Watchdog

Strip away the non-essentials and let’s face it: SNY exists to carry Mets games. Thus it makes sense to squeeze every possible ounce of programming out of them.

Voila: The network this season will add “Mets First Pitch’’ at 6 p.m. for 7 o’clock games, a half-hour before the traditional 6:30 pregame show.

(The debate program “Wheelhouse’’ will be cancelled effective April 1.)

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In soccer terms, Real Madrid versus Manchester United speaks for itself, but Wednesday’s Champions League match came with an added layer of fascination for fans in the United States.

It was the world soccer debut of Gus Johnson, the latest Great American Hope for a play-by-play voice of the sport in this country.

How did it go? Pretty well, considering his lack of experience and the...

For those of you who heard and/or read Mike Francesa’s Monday show opening on WFAN, here is a transcript of his original comments regarding the coming snowstorm from the open to his Thursday show:

“Getting ready for some snow here, but not like it is in New England, where they are expecting this Nemo monster storm to deliver, you know, 2 ½ feet of snow. But we’re looking at 3-to-6 inches over...

Mike Francesa opened his Monday WFAN show taking issue with a story in Sunday’s Daily News about Mike seeming to downplay the coming snowstorm during his show Thursday.

(WFAN teammates Boomer Esiason and Craig Carton took joking on-air pokes at Mike about his original comments on both their Friday and Monday morning shows.)

So what exactly did Francesa say Monday? That’s what I’m here...

Kate Upton is heating things up in one of the world's coldest locations.

Sports Illustrated released its 2013 Swimsuit Edition cover Friday, and for the second year in a row, the 20-year-old supermodel will grace the front of the magazine.

The cover, which was shot in Antarctica, features a topless Upton wearing just a white winter jacket. The words "Polar Bare" are inset in...

If, like me, you have an interest in sports movies and too much time on your hands, I highly recommend a piece at baseballresearcher.blogspot.com that reconsiders the belief that in “The Pride of the Yankees’’ Gary Cooper’s image was flipped to make him look like a plausibly lefty Lou Gehrig.

I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say Baseball Hall of Fame senior curator Tom Shieber...

Before this season, Alan Hahn and Wally Szczerbiak knew each other primarily as sportswriter and subject. But the MSG studio analysts have become fast friends – helped by a regular carpool to the Garden for most Knicks games.

Hahn, who lives in Holbrook, and Szczerbiak, who lives in Cold Spring Harbor, meet at a mutually convenient park and ride and alternate driving in from there, taking...

Baby Boomer alert: Amazingly, The Amazing Kreskin not only is alive and well and still working at age 78, he has as much work as ever – nearly one show or interview for every day of the year in 2012, he said.

But until this year he never had attempted to predict the Super Bowl score. That changed on Fox Business Channel the week before the big game, when he sealed his pick and gave it to the...

Hockey players are generally a tough group of people. But they've got nothing on hockey reporters, specifically MSG Network rinkside reporter John Giannone.

Towards the end of the second period in Thursday's Rangers-Islanders game, Rangers defenseman Marc Staal tried to clear the puck out of the Rangers' zone, but it sailed over the boards towards the Rangers bench. Giannone was the unfortunate...

Tuesday’s Lakers-Nets game averaged 3.08 percent of area homes and 299,000 viewers – the best such figures for a regular-season Nets game in YES’ history.

Those numbers peaked at 4.47 percent and 451,000 from 9:45 to 10 p.m., heights that would have been unimaginable in the pre-Brooklyn era.

(For comparison purposes, Yankees games on YES averaged a 3.92 rating in 2012, the lowest since...