Yankees Play-By-Play Guy Michael Kay Is In Hot Water With Clint Frazier

In an animated discussion on his radio show Monday, about the four-game weekend series sweep that all but knocked the Yankees out of contention in the AL East, Yankees television play-by-play man Michael Kay was at the very least clumsy with his choice of words while bitching about which Yankees were available and played in the series, and who didn’t (emphasis added):

“I think that the whole thing started as a little pebble, turned into a snowball, and has gone into an avalanche. I mean, if you look at their record this year with Aaron Judge out of the lineup, it’s under .500. He’s an important part of what they do. And I thought Stanton did okay during the weekend, and all that. But, I mean when you’re playing Luke Voit and Shane Robinson in important games—you know, shame on the Yankees for not having the depth, but again, shame on guys like Jacoby Ellsbury for not getting healthy! Shame on Clint Frazier for not getting healthy! Again, you can’t make them get healthy, but if those guys are healthy it’s a completely different animal.”

As you can imagine “shame on Clint Frazier for not getting healthy” was latched onto by Yankees fans as a shitty thing to say about a guy dealing with post-concussion symptoms, including migraines that were severe enough that Frazier was initially diagnosed with a second concussion. Kay sought to back away from the comment later in the day:

It’s hard to know how to interpret the line, in the context of what was a pretty heated discussion—when I listen to that whole section of the show (the first 12 or so minutes of the podcast), it sounds to me like Kay really is saying that Ellsbury and Frazier haven’t done enough to get healthy. On the other hand, because that would obviously be a ridiculous thing to say about someone suffering from a brain injury, it’s also not hard for me to imagine Kay using the “shame on” setup to demonstrate the futility of blaming the Yankees organization for the evident talent disparity on display in the Red Sox series, when several of their important players were out with lingering injuries.

What’s important is this: The line evidently didn’t sit well with Frazier, and Kay’s explanation doesn’t seem to have fixed things:

Yikes. Michael, it sounds like you’ve got some more explaining to do.