Watch: Matt Harvey apologizes to Dan Patrick for Wednesday's awkward interview
On Wednesday morning, injured Mets pitcher Matt Harvey appeared on The Dan Patrick Show to promote a new service for wireless server Qualcomm. What Harvey failed to grasp is that in order to make his plug he would be expected to first talk about things Patrick, who is also a Sports Illustrated senior writer, wanted to discuss, most notably the condition of Harvey's injured arm and his decision, stemming from a visit with Dr. James Andrew on Monday, to undergo two months of rehab in an attempt to avoid Tommy John surgery.
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To be fair, Harvey did answer three "off topic" questions from Patrick, one of them about his injury, before suddenly derailing things with, "but today I'm here talking about Qualcomm." Harvey clearly mishandled the interview, telling Patrick, "I did all those answers yesterday," before trying to steer things back to his promotion, then rambling for a minute and a half about Qualcomm after a clearly annoyed Patrick told him to go ahead and make his pitch. Patrick immediately let his feelings about Harvey's conduct known to his audience after the five-minute interview concluded and the interview, which you can watch in all of its cringe-worthy glory along with Patrick's response below, became a hot topic on Wednesday afternoon.
Patrick attempted to contact Harvey on Wednesday afternoon to clear the air, and to Harvey's credit, he called the show back Thursday morning and spent most of his first two minutes on the air apologizing, though he did get off to an awkward start by saying he "didn't mean to make Qualcomm sound bad," after which he gave Patrick the interview he had wanted Wednesday morning.
Harvey told Patrick he has "been going through a lot," was on his way to a doctor's appointment when he called into the show on Wednesday morning, and "was kind of flustered about the whole thing."
"I obviously didn't handle it very well," Harvey later said, adding that he "lost track of" the fact that the health of his arm was a major story that Patrick would want to talk about and that his listeners would want to hear about. "That wasn't me at all," said Harvey, who agreed to send Patrick an autographed x-ray of his arm for Patrick's TGI Fridays-inspired studio.
Ironically, assuming they subscribe to the belief that any publicity is good publicity, Harvey's initial interview with Patrick could not have gone better for Qualcomm, which got its message out to far more people than listen to a typical Dan Patrick Show. After all, right now I'm writing about Qualcomm, you're reading about Qualcomm, and by the end of this sentence, you will have read the word "Qualcomm" eight times in this article alone, not counting your additional exposure to the company and its products if you watched the initial interview above.