Lyons Tests Boundaries On Fox

On a recent Fox Sports News Primetime broadcast, the video highlight from a New York Yankees game showed Chuck Knoblauch taking a lead off second base when teammate Tino Martinez hit a liner up the middle.

Anchor Steve Lyons looked down at the monitor on the desk and picked up the live narration.

“There goes Knoblauch… OFF LIKE A PROM DRESS…”

Did he just say…?

When you live and die by the “Psycho,” that’s what you’ve come to expect.

Perhaps testing the boundaries of the Fox attitude to a psychotic extreme, Lyons continues a career in sportscasting with much the same, er, gusto, that he exhibited during a nine-year ride as a do-everything major leaguer, when his most notable contribution to the game was as the Chicago White Sox player who sheepishly yanked up his pants after pulling them down in front of the Tiger Stadium crowd to shake out dirt after a head-first slide into first base nine years ago.

A tour around the cable box reveals Lyons is the only ex-jock given the responsibility of delivering news on a national studio show five nights a week. But, please, he doesn’t want to be called a journalist.

“I’m just an idiot ex-baseball player,” the 38-year-old says.

And many would agree.

In the Fox Sports News rotation, Lyons isn’t a bench player any more. He’s teamed in an “Odd Couple”-like sequel with Chris Myers on the 10 p.m. and midnight East Coast feeds and the 11 p.m. shows that go to the West Coast.

It was much the same when Lyons was a player and he’d look at the lineup card posted on the dugout wall to see his name.

“Hey, aren’t we TRYING?” the career .253 hitter would announce to his teammates - he hoped before they could say it to him.

The same thing was probably muttered around the Fox Broadcasting Center when Fox Sports News executive producer John Terenzio decided a few months ago that Lyons, who came to Fox after trying sports-talk radio in Boston and Chicago and spot reporting at ESPN2 in his post-playing career, would be a permanent anchor.

Lyons jumped aboard Fox’s expanding sports staff as a baseball game analyst several years ago. Terenzio said he noticed Lyons’ broadcasting flair about a year ago when he was doing studio work for the news show. During a Fox Scope segment, Lyons described a player going from first to third “faster than a 16-year-old on a third date with the same girl.”

Terenzio looked up. Did he just say …?

“It was a little crude,” Terenzio agreed. “But it showed imagination. He was doing highlights better than some of our highlight people.”

Terenzio asked Lyons if he’d be interested in trying out as an anchor. Lyons thought Terenzio was crazy.

Soon after Lyons was hired, Fox added Keith Olbermann and Myers to the news corral. New anchor teams had to be drawn. Terenzio felt Lyons was ready. So did Lyons. But with what partner? If opposites attract, Lyons seemed to be a better fit with Myers.

Lyons recognizes his shortcomings. He gets help writing his nightly scripts, and he types about as well as Myers might handle a curveball. But Lyons’ sports knowledge, competitive nature and personality are the strengths he’s banking on.

“If anything, I try to dumb down the scripts I’m given - if it’s a three-syllable word, I’m in trouble,” said Lyons. “I’m thinking, `If I can’t understand it, why make the guy sitting at home feel stupid?”’

Seriously, Lyons’ promotion could start a ripple effect in the “jockocracy” of sportscasting. If he’s a success, more former players who aren’t trained in journalism but whom producers feel are engaging enough to pull it off could be lining up for these spots, rather than gaining experience by doing 3-minute sports segments on local newscasts.

“He’s not a blueprint for the new kind of anchor everyone will be looking for,” said Terenzio, who has also tried ex-NFL players Bill Maas and Ron Pitts as Fox Sports News anchors, with varying degrees of success. “It’s a case-by-case basis. Some can’t pull it off five nights a week.”

And his workload will only increase. Soon, Lyons will host a weekly half-hour “Hardcore Baseball” show for Fox Sports Net. And on Saturdays during the summer (starting June 5), he’ll host the teen-oriented “In The Zone” show, then join Olbermann in the pregame show for the national Fox Game of the Week broadcast. It means Lyons won’t be doing any more game analysis for awhile.