The sports pope wants one sinner absolved.
Mike Francesa, simultaneously the most revered and mocked voice of sports talk radio, donned a pro-Alex Rodriguez shirt at his WFAN studios Friday afternoon. The shirt, a wink at Derek Jeter’s popular “Re2pect” advertising campaign for the captain’s final season, reads “#Forg1v3,” as Rodriguez, No. 13, readies himself for a return to the Yankees after a year-long ban for his role in the Biogenesis scandal.
Francesa and Rodriguez, two of the more polarizing figures in New York sports, have a curiously amiable relationship. In November, after the embattled superstar stormed out of his arbitration hearings while appealing his suspension, he made a beeline right for WFAN studios. Francesa — who continually blasted Major League Baseball’s handling of the case — gave him a major outlet to air his supposed innocence, and Rodriguez gave Francesa all the ratings he could ask for.
Eleven months later, as Jeter exits into the sunset, Rodriguez enters into the darkness, a punch line to every joke about the Yankees’ future. Francesa is here to ease the transition, though, through #Forg1v3ness — even if Francesa, who’s notoriously anti-Twitter, doesn’t quite know what a hashtag is.
For the curious or deeply ironic, the shirt comes from Vinny Milano, or “Bald Vinny” for those in the know, a Yankee Stadium mainstay, constantly hawking his apparel around the stadium. And around WFAN studios, apparently.