Sports

Mike Francesa is a bully afraid to take on most powerful targets

Here is the thing, Mike Francesa is a bully. He is the type of guy who sides with a billionaire like James Dolan over his WFAN teammate Maggie Gray. He belittles a 90-year-old man who calls about seeing Babe Ruth.

If he perceives an easy target, Francesa is your guy.

Every once in awhile he’ll go after a player or a team hard, but rarely the wealthy, the powerful or the famous; especially if they smooth him over with special favors.

For perhaps the two most troubled franchises in the city, the Knicks and the Mets, Francesa rolls over. He’s no Mad Dog.

Criticism of Dolan? Francesa said he socializes with Dolan and the former head of MSG public relations, Barry Watkins, is like family to him. It has always been odd how Francesa has been easy on the Knicks’ owner. He gave you the math.





Criticism of Jeff Wilpon? Not on Francesa’s show. The Mets are embarrassingly run like a small-market team, even though Citi Field is 10 miles from Yankee Stadium.

A lowly caller on Thursday got thrown off the air by Francesa for suggesting Wilpon, not the GMs, is making all the decisions.

(Memo to Mike: Why do you think all these executives turned down interviews with the Mets?)

These days, Francesa is very mixed up with what he wants to do, retiring, then unretiring and now — probably negotiating — talking as if he might quit FAN again.

It is sad for him and for those of us who grew up with Mike and the Mad Dog that he didn’t put the legendary band back together. Chris Russo was willing to take him in at SiriusXM on a limited basis.





We might not have gotten the “Will Clark vs. Don Mattingly” classics, but the sound of nostalgia would have been fun. Joy instead of anger.

On Wednesday, Francesa spent a full segment criticizing me, saying all the stories in The Post were wrong. There are archives online that include The Post breaking his return to WFAN. We invite anyone to check the dates and what happened.

Despite saying I don’t know what I’m talking about, we learned he is apparently scouring podcasts — or having someone else do it — to see what I say about his app. He should listen more closely.

He said I reported something about his subscriber numbers on his app. He apparently used an off-handed, vague reference during a September show that neither I, nor the host of the pod, Jimmy Traina of “Sports Illustrated,” even remembered.





Any smart person would never have thought I reported his subscriber number. Even if they somehow had, they could see the countless times I’ve said that there is no way of knowing the app numbers because they are not public.

Anyhow, he called me a bunch of names, just two days after lecturing Gray for getting too personal with Dolan. Hello?

He is apparently upset there is a perception that his $8.99 per month app is a dud. Francesa could clear it up by giving an accurate, verified number of paid subscribers.

On Wednesday, in his rant, he used charity as a shield to try to prove the app is doing well with a cockamamy bet proposition on the air, then relayed off the air through WFAN vice president Mark Chernoff, he wanted $500,000 in escrow to sit down with me for an interview.





In his wager, he used 800 subscribers as the over/under on his side.

Not sure, that is a great number for a radio legend, but if he is proud of it, then it is good to see it is a big success.

Let’s round up and say he has a thousand subscribers, that is like $108,000 per year. Francesa usually ridicules people making anywhere around that number or, goodness, less, but he sounds pretty satisfied.

In his diatribe, Mike challenged me to come down to the FAN’s Hudson Square studios on Thursday to have it out on-air.

I was there. Mike didn’t show.

After ranting for me to come to the Hudson Square studio, Mike stayed home to do his show. This is now the norm.

No hard feelings, Mike, and some free information:

Sources tell The Post that Chernoff and Entercom aren’t happy you fail to regularly come to the Hudson Square studios.

On Thursday, I was disappointed by that, too.





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