Michael Kay has been calling Yankees games for so long that he has earned the right to say whatever he wants. Thursday night in Baltimore, he cashed that right in.
The Yankees were at Oriole Park doing something they have barely done all month. They were scoring runs. Three of them, actually, in the top of the third inning off Kyle Bradish, before Jazz Chisholm struck out to end the frame.
Michael Kay, 65 years old, longtime YES voice of the Yankees, could not help himself.
“The Yankees, three runs in an inning? It’s an offensive orgy,” Kay said on the broadcast.
The clip was on Underdog MLB within minutes. It spread across baseball Twitter faster than a Chisholm stolen base.
Now, in fairness to Kay, this was clearly a joke about how bad the Yankees offense has looked lately. And he has a point. Coming into Thursday, New York had scored just 14 runs in its previous six games. That is Cleveland-in-1968 numbers.
The lineup is beat up. Aaron Judge is banged up. Giancarlo Stanton is on the shelf. Cody Bellinger has been in and out. The Yankees have basically been running a Triple-A batting order out there and hoping for the best.
So when Kay saw three runs cross the plate, the sarcasm just poured out of him. Three runs in one inning felt like a rally. In August. In a pennant race. That should tell you everything about where this Yankees season sits right now.
This is not the first time Kay has cooked something up on air that made the highlight rounds. Earlier this year he took a completely petty shot at Vladimir Guerrero Jr. during a Blue Jays game, which had Toronto fans lighting torches for a week.
Kay has a whole catalog of these moments. He is loud. He is opinionated. He is a Bronx guy calling a Bronx team, and he does not pretend to be neutral. That is what YES pays him for.
Some fans hate it. Modern broadcast culture wants everything neat, corporate, and cleared by legal three days in advance. Kay does not operate that way, and he never has. He is a talk-radio brain in a play-by-play chair.
At 65 years old, with thousands of Yankees games in the books, Kay has more than earned the license to riff. If you want a clean, robotic broadcast, there are options. If you want a guy who calls a three-run inning an offensive orgy because the Yankees have been that bad, you tune in to YES.
The Yankees actually needed this game and every game like it. The AL East is tight. The wild-card picture is a knife fight. Boston is not going away. Every three-run inning matters, even the ones Michael Kay decides to describe with words that would get most announcers a week of sensitivity training.
Let Kay cook. Let him say the weird thing. He has earned it.
Just maybe warn the interns before he opens the mic in the ninth inning.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
