without getting, you know, 200 messages in my inbox from people that have never met me, just labeling, just calling me names. I've been called the 'C' word. I've been called a whore. I've been called a homewrecker."

Worse than all of that? She was the punchline to Jay Leno joke. "That was my breaking point," she says, and who can blame her? I mean, it would be one thing if Letterman or Conan made a crack about her looks, because that might have actually been funny. But Leno? Heck, I'd even take a Jimmy Kimmel zinger before subjecting myself to that nightmare.

So in the end, the key takeaway here is that if you made fun of Brooke Hundley's appearance, you're basically Jay Leno. Stings, doesn't it?

Exclusive: Steve Phillips' Mistress, Brooke Hundley, Speaks Out [Video @ ABC News]

A man has to have goals — for a day, for a lifetime — and that was this man's: to have people say, "There goes frozen, decapitated Ted Williams, the greatest Halloween costume that ever lived." We tip our caps.

Barry Petchesky, by way of the good folks at Herm's Perm, brought you the strange saga of Chase Mejia, a well-traveled Division I wide receiver who somehow found himself at a Miami porn shoot, serving as the western pillar in a fleshy Eiffel Tower — split left, you might say, and running a hard post over the middle.

Many people were none too pleased with our horndog bird-dogging. Brian Cook of MGoBlog led the charge. "Fuck you," he wrote to AJ. "You're a piece of shit." On his own blog, he wrote: "AJ Daulerio Is An Asshole." And elsewhere, he declared the ESPN Horndog Dossier "literally the worst thing the blogosphere has ever done." Sports bloggers literally across the country literally took to the streets and set themselves on fire, literally.

Soon after it emerged that Steve Phillips had carried on a bunny-boilingly ill-advised affair with production assistant, ESPN cut the guy loose. "His ability to be an effective representative for ESPN has been significantly and irreparably damaged," ESPN factotum Josh Krulewitz said, "and it became evident it was time to part ways."

The New York Post broke the story of Steve Phillips' affair with 22-year-old Brooke Hundley. Dash brought you all the sordid details, and, meanwhile, at Deadspin HQ ...

... AJ dusted off the ESPN Horndog file.

"I've never had sex w/ anyone at ESPN....," an ESPN employee wrote in an e-mail to AJ. "But, uh, I just got to Bristol and between me and you, you've to got a lot of people sleeping with a rosary tonight." A rosary, and possibly a 20-year-old production assistant.

Meet Katie Lacey, ESPN horndog.

We got our hands on a copy of Tim Donaghy's book, Blowing the Whistle, which was all set to be published by Random House until the NBA stepped in. That's a nice publishing house you have there. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it.

Meet Erik Kuselias, ESPN horndog, skeeve.

I mean, other than the New York Post's dubbing Brooke Hundley "the shlubby seductress," "the tubby temptress" and "the portly production assistant," of whom the press got its first glimpse when she "waddled" out of her apartment; and other than the Post's general habit of calling her "shlubby" and "portly" to draw a contrast with the "handsome Phillips" and the "handsome married baseball analyst Phillips," whose wife is the "beautiful, blond, green-eyed" Marni, a "stunning, green-eyed blonde"; and other than Doyel's going on Howard Kurtz's useless Reliable Sources and calling Hundley "not very pretty," "not very photogenic," "not real good looking" and adding that all the people Googling like mad for her image have come away "not impressed"; and other than that one guy on Joy Behar's CNN show who compared Hundley to Jack Black and Danny Devito and declared that Marni Phillips had every reason to be nervous about a "woman with an 18-inch neck"; and other than Joy Behar's mistakenly referring to her as "this guy Hundley" and then correcting herself by saying to her panelist, "You got me so crazy that she's so not attractive, I think she's a man" — other than that, I'd say that, yeah, the media have been pretty mature about the irrelevant matter of her looks.

Of course, the announcement came late on Sunday night because they thought we wouldn't be paying attention. (They were correct!) It's not clear what happened between Wednesday when Phillips was "granted" a leave of absence and today when the network decided he had to be canned. But even the front page of ESPN.com announced the dismissal in very understated tones.

"Steve Phillips is no longer working for ESPN," network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said in a statement. "His ability to be an effective representative for ESPN has been significantly and irreparably damaged, and it became evident it was time to part ways."

I'll say. Just in case you have trouble parsing that statement, it seems he was fired not for having sex with a subordinate or sexual harassment or creating an unsafe work environment or even for cheating on his wife. He was fired for being an embarrassment to the company. That's where the line is, in case you were wondering. Krulewitz would not comment when asked about the employment status of Brooke Hundley, the 22-year-old production assistant who slept with Phillips and then began a steady campaign of harassment toward his family. For all we know she might still be working there, but probably won't be getting promoted anytime soon.

More tomorrow, of course....

Baseball analyst, former Mets GM Phillips fired by ESPN [ESPN]
ESPN fires Phillips after sex scandal [NY Post]
ESPN fires Steve Phillips after ex-Mets GM admits affair with production assistant Brooke Hundley [New York Daily News]

UPDATE: ESPN now says Hundley no longer works there, but did not say whether she was fired or quit. Also, Phllips has entered a "treatment facility," although I can't imagine what for. [Yahoo]

It's usually because they're just so absurd or really lack even the most tenuous of news angles to give them the go-ahead. Other times it's because they're just absolute horseshit. But every Friday until we get sick of running them, we'll present to you some of these not-so-shiny gems. All items should be treated as [Sic'd]. Enjoy...

Searching For Erin Andrews But Ended Up With Brooke Hundley

Hey Guys,

My buddy and I were at All Star Weekend, and I guess today he looked back at them and found a pic of Brooke Hundley in the background of and Erin Andrews photo he took. (PS my friend and I told her we loved her and she said Aw, thanks ... great person!)

Anyway, I was crazy picture happy that weekend so I took a look back at mine and among them are some gems. Including her essentially waiting outside the Baseball Tonight ropes for a good 20 minutes waiting for him. Anywho the ones here are her staring and waiting for him just as he's about to leave, and them walking out together.

As you can see from the outfits, it is the same exact night the NY Post photo was run.

Enjoy,
Greg

This Man Has A Few Things To Get Off Hist Chest:

Subject: You're An Asshole

What you did today was childish and seriously damaged an innocent woman's quality of life because ESPN didn't hand you a scoop on a silver player. It reflects terribly on everyone with a sports blog. Fuck you. You're a piece of shit.

-Brian Cook

And More Complaints From The Vocal Minority

•

Dude, you gotta reign it in. I enjoy reading rumor/gossip as much as the next guy but what you're doing is really fucked up. Outing anonymous sources, ruining careers and families based on nothing more than uncorroborated rumors. I'm not saying the stuff you're printing isn't true — it probably is — but this is not a crusade worth fighting. I urge you to hesitate before posting another of these. Just think about what you're doing.

Have you no shame, Mr. Daulerio?

•

I'm sending a copy of this email to both AJ Daulerio and Nick Denton. Maybe it will go unread by both for various reasons. Maybe I am only saying something that has been heard before.

Blogs have been fighting for respectability among other media for years, and I feel you crossed the line yesterday, AJ. I've been a reader of Deadspin for years, and I used to consider Deadspin to be a trustworthy and reliable source of sports information. I think it can be argued that Deadspin has been going downhill for a while, but if it hadn't jumped the shark before, it did yesterday with the "ESPN Horndog Dossier." You openly admitted at the beginning of the dossier that you would be posting tips about ESPN scandals you had gathered for months, maybe years, yet hadn't published. You have no credible source on the stories for Kuselias, Lacey, or "importing" girls, yet you put them up anyway with reckless disregard for journalistic ethics. It shouldn't even matter whether the stories are true or not, because you have no way to know that they're true. If I sent in an anonymous email, saying that I saw Mike Greenberg slap a girl on the ass and make out with a woman who was not his wife, would that get me published on Deadspin? Congratulations on turning a once reputable blog into TMZ. I hope the spike in hits you got yesterday was worth the price of the site's integrity.

I can see how much you care about posting credible news when you say, "And since the tenuous connection between rumor and fact for accuracy's sake has been a little eroded here, well, it's probably about time to just unload the inbox of all the sordid rumors we've received over the years about various ESPN employees." Yeah, just unload any unverifiable rumor you have, smear someone's reputation, throw lots of crap against the wall and see what sticks.

I would be curious to know if Mr. Denton condones this kind of editorial work on his family of blogs. You might even have a legal issue on your hands if ESPN chooses to pursue defamation charges. Even if they don't, even if everything posted was true, posting malicious rumors as fact is reckless and sets the credibility of Deadspin, Gawker, and other blogs back years. I don't need a response to this email. I just wanted to let Deadspin and Gawker Media know what I think about the direction their product is going.

•

AJ, I like your site a lot. I read it everyday, multiple times a day. The recent posts about Steve Phillips, ESPN employees, etc. has been fascinating to say the least, but I just don't get it. What is your agenda? Are you guys doing this to "expose" the heinous acts of certain employees at ESPN or are you trying to post any sort of "National Enquirer" type material just to get more page views?

About 18 months ago, Will Leitch sat through Buzz Bissinger's assault on blogs. Bissinger said "with the Internet, there's too much information out there, and we've become a very mindless country. I don't know how else to say it: We really revel in ignorance and disinformation."

Was Bissinger right?

Jason
Secaucus, NJ

•

AJ- Not sure what you are trying to do here. Why out Kuselias and the executive, who noone has ever heard of? There are thousands of rumors coming out of there about more famous individuals at ESPN, I'm sure you've heard them all. So why go after these two? It seems kind of meanspirited, as these people have families and their statuses as public figures, especially the executive's, are tenuous at best.

Regards,

Scott

•

I work VERY hard at resisting the urge to post comments to blogs or news stories, and equally hard to avoid writing indignant emails, but your inexplicably unprofessional tirade filled with unsubstantiated rumors aimed at destroying individual reputations and lives begs for a reaction. Rarely has a more despicable, childish, cowardly rant seen the light of day, and it's beyond belief that a blog long holding itself out as the protector of the sports' fans' best interests could commit an act even the most vulgar tailgater would avoid in his worst drunken state.

You owe ESPN an apology, and you owe every person mentioned by name an apology. It wouldn't matter if everything you wrote turned out to be true; by your own admission you didn't know for sure when you wrote it——so you STILL owe the apologies!

It's likely SOME OF THEIR CHILDREN are reading those accusations you vomited forth in your blog! IF the stories turn out to be true, their lives are topsy-turvy enough; now, thanks to you, their agony is exponentially ballooned by the taunts of classmates and teammates; their added agony debits your decency account for a long, long time going forward.

Your mea culpa needs to be front page and intense; otherwise the only people reading you going forward will be the guys calling in to the shock jock sports shows you so disdain. For now, you've made those guys look like Mister Rogers.

Please Forward To Mr. Magbary

I used to love your blog, but with the influx of non-sports related bathroom humor, I have taken it off my RSS and bookmarks. I am doubtful most of your readers would want to read about such matters, especially when it has little to do with sports. It is not entertaining whatsoever. I love edgy humor as much as the next guy, but stories about bodily functions and fluids have no place on a sports blog.

Thanks For Your Support?

ESPN reporters has become a whiney liberal bunch of corp losers, the league has TOO many thugs from welfare projects RUINING the Sport.
The league has gotten pathetically politically correct and have ruined the sport for fans.
wondered too if you planned to nail ESPN for the lack of reporting on the LARGE number of gay and bi reporters (former FtBall Plyrs) and the Long held and Widely spread rumors about the CURRENT gay players in FtBall. Ex,,Rumors for YEARS about barry sanders being gay, Steve Young being Bi, Troy Akman being gay and Tom Brady Being so Gay they edited his commercial few yrs ago taking his voice out of his own commercial,

I liked reading your blog
jon

No, Thank You

Hi A.J.

Are you available to do an interview for Entertainment Tonight re: ESPN scandal this morning? We'd be happy to plug/mention anything you need.

I can send a crew to you or have you do the intv in our office-whatever works best for you.

Thanks,

Amy

And One More...Just For Good Measure

Not a daily visitor to your site, but loved what you guys did with ESPN today.

I worked for the New Jersey Nets and Devils out of college and the same shit went on there. What really resonated with me is how similar ESPN is all professional teams or sports-based businesses. One particular Marketing VP, Jason Siegel of Binghampton Athletics sexual harassment fame was the VP of Marketing when I worked for the Devils. And he was doing the same stuff there that he was accused for back in March. When that story broke, me and the guys I used to work with there all agreed it was the least surprising news of the year.

Anyway, many of the people I worked with moved on to work with other professional teams or in one case, the World Wide Leader.

This particular kid was your typical sports nerd. Nice enough guy, attractive enough to be seduced by an older married women (we'll get to that in a second) and would do anything his boss told him to do as long as he could tell people he worked for "XYZ Team" or ESPN. Well he was on the production crew responsible for covering the college world series in Omaha. I would probably say this occurred in the summer of '04 or '05. They're winding down the week and the whole crew decides to go out for drinks. A few hours later when everyone is well on their way, this guy catches the eye of a one Linda Cohn and they eventually sneak back to her hotel room...

On the ride there, Cohn couldn't keep her hands off of him and wouldn't stop saying how much she's been eying his all week and how she loves giving blowjobs. When they get back to the hotel room, she gets on her knees and says to him "I LOVE doing this!" before taking him all in.

I've never been able to look at her the same since.

Anyway, I'm sure you guys are getting tons of shit like this today. I'm obviously not going to give you names, nor do I have a way to verify this, nor do I really care. But go ahead and add this to the ESPN failure pile.

Glad I could help.

(Ed. Note: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!)

(Ed. Note #2: The above story is a joke, if it wasn't clear already.)

I'm pretty sure this guy didn't make the front page this much when he was actually running a New York sports team. The paper has at least four new Phillips-releated stories today, plus more statements and police reports on their website, and a background dossier on Brooke Hundley, "a tiger hell-bent on clawing her way to the top." (If you say so.)

There's also the fantastic discovery of the woman who Hundley hired to call Marni Phillips' and tell her that her husband was a cheater. The woman answered a Craigslist ad posted by Hundley, offering her $50 to call Phillips' wife and read a prepared script about her husband's infidelities. (The ruse didn't work.) Yet, somehow that didn't set off any alarm bells for the woman who took the job.

"But [Hundley] seemed upset that I still didn't talk to [Phillips' wife] in person," [Courtney] Arp said. "That's when I started to think a little bit, 'This girl is crazy.' "

That's what tipped you off?

But the real icing on the cake is Mandy Stadtmiller's only somewhat tongue-in-cheek breakdown of how to pick the right floozy to cheat on your wife with. Of course, if guys like Steve Phillips could identify the crazy chicks before they invited them back to the hotel room, there wouldn't be anybody left to sleep with married baseball analysts.

Still, some of her points could be taken to heart:

Rule No. 7: She's done this before and already has a reputation as the office bicycle.

Rule No. 8: She says things like, "I would never date you, but . . ." Also acceptable are "I can't ever imagine marrying a guy like you" and "Your poor wife."

Rule No. 9: She's the opposite of 22.

Solid advice. By the way, so far the paper has referred to Hundley as a "harlot" and a "strumpet" (as well as "tubby" and "portly") because "slattern" and "woman of ill repute" were apparently too old fashioned. But the most egregious slander was reserved for Phillips himself, who is labeled on today's front cover as a "star." If that's not a blatant disregard for the truth, I don't know what is.

Loony lover Brooke Hundley used Craigslist to 'hire' a phone stalker [NY Post]
Cheat sheet [NY Post]

After a call to ESPN public relations department asking about the "rumor" I was told that "I would be wrong" to print that story because it was inaccurate. Fine. I would have been. But natural follow-up question to these types of rumors, as per give-and-take protocol, is well, what's the real story then? Was there an incident with Phillips that Baseball Tonight people are concerned about? However I was summarily nothing-to-see-here-please-dispersed.

Obviously, there was. The other interesting thing about this scenario is that Baseball Tonight producers and talent were so rattled by the Harold Reynolds incident that I'm sure they are completely dumbfounded by Phillips' behavior. Or, at least, the rumor was at the time is that Phillips was toxic and everyone wanted him to go so they don't relive the messy HR situation all over again. Alas.

However, there are many, many, many other people employed at the WWL who have (allegedly) boned assistants, interns, on-air talent, executives, etc. However, it's a little unclear as to what lines need to be crossed in order for them to be suspended.

And since the tenuous connection between rumor and fact for accuracy's sake has been a little eroded here, well, it's probably about time to just unload the inbox of all the sordid rumors we've received over the years about various ESPN employees. Chances are, at this point, there's some truth to them. We'll just throw 'em out there and see how many "no comments" or, you know, actual comments or "you would be completely wrongs" there are about these situations. Consider this one giant all-day version of "Deleted Scenes" or something.

Coming up first...ESPN "personality" Erik Kuselias.

So, Bristolites, strap in — it's gonna be a long day.

According to the New York Post's rather lengthy deconstruction of events, Phillips had a brief fling with a fellow ESPN employee named Brooke Hundley this summer. He ended it rather quickly, which did not go over very well. She allegedly began harassing Phillips, his wife and even his teenage son—who she friended on Facebook by pretending to be a classmate, and then grilled him for personal information about the family.

The final straw came when Phillips' wife arrived at her home to see a strange woman coming down her driveway and getting into a car (which she promptly smashed into a pole while trying to make a quick getaway.) The woman had left a very creepy letter in the front door, addressed to Phillips wife. The full original letter is available on the Post website [PDF], but here are some of the bullet points laid out by Hundley:

• She and Steve first slept together in a St. Louis hotel room, but he assured her that she wouldn't get pregnant because of his vasectomy.
• How and she Steve love to text back and forth with detailed plans on how they would like to sex each other
• An uncomfortable amount of detail about the activities of her children
• How the Catholic Church will totally understand if the Phillips got a divorce, so that she and Steve can be together
• She's 22 ... but not stupid!
• A graphic description of Steve's birthmarks (on his crotch and inner thigh), just to know she's legit.

In a written statement, Phillips confessed that he had three sexual encounters with Hundley and then broke it off in July. Almost immediately after that, the woman began making phone calls to his wife, leaving voicemails, sending inappropriate texts, and making even more inappropriate Facebook overtures to his son. He says he believes her to "obsessive and delusional" and police have become involved. Nevertheless, Phillips is suspended for at least one week and his wife has filed for divorce.

This is not the first time Phillips has run into this sort of trouble, nor is it the first incident involving the Baseball Tonight team. When he was GM of the Mets in the 1990s, Phillips had to take a leave of absence after an affair with a team employee. See also: Reynolds, Harold. There's a chance we won't see him on any ESPN network before this baseball season ends and then after that, who knows what will become of his tenure at the firm.

Expect a lot more on this before the day is over, obviously

Affair is foul for ESPN star [NY Post]
Photos of Brooke Hundley [WEEI]

Update: Get your questions in now for Phillips' 1:00 p.m. ESPN Chat! Suggested inquiry: "What were you thinking? Melvin Mora for Mike Bordick?!"

Update 2: The New York Daily News apparently got a hold of Hundley's resume. (Update 2.5: Because it's online.) Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Update 3: Headline: "Steve Phillips Furthers His Idiocy." Sorry, that's actually not about the affair.

Update 4: ESPN, perhaps learning their lesson from the Ben Roethlsiberger incident, has released an official statement and linked to it from the front page of ESPN.com: "We were aware of this and took appropriate disciplinary action at the time. We have granted Steve's request for an extended leave of absence to allow him to address it. We have no further comment."

Update 5: TMZ has the 911 call from Phillips' wife after Hundley showed up at their house. Good times.

P.S. This is one of those early morning posts you've heard so much about, so now is the point in the program where you chime in with breakfast orders, instant dream analysis or a friendly game of "What did I put in my body last night to make me cough up that?" Pencils ready ... begin!

The place: The Tampa Bay ESPN 1040's "THE KILLER B'S" Marc Benarzyk & Bill Freitas. The subject: B.J. Upton, who Phillips criticized on ESPN TV for not digging it out to first base after hitting a ground ball. For those of you not audio inclined at the moment, here's the gist:

"I watched Steve Phillips the other night ... I wanted to slap the guy."

To be fair to Steve Phillips, he is the one who is actually still employed by ESPN. To not be fair to Steve Phillips, he is one of the worst GMs of the last 20 years. And Harold ... well, you all know about him. Either way, this can only end well for fans of slapfights.

The KILLER B's [ESPN1470]

But that's beside the point. Do you like the Steve Phillips? Do you not like the Steve Phillips?

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

August 22

"Vinny (New York): With a gun to your head, still Seatle over the Yanks for the Wild Card? Yankees are looking pretty impressive, just taking care of most people's "best team in baseball."

SportsNation Steve Phillips: The Yanks looked good beating an undermanned Tigers team, I agree with you. But I think the Mariners will hold on and win the Wild Card. Their starting pitching is just good enough and their bullpen in unreal. They have one of the best defenses in babseball, and they are starting to produce on offense. I think it is too little too late for the Yankees to make the playoffs."

We know. It's cheating and easy to make fun of a guy for wrong predictions. But this was just three weeks ago, and now the Mariners are 6 1/2 out of the wild card. Just saying.

Steve Phillips: Not Smart [Vegas Watch]

After watching this Steve Phillips gimmick segment on "Baseball Tonight" last night, we await, with much dread, the attack of the Steve Phillips clone army.

Hey, it's cheaper than actually replacing Harold Reynolds.

This week's example: An interview with ESPN's Buster Olney about those ridiculous mock press conferences his network was having last week, forcing him and other "real" journalists to ask fake questions of pretend GM Steve Phillips. Olney acknowledged the criticisms of both the ESPN feature and his role in it, but defended the rather obvious point that it hurt his credibility as a journalist.

Yeah, we got a lot of negative feedback. ... The one thing I find kind of laughable is people who say there s some sort of journalism credibility problem here. ... But people are taking it way too seriously when they question the integrity of it, because it wasn t meant to be anything but a schticky way of looking at the offseason.

Olney even responded to our specific observation about the clearly demoralized Olney's face: "you can see thousands of operas and greek tragedies in his eyes."

Actually, those are my grandmother s. She has bags under her eyes, and I got doomed with them. Always look like I got about two hours sleep.

In an alternate universe, Olney answered the question by saying, "Honestly? The whole thing was horseshit and the low point of my career. I had to drink all morning just to get ready for one of those segments. Signing with ESPN makes me feel like my soul is rotting. You know what? Screw it. No amount of money is worth this." He was then carried off-set and became an underground hero in the world of sports journalism. He became the pied piper of 21st Century sportswriting, and his book, Who Knew? Fear And Loathing In Bristol changed the sports world as we knew it.

We don't live in that world. Yet.

Full text of his interview after the jump.

"Yeah, we got a lot of negative feedback. The people who were filling in were producers at ESPN, some of the people in various departments, and they asked me if this was like a regular baseball press conference. I said, No, it s more like watching West Wing. I didn t take it very seriously. Basically what it was was this: Trying to come up with a way that the typical What is this team gonna do in the offseason could be done in a different way. They put a lot of bells and whistles on it. Whether or not you like the bells and whistles, that s up to you. If you thought it stunk, fine. The one thing I find kind of laughable is people who say there s some sort of journalism credibility problem here. That s silly. It s really nothing more than any of us writing a column saying, this is what I would do if I were the Red Sox. This is what I would do if I were the Yankees. This is what Steve Phillips was doing. No one was actually saying this was really Steve Phillips, GM of the Red Sox. They ran the streamer across the bottom. People thought it looked stupid? Well, that s up to them. But people are taking it way too seriously when they question the integrity of it, because it wasn t meant to be anything but a schticky way of looking at the offseason.

...

Actually, those are my grandmother s. She has bags under her eyes, and I got doomed with them. Always look like I got about two hours sleep."

Buster Olney Podcast [Sports Bloggers Live]
Even More Mock Press Conference Shenanigans [ESPN]

They added two wrinkles. First, the "reporters" were apparently instructed to be more "confrontational;" Karl Ravech and Buster Olney both shouted follow-up "questions" even though they hadn't been called upon yet. (That's as hungry as we've ever seen Ravech to get a story.) But the best part was Phillips' spontaneous decision to, in the middle of the segment, suddenly decided to take a deep, three-second gulp of water. In radio, this is called "dead air." On SportsCenter, this is "added realism."

By the way, ESPN ombudsman George "Everyone Around Here Puts Dork Stickers On My Back" Solomon addressed this issue in his column this month:

Phillips was to spend the rest of the week pretending to be the GM of the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, providing viewers information on these clubs in what ESPN hoped would be a weeklong series of offbeat features.

I know, I'm past the age of the target audience. And I also know my limited sense of humor disappears quickly when the news-gathering process is spoofed, even when the goal is to entertain. I also know that ESPN attempted to make its intent clear. In this instance, though, I missed the joke and ESPN missed its mark.

Sir, for the first time since you started these columns ... you missed nothing. There is no joke. Except that now, tragically, these have to end. We now simply cannot look away.

OK, Seriously, Knock It Off, You Guys [Deadspin]
Who Knows What's Real? [ESPN] (third item)

Don't know if you saw the 11:00 SportsCenter on Sunday night, but when they did the original Steve Phillips faux-press conference, where he was the Red Sox GM, they teased it all night and then when they finally threw it over there, they did about 3 minutes and then had horrible technical difficulties (sound cutting out, video crapping up) and had to end it and go back to the studio, to a thoroughly defeated Steve Levy and Stu Scott, who apologized and said they'd have the full version on the later SportsCenters. So I guess they taped it and edited it in later. Loved that they were doing it in Bristol, with presumably hundreds of tech people and staffers available, and they still couldn't pull it off live.

We're hearing all kinds of behind the scenes stuff about these segments, and, if we can talk this person into it, we're actually gonna have a report from one of the "reporters" yelling "questions" at Phillips sometime later this week. We'll have to hurry, too; sadly, they're ending the segments on Friday.

OK, Seriously, Knock It Off You Guys [Deadspin]

(By the way, we LOVE that picture of Buster Olney. You can see thousands of operas and greek tragedies in his eyes.)

OK, first off, if they're going to have this mock press conference, why is Phillips speaking in the bland cadence of GMs? More accurately ... why isn't he saying anything? Is this supposed to be analysis? Why is he just spouting press releases? Oh, and, honestly, why does ESPN have real reporters asking questions? Poor Buster Olney, the guy's got a huge cover story about steroids this week, he's written for the New York Times, and now he's got to ask these fake questions with a fake notebook? Are we supposed to think he's actually writing anything on that? And why are they wasting five minutes of SportsCenter during one of the most busy times of the year with this? Are they really going to do every team? And why do they keep acting like there's this onrush of questions? They're gonna call on Olney or Schaap every time; isn't it just mean to make the interns keep shouting things out? Are those really flashbulbs going off? Where is this filmed, anyway? Shouldn't some of those reporters be out, you know, reporting? Oh, and why does Phillips keep answering questions like he really has a relationship with the people he's talking about? "I — along with the Tribune company — am committed to Dusty (Baker) and I like what he's doing with this." What? We have fake owners now? Can we have a fake firing? Please? Are we going insane?

Oh, and the best part: When Phillips called on Jeremy Schaap to ask a question today, he totally called him "Jerry." Of course, it's possible that just like Phillips is playing the "character" of Cubs GM, maybe Schaap is playing the character of "Jerry the reporter."

EARLIER: The Sad Faces Of Buster Olney And Jeremy Schaap [Deadspin]

The Philly Inquirer gets it started by pointing out that this whole Terrell Owens mess was an ESPN production from the start, lamenting "take ESPN out of the equation, and this is a run-of-the-mill contract squabble between a star player and a football team." And Joe Sports Fan is terrified of the day we have ESPN TV dinners. We suspect they would take about 30 seconds to cook and would have the nutritional content of spam covered in bacon fat.

And, in the best hit we've seen all day, SportsBiz pleads with ESPN head honcho George Bodenheimer to stop ruining sports for him. And through all this, we still can't find anybody to say anything bad about executive vice president of content John Skipper. Honestly, this guy must wear pants made of diamonds or just own incriminating pictures of EVERYONE in Bristol.

Made For TV: ESPN Found The Perfect Dupe [Philly.com]
What's Wrong With ESPN [Sports Biz] (via TrueHoop)
Media Circus [Joe Sports Fan]

(By the way, just for fun, here's a mildly amusing mock SportsCenter "racist coach" broadcast.)

If you missed this today, just catch the 7 p.m. "SportsCenter" tonight. They're going to do it again. Fake questions, fake answers, fake GM. At least they're not even pretending anymore.

Steve Phillips Archive [ESPN]