Thursday, July 27, 2006

What in the fuck happened to Harold Reynolds??

I don't claim to be the biggest baseball fan in the world. Yes I did play little league, I had a .335 average one year and was known to have absolute frozen rope-like accuracy when I threw a ball from the outfield to home plate. Yes I still play slow pitch softball, with a current average of about .445, and I still find myself posing after home-run shots and steam rolling anyone who is in my base path during flyballs. But overall, in the grand scheme of sports, I'm not that much of a baseball aficionado. Granted, in the 2k Baseball PlayStation game that I play daily the record of my New York Yankees is 59-4, with Jason Giambi having 52 home runs and 135 RBI's in the month of June for Christs sake. But again, I'm not the biggest fan of baseball.

I'm more of a casual fan, checking out the baseball highlights on ESPN whenever I'm not stroking it to Internet porn or barely nude pictures of Rosario Dawson. Most of the commentators seem a bit irritating, but the one dude I found somewhat bearable was a dude named Harold Reynolds. He never fell in line with the other sheep on the panel who wanted to regurgitate the same drivel, I remember he was the only one who didn't find the showboating of a little leaguer "Offensive", and he is the only one who didn't overreact to Alex Rodriguez' slump and said that he would "get through it".(I can respect an independent thinker.) So I was taken aback, for a guy who isn't the biggest fan of baseball I may add, when Harold Reynolds was fired from ESPN. The brass at the sports network are very cryptic about his dismissal, some say that it had something to do with an incident sexual harassment of female co-workers(an inappropriate hug apparently), some believe that it has something to do with his conflict with how the show was covering A-Rod, who knows. Here is an excerpt from this recent New York Post article:

After being accused of sexual harassment and fired by ESPN, former "Baseball Tonight" analyst Harold Reynolds said yesterday he doesn't think he did anything wrong and is still hoping to regain his job.

"This was a total misunderstanding," Reynolds told The Post. "My goal is to sit down and get back. To be honest with you, I gave a woman a hug and I felt like it was misinterpreted."

Reynolds declined to give any more details. The woman who accused Reynolds of the sexual harassment is an ESPN co-worker, according to sources.
Yesterday, ESPN confirmed The Post's report that Reynolds had been fired, but they would not comment any further.

"He no longer works here," ESPN VP Josh Krulewitz said.
Still, Reynolds is hopeful ESPN executives will change their minds. Besides being with the network for 11 years, Reynolds had just signed a new six-year contract to remain in Bristol and he recently got married.

Reynolds limited his comments, because he didn't want to go into too many details for fear of saying something that could hurt his chances of reversing ESPN's decision.



Other ESPN Scandals:

2 comments:

Unknown said...

playahata has a nice piece on this.. check it out:

http://playahata.com/hatablog/?p=1739

Anonymous said...

Hey HC - thought you might be interested in this:

Reynolds
sues ESPN