What's next for LI's Sal Licata after being part of SNY layoffs?

Sal Licata is looking to what’s next.

Again.

Licata, the former WFAN host, was let go by a local media company for the second time in less than a year when he was swept up in the SNY layoffs on Friday.

Licata, who had worked for SNY for 16 years, wasn’t on staff at the network. But he was a frequent contributor and the daily host of “Baseball Night in New York,” one of two SNY shows along with the nightly wrapup show “SportsNite” that was axed along with an undisclosed number of editorial staffers and freelancers.

Licata, the 47-year-old Connetquot High School alumnus, saw his WFAN show with Brandon Tierney canceled late last year to make room for the return of Craig Carton.

After learning of his SNY fate on Friday morning, Licata faced the decision of whether to address it on his podcast “The Sal Licata Show” on YouTube.

Licata is a talker. So what else could he do except talk about it in good humor under banners that read “Sal Got Fired Again” and “I Got Fired Again"?

“The tricky spot about that — I found out legitimately that morning and then it hit me throughout the course of the day — is I think I’ve got to go live here on my YouTube show,” Licata told Newsday on Tuesday in a telephone interview. “The hard part was that even though I could make light of a very sensitive situation — and believe me, it hurts even me — the hard part was that I felt weird making light of it or poking fun at myself for the situation when I know so many other people, my dear friends, were hurting.

“So the challenging part was to make sure I hit the right notes and to be sensitive to everybody else — all my colleagues that lost their jobs, but also knowing that I need to go now and be a voice for not only me where this happened again, but also for those colleagues who also lost their job. So I'm glad after talking it through with my producer that we decided to do it and I feel proud of the work that we did for that hour.”

Licata said doing "Baseball Night in New York" was “my favorite 30 minutes of the day.” But with the economic pressures facing regional sports networks such as SNY, there was always a feeling of uncertainty, he said, about the shows' fates.

“SNY was never going to be my future,” Licata said. “It was always just a great, perfect second job and something that I loved doing. ... But it's hard not to be like you work your whole life and you dedicate your whole life to this, and you're pretty good at it — and I would say cost effective as well, relatively speaking — to lose both those jobs in the span of 10 months, yeah, still a little hard to believe that actually happened.”

Licata has something to fall back on, a platform he co-founded called “Underscore” that launched in September. It’s Licata, former WFAN host John Jastremski and Syosset’s Jimmy Traina, the former Sports Illustrated writer, delivering New York-centered sports coverage including daily podcasts and newsletters and live programming.

“I'm excited about it because the whole idea behind the creation was the changing landscape in media,” Licata said. “Having somebody like myself, somebody like Jimmy Traina and John Jastremski — three guys who were not, in my opinion, being valued properly or used properly — be creative, come up with stuff, and try to take advantage of the windows that the new media provides.”

At this point, Licata is a veteran of looking for silver linings. He already found a few from the SNY situation — now he has more time to devote to Underscore’s goal of going live whenever there is New York sports news that needs to be passionately commented on (like immediately after Thursday night’s Giants-Commanders game and Friday's Knicks-Pacers game). Plus, he and Jastremski will be able to do a daily show together in addition to their individual podcasts.

Who knows? All that could help fill some of the void fans feel without the canceled SNY shows. That would be somewhat poetic.

“One thing that I feel confident in is I would put my content up against anybody's,” Licata said. “We understand it's not the biggest platform yet, but I'll put the content up against anybody's.”

By Anthony Rieber

anthony.rieber@newsday.comAnthonyRieber

Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.