Field Yates: Humanoid
Confession: I listen to the ESPN Fantasy Focus Football podcast.
It is the most conflicting part of my life.
It’s redeeming qualities? I enjoy Stephania Bell. I enjoy when they have Mike Clay as a guest. I enjoy hearing their hot takes and fantasy advice, mostly so I know exactly what everyone else in my fantasy leagues will be buying into — and then I can use that knowledge against them for my own benefit and fantasy dominance.
It’s not so redeeming qualities? Matthew Berry. Matthew Berry. Matthew Berry — with his tiresome, faux self-deprecating, I’m a guy who always thinks himself to be the funniest one in the room schtick.
And of course, there’s the atrocious theme song which goes on for like five minutes talking about how the show is all about mediocre fantasy advice and then tosses in weird sound bites to introduce you to the “personalities”. AKA — hit the 15 second jump ahead button about 8 times and you’re good.
Then we arrive upon the most confounding piece to the pod, Field Yates. Something about him is both extremely likable and eerily unsettling. So today, as I listened to the pod on my way to work, it finally dawned on me what my issue with Field is.
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Field Yates is the most advanced humanoid to ever walk amongst us.
To explain my feelings, I refer to a phenomenon called Uncanny Valley.
Uncanny Valley is the hypothesis that human replicas which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion (or uncanniness) among some observers.
Field is somewhere on the furthest right side of the blue line, more human than a corpse/zombie and more appealing than a teddy bear. However, still below the levels of an actual human.
My Evidence:
- Field appears and sounds like the perfect on-air personality. Too perfect. He has the classic Americana handsome look. Pressed, well-coordinated, on-trend suits with matching tie and pocket squares. He is the physical embodiment of what every personal stylist is hoping to achieve. Combine that with his voice, which sounds EXACTLY like Ryan Seacrest — who is probably the most recognizable and successful radio personality of today. Field is the amalgamation of every focus group that ESPN has conducted for on-air talent. And I believe he is the product of some Frankenstein-like experiment conducted in the bowels of the Bristol, CT campus.
- For much of Field’s ESPN tenure, the running joke has been he couldn’t get a girlfriend. Most may write this off as “Oh, well, he’s just like us. Everyone has gone through a period where we couldn’t find a date or things didn’t go right. Blah, blah, blah, more excuses.” Let me submit, however, the idea that perhaps Field was going on plenty of dates — as I’d imagine a good-looking guy would do in an otherwise empty town like Bristol that’s within the greater NY metro area. The dating train would then run off the tracks when the girls realized that he was, in fact, a humanoid robot incapable of higher level emotional functions.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: A quick perusal of IG reveals, there does appear to be a human woman that calls herself his girlfriend now — BUT, seeing as how this is a recent development, perhaps the ESPN inner circle agreed to fix this glaring hole in the Field Yates conspiracy. Much like Scientology attempts with Tom Cruise.) - Field’s speech pattern is also up for scrutiny. If you listen to the podcast, then you are at least subconsciously familiar with it. Example — Field: “Now, as we move to the Carolina Panthers and Cam Newton, there of course, is cause. For… Concern. Matthew — ” And then Matthew goes off on some whiny story about how he made Cam laugh once in a pre-draft interview. Yes, we know, you think you’re hilarious…but I digress.
Field’s speech pattern follows the same pattern over and over. He ramps up early, hits you with the info at the top and then, as he closes his statement, he punctuates the. Final…. Words. Sure, you could view this as a well-polished news-anchor style delivery but I will submit another take. As Field progresses through each sentence, his computer brain only has a limited amount of energy per cycle and the punctuation at the end of each sentence is just his motor running out. Of… Steam. Additionally, the reason why he usually tosses it to the next person after such punctuation is so he has time to re-charge for his next run. - And finally, Field’s colloquialisms are equally bizarre. Often using turns of phrase that seem dated by about a year or two. Just the kind of lag in zeitgeist that the suits at any major network fall victim to. Trying desperately to keep up with the times, TV shows often reflect whatever was popular about one or two years prior. Example: The Mayor. A new show coming to ABC this fall about a rapper that decides to run for mayor of his town and he actually wins! AKA- ABC saw how pumped the youth of America got over the unlikely candidacy and popularity of Bernie Sanders, and then they immediately went to work creating a show that would parody that phenomena…two years later.
As it applies to Field, the programmers at ESPN who upload the talking points and slang Field is to use that cycle, will take a snapshot of pop culture two years prior and give us such Field Yates gems as “Now, Mike Clay, you LOOOOOVE you some Jared Cook, don’t ya?” Which was a phrase that I feel ran it’s course somewhere around the end of 2015. Moving forward, look for Field to use the phrase “Aaron Rodgers looking at the scoreboard is all of us.” — in about four to five months.
And here we find ourselves, staring the future of television right in the pretty-boy face. Could he be the first in a chain of future humanoids, putting the hard-working, blue-collar human anchors out of jobs?
Think about it.
Also, expect Field to start using this GIF at about this time next year.
