Jared Max’s 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. show on ESPN Radio averaged 10.7 percent of men ages 18-34 listening at that hour in May – the highest such figure for any show on either New York sports talk station. In the core demographic of men ages 25-54 he averaged 5.1 percent compared to WFAN’s 5.6, the narrowest gap between the stations in any day part.

Granted, the competition is modest in the wee hours.... » more

Don’t bother shedding a tear for the NBA or ABC over being stuck with Oklahoma City, the nation’s 45th-largest television market, in the Finals.

OK, so you probably weren’t planning on shedding a tear anyway. But the point is, the league and its broadcast TV partner need not do so either.

That is because unlike baseball and hockey, where familiar logos drive interest and ratings, the... » more

ESPN Radio made some inroads with listeners in May, its first month at 98.7 FM after a ratings-challenged decade at 1050 AM.

General manager David Roberts was particularly encouraged by the cumulative audience, which measured more than 1.3 million people at least sampling the channel, up almost double from May 2011. (The deep playoff run by the Rangers, usually a ratings afterthought, helped... » more

If you had “Stony Brook baseball” in the office pool for What Will Lead the Sunday Night SportsCenter on the Biggest Sports Weekend of 2012, congrats!

By early Monday “Stony Brook” was trending nationally on Twitter and ranked No. 3 in Google Trends Hot Searches.

You cannot buy that kind of advertising.  ... » more

NBC’s ratings for the Belmont Stakes on Saturday were well below what they would have been if not for I’ll Have Another being scratched,  but not as weak as many had anticipated.

The race averaged 9.6 percent of homes in the New York area and 5.4 in major markets nationally, above the norm for a non-Triple Crown Belmont.... » more

RIP Warner Fusselle, a veteran, venerable announcer heard on everything from Brooklyn Cyclones and St. John’s baseball to Seton Hall basketball to “This Week in Baseball.’’ He died of an apparent heart attack Sunday at age 68.

Fusselle had been the Cyclones’ lead announcer since their inception in 2001 – the minor league team once held a Warner Fusselle Bobblehead Night – but his eclectic... » more

Let’s face it, Major League Baseball long has been, um, coolness challenged.

Addressing that was part of the idea behind the MLB Fan Cave, which debuted last season in the former Tower Records store on lower Broadway - and adjacent to the NYU campus - and has returned with a new décor designed in part to dial up the hipness meter further.

“We’ve been trying to talk to younger audiences... » more

The movie business moves slowly, but at last it is time for you to discover what I did at a screening way back during Super Bowl week: Rex Ryan can act!

Well, presumably better than Tom Coughlin, at least.

How else to explain his role in “That’s My Boy,’’ the Adam Sandler movie that premieres June 15, in which the Jets coach plays a lawyer and . . . a passionate Patriots fan!

In... » more

Hard to believe it has been 20 years since the Dream Team won Olympic gold in Barcelona, complete with Charles Barkley almost precipitating an international incident with Angola.

But so it has been, long enough to have inspired a documentary about the team that helped launch an international boom in the sport.

“The Dream Team,’’ premiering at 9 p.m. Wednesday on NBA TV, interviews all... » more

It would be a stretch to call Mickey Mantle’s a more recent generation’s Toots Shor’s. The restaurant on Central Park South that opened in 1988 and was named for The Mick never quite turned into an iconic hangout of that magnitude.

But it had its moments – some of them sordid – especially in the early years, many of them recounted in a 2007 book by restaurant founder Bill Liederman. In those... » more