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]