Hopeless Joe Radio Makes Its Pitch To The Mets

Yesterday, aside from the usual losing the Mets have been doing, they also lost their radio station. The Yankees are set to sign a deal with WFAN, bumping the Mets– who have been with WFAN since it became a network in 1987– to a new station to be determined.

Hopeless Joe Radio would like to make its pitch. I’ll turn the rest of this post over to the Hopeless man himself:

Hey there, Mets. I know how you’re feeling. A 25+ year relationship up in smoke. Just like when my mother moved and didn’t tell me where she was going. (Which hurt, but not as much as when she un-friended me on Facebook.) Where is loyalty these days? You Mets have proven themselves in that department, like paying Bobby Bonilla for half a century, but how does WFAN repay you? By abandoning you for those clowns in the Bronx, with the winning records and other nonsense like that. Wins don’t count! Every smart fan knows it. The Mets have so many more pitcher hits than the Yankees, and everyone knows that’s the most important measure of a team.

But WFAN’s silly decision can ultimately be your gain, Mets, because you would fit just perfectly on Hopeless Joe Radio, and we would be honored to carry your schedule, at least until Syria takes over and bans us from broadcasting sports on the public airwaves. Afternoon games would be a terrific replacement for our usual 1:00-4:00 Dirge Music Jamboree. And our evening call-in show, “Suicide, or Not Today?” has been slowly slipping in the ratings, mostly because we lose our most loyal viewers on a nightly basis. Seriously, why didn’t our program director realize that a call-in show about suicide was destined to fail? I would fire him, but I fear he would do something drastic, especially since over the years he’s now heard thousands of people’s ideas of how to do it.

We would love to add a pre-game show to replace our long-running “Name Those Symptoms” game show, which has sadly run its course, having covered every disease in the medical school curriculum. And a nightly post-game report would save us from having to turn to plan B and offer Anthony Weiner his own nightly show once he recovers from his mayoral primary defeat. I mean, on the one hand, he would help us make some headway into social media– we haven’t really been able to build up much of a Twitter following, and we hear he’s an expert at that– but on the other hand, he would likely thrive in a more visual medium than radio.

Mets coverage can easily be incorporated into our morning show, “Ernest and Gertrude live from the Hospice,” and we’d love to do a weekend block of Mets-related programming for kids, integrated with our usual kids shows, “Life Will Only Get Worse,” “Your Parents are Dying,” and our annual seasonal offering, “Santa’s Not Real.”

Really, the Mets would fit right into our lineup, since you usually lose, no one likes you anymore, and being a Mets fan is almost literally like being a Bernie Madoff fan. And since we run nightly interviews with people who lost their money in Madoff’s investment accounts, it couldn’t possibly be a better match.

Mr. Met is already our mascot, except our version has blood dripping from his ears. Give us a call and I’m sure we can work out a deal. We’re around all day, except between 11 and 2, which is when the entire station will be live on the air for a group electroshock therapy session. Wish us luck.





Jeremy Blachman is the author of Anonymous Lawyer, a satirical novel that should make people who didn't go to law school feel good about their life choices. Read more at McSweeney's or elsewhere. He likes e-mail.

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A-rod's undisclosed labrum tear
11 years ago

Ah, nothing is funnier than good jokes about suicide.

I love Hopeless Joe, but this one seemed to strike the wrong chord.

Aaron Trammell
11 years ago

It’s Hopeless Joe, not Cautiously Optimistic Joe.

Redrover
11 years ago
Reply to  Aaron Trammell

True words. He was Cautiously Optimistic Joe until he called into his own show and convinced himself to become Hopeless Joe.