The Valley of the Sun, which is what Chamber of Commerce types like to call the Phoenix area, has four seasons like most other places, but they’re different from those elsewhere.
Early Summer is the March-April period, when daytime-high temperatures start in the 70s and end in the 90s. It’s our equivalent of spring. Real Summer begins in May and lasts through September. It starts hot and gets hotter, with the later months featuring uncomfortably high humidity (carried on southern winds) as well as daily triple-digit readings. Except for sun-deprived Northern Europeans, visitors generally stay away during these months, and Phoenicians who can head out.
Late Summer is October and November, during which daily highs fall from the 90s to the 70s—the opposite of Early Summer. Winter, as it were, is December, January and February-- highs in the 60s, lows in the 40s. It’s really cold at this time Up North, so it’s the main tourist season. You can spot the outlanders because they wear shorts and t-shirts, while the locals have their parkas on, zipped up.
Late Summer is my favorite season. The air is dry, the sky is blue and while it’s warm the sting has gone out of the heat. Better, it’s time for Arizona Fall League baseball. From early October until late-middle November, young professional players cavort in the spring-training ballparks around the area in a kind of pick-up league with nothing at stake except the day’s final score and (of course) their individual stats. It’s baseball at its purist, shorn of the hassle and hype that surround the diamond sport during regular-season hostilities.
If you follow this space you probably know the Fall League’s nuts and bolts, but I’ll zip through them anyway. Six teams, each with 35-man rosters, play 32-game schedules. Each of the 30 Major League clubs chips in seven promising players, mostly Class-A or –AAers but with a few AAAs and young Major Leaguers in need of innings added for good measure.
Tickets are cheap-- $6 for adults and $5 for seniors—and you can park right in front of the stadiums, free. Attendance usually runs between 200 and 300 people a game. This includes about 50 scouts, a dozen or so predatory baseball-card-autograph seekers and about the same number of players’ girl friends, who add charm to the proceedings. Most of the rest are retired guys like me, with nothing better to do.
It’s a great scene. You can sit where you want and spread out into adjoining seats and rows. If you’d like to share your opinions with the players, umpires and other fans, just raise your voice a notch. Indeed, the audience is part of the show, especially Superfan Susan, a solid, 50ish blonde who regularly sits behind the Scottsdale Scorpions’ dugout and, in a high-decibel baritone, pours praise upon the Scorps with cries like “UNBELIEVABLE!” “AWESOME!” “OUTSTANDING!” and “BEST IN THE UNIVERSE!”
She does the same thing during the regular season at Diamondbacks’ home games. Some people smirk at her antics, but I smile because she’s always upbeat and so obviously pleased with herself.
The real fun at Fall League games is talent-scouting, something most of us fans think we’re pretty good at. Most of the players are in the 21-to-24-year-old age range, and two or three years from the Bigs, but most seasons a few are such standouts that it doesn’t take a Paul Krichell to see that they’ll excel On High, and soon. In that category of late have been the Tampa Bay Rays’ third-baseman Evan Longoria, Atlanta Braves’ pitcher Tommy Hanson, Chicago Cubs’ shortstop Starlin Castro and Washington Nationals’ pitcher Stephen Strasburg.
This year the main focus of attention has been on Bryce Harper, the Nevadan who, as the top choice in last June’s draft, commanded a five-year, $9.9 million contract from the Nationals. At 18 years old he’s the second-youngest Fall Leaguer ever, and has done only part-time duty with the Scorpions, but I saw him play Wednesday afternoon in front of a larger-than-usual crowd in the Peoria ballpark. He went 2-for-5 at the plate, with the two hits being triples, one to right field and the other to left-center. Moreover, his cannon throw from deep right field to third base trying to catch a tagging runner drew oooohs even though its target slid in safely.
At 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds Harper is a big boy, and has a powerful, left-handed batting swing. He’ll probably start next season at Class A and not be brought to the big club until 2012, earliest. Still, it’s easy to see what the Nats, et al, saw in him.
There are other good-looking prospects here, although none has shone as brightly as the young men listed above. Ben Revere is a little (5-9, 175) outfielder from the Minnesota Twins chain who can hit some and run a lot. Brandon Belt, a 6-foot-5 first-baseman belonging to the San Francisco Giants, hits for power and has a great baseball name.
The Chicago White Sox have a quick, switch-hitting Venezuelan shortstop named Eduardo Escobar who can do it all; he went 3-for-5 with a couple of doubles when I saw him the other day, and his two outs were hard hit. Brandon Barnes, an outfielder in the Houston Astros’ system, last week hit a home run that cleared a 30-foot-high centerfield backdrop 410 feet from home plate, a drive than had to measure at least 440 feet end to end. Yeah, the wind was blowing out, but the blast still was Mantlesque..
That’s the great thing about baseball-- you never know what you’ll see when you go to a game. Early Summer, Real Summer or Late Summer.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
WONDER WOMAN
So much of the high-level sports competition we watch is extraordinary that we come to expect it and often don’t remark about it when it happens. That’s why I want to tip you off about a coming event that’s sure to produce something truly memorable.
I refer to the Breeders Cup Classic, the annual highlight of Saturday’s Breeders Cup card that’s regarded as the world’s championship of Thoroughbred horse racing. In the field will be Zenyatta, a 6-year-old bay mare who’ll be trying to repeat her winning performance in last year’s race. She’s undefeated in 19 career starts, an unprecedented achievement. Saturday’s outing is likely to be her last, and your last chance to see her in action. Better do it while you can.
A heads-up is necessary because, these days, horse racing gets about as much Sports Center time or sports-page ink as volleyball or water polo. ‘Twasn’t always so; in the first half of the last century the erstwhile Sport of Kings ranked with baseball and boxing as America’s favorite sporting interests.
You might be interested to know that this nation’s first sports superstar was equine, not human. Dan Patch, a record-setting pacer (a horse that pulls a buggy), wowed ‘em on the state-fair circuit in the first decade of the 1900s, regularly drawing paying crowds of upwards of 100,000 people for his races. Tens of thousands of folks would come just to watch him work out. Products were named after him, starting with things like animal feed and harness and branching into cigarettes, chewing tobacco, a soft drink and a washing machine, among other items. “The Great” Dan’s owners were said to have reaped some $13 million from him before he died in 1916, a barn-full of money in those days.
In today’s urban society, of course, one rarely encounters horses, and being a serious fan of their endeavors is the sort of scholarly pursuit that’s no longer in vogue. I’m a Saturday regular at the horse book at Turf Paradise race track in Phoenix, and, at 72, I think I bring down the average age of the clientele. It’s occurred to me that in 15 or so years just about all of us will be gone, and few replacements are in sight.
But you don’t have to be a Racing Form nerd to appreciate Zenyatta. For starts, her perfect record is unmatched in racing’s long history, the closest to it being Man o’ War’s 20 wins in 21 starts during his brief, long-ago career (1919-20). By contrast, Citation, another contender for greatest-ever honors, was 32 of 45, Secretariat was 16 of 21 and the late-blooming Seabiscuit was 33 of 88. Furthermore, 14 of Zenyatta’s wins have come at the Grade I level, the sports highest. That’s a record for fillies and mares (a filly becomes a mare, and a colt a horse, at age 5), as are her lifetime earnings of $6.4 million.
Zenyatta’s sex also plays a role in her singularity. Unlike in humans, physiological differences between male and female horses for purposes of running aren’t great, and, indeed, Zenyatta is both taller and heavier than was the famously muscular Secretariat. But while it’s not unheard of for a gal to beat the guys in horse-racing classics, it is highly unusual. For instance, only 39 fillies have started in the Kentucky Derby’s 136 runnings, and just three have won, the last being Winning Colors in 1988. Similarly, Zenyatta’s victory in last year’s Breeders Cup Classic was the first for her sex since the event was inaugurated in 1984.
Lastly, Zenyatta’s running style is the sort most people love to watch. She’ll trail the field most of the way, seemingly out of it, then charge down the home stretch to pass all and sundry. Her 2009 Breeders Cup win, against an otherwise all-male (and quite accomplished) field, fit this mold. Check it out on web video; I get a chill every time I see it.
It wouldn’t be a racing story without a screw-up element, and this one’s is large. Last year’s racing co-sensation was another freakishly fast female, the filly Rachel Alexandra. She beat top-flight colts several times en route to a triumphant season that culminated with her edging Zenyatta in Horse-of-the-Year voting. Rachel’s owners, however, ended her campaign before the Breeders Cup, so the two didn’t meet.
A Zenyatta-Rachel match race this year would have drawn a national and even worldwide spotlight racing sorely needs and rarely gets. Unfortunately, but typically, the doofusses who run the sport couldn’t or wouldn’t make it happen. Rachel returned to the track but never quite matched her 2009 form and wound up being retired in September, still never having faced Zenyatta..
So the best we can do is watch Zenyatta take on the boys again in Saturday’s Classic, with a total purse of $5 million at stake, but that’s okay. History will be made, and you should take the opportunity to be there, if only via TV.
Don’t wait for the movie.
I refer to the Breeders Cup Classic, the annual highlight of Saturday’s Breeders Cup card that’s regarded as the world’s championship of Thoroughbred horse racing. In the field will be Zenyatta, a 6-year-old bay mare who’ll be trying to repeat her winning performance in last year’s race. She’s undefeated in 19 career starts, an unprecedented achievement. Saturday’s outing is likely to be her last, and your last chance to see her in action. Better do it while you can.
A heads-up is necessary because, these days, horse racing gets about as much Sports Center time or sports-page ink as volleyball or water polo. ‘Twasn’t always so; in the first half of the last century the erstwhile Sport of Kings ranked with baseball and boxing as America’s favorite sporting interests.
You might be interested to know that this nation’s first sports superstar was equine, not human. Dan Patch, a record-setting pacer (a horse that pulls a buggy), wowed ‘em on the state-fair circuit in the first decade of the 1900s, regularly drawing paying crowds of upwards of 100,000 people for his races. Tens of thousands of folks would come just to watch him work out. Products were named after him, starting with things like animal feed and harness and branching into cigarettes, chewing tobacco, a soft drink and a washing machine, among other items. “The Great” Dan’s owners were said to have reaped some $13 million from him before he died in 1916, a barn-full of money in those days.
In today’s urban society, of course, one rarely encounters horses, and being a serious fan of their endeavors is the sort of scholarly pursuit that’s no longer in vogue. I’m a Saturday regular at the horse book at Turf Paradise race track in Phoenix, and, at 72, I think I bring down the average age of the clientele. It’s occurred to me that in 15 or so years just about all of us will be gone, and few replacements are in sight.
But you don’t have to be a Racing Form nerd to appreciate Zenyatta. For starts, her perfect record is unmatched in racing’s long history, the closest to it being Man o’ War’s 20 wins in 21 starts during his brief, long-ago career (1919-20). By contrast, Citation, another contender for greatest-ever honors, was 32 of 45, Secretariat was 16 of 21 and the late-blooming Seabiscuit was 33 of 88. Furthermore, 14 of Zenyatta’s wins have come at the Grade I level, the sports highest. That’s a record for fillies and mares (a filly becomes a mare, and a colt a horse, at age 5), as are her lifetime earnings of $6.4 million.
Zenyatta’s sex also plays a role in her singularity. Unlike in humans, physiological differences between male and female horses for purposes of running aren’t great, and, indeed, Zenyatta is both taller and heavier than was the famously muscular Secretariat. But while it’s not unheard of for a gal to beat the guys in horse-racing classics, it is highly unusual. For instance, only 39 fillies have started in the Kentucky Derby’s 136 runnings, and just three have won, the last being Winning Colors in 1988. Similarly, Zenyatta’s victory in last year’s Breeders Cup Classic was the first for her sex since the event was inaugurated in 1984.
Lastly, Zenyatta’s running style is the sort most people love to watch. She’ll trail the field most of the way, seemingly out of it, then charge down the home stretch to pass all and sundry. Her 2009 Breeders Cup win, against an otherwise all-male (and quite accomplished) field, fit this mold. Check it out on web video; I get a chill every time I see it.
It wouldn’t be a racing story without a screw-up element, and this one’s is large. Last year’s racing co-sensation was another freakishly fast female, the filly Rachel Alexandra. She beat top-flight colts several times en route to a triumphant season that culminated with her edging Zenyatta in Horse-of-the-Year voting. Rachel’s owners, however, ended her campaign before the Breeders Cup, so the two didn’t meet.
A Zenyatta-Rachel match race this year would have drawn a national and even worldwide spotlight racing sorely needs and rarely gets. Unfortunately, but typically, the doofusses who run the sport couldn’t or wouldn’t make it happen. Rachel returned to the track but never quite matched her 2009 form and wound up being retired in September, still never having faced Zenyatta..
So the best we can do is watch Zenyatta take on the boys again in Saturday’s Classic, with a total purse of $5 million at stake, but that’s okay. History will be made, and you should take the opportunity to be there, if only via TV.
Don’t wait for the movie.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
HELP WANTED
There are, the joke goes, three things every man thinks he can do better than anyone else: build a fire, run a restaurant and manage a baseball team. I’m not sure about the truth of the first two of those, but the last is beyond dispute.
Just about all of us guys have played baseball at some point in our lives, and feel that the knowledge gleaned thereby transfers easily to the highest level of the game. Silly as that sounds, the repeated evidence of our senses makes it plausible. Again and again we sit before our TV screens, urging our team’s manager to do or not do something, then see him come to grief when he goes against our wishes.
That’s particularly true if you’re a Cubs’ fan, by the way.
Now, it seems, we might get our chance to prove our mettle. No less than 10 Major League teams have had managerial openings since the recent end of the regular season, and while three have been filled (by the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Braves), seven remain—with the Cubs, Mets, Brewers, Pirates, Mariners, Blue Jays and Marlins—and more could follow. That’s quite a help-wanted list in these job-tight days, and if the lineup of applicants is long it’s surely no longer than that for many less-interesting positions.
Go ahead and send in your application. It couldn’t hurt.
Don’t feel deterred by a lack of baseball smarts, because they’re more common that you might think. Plenty of people inside and outside the professional game know full well when to bunt, steal, hit and run, squeeze, pitch out, change pitchers and do all the other managerial stuff, even the super-difficult double-switch. Most of us easily can do what the ex-pitcher Bill Lee considered the job’s most-frequent duties, namely “sitting on your ass, spitting tobacco and nodding at stupid things.”
Managerial candidates need some positive attributes, of course. One is locker room “cred,” which is helpful in gaining players’ attention. A common way to get this is by having had a good Major League playing career. Two of the fellas who’ve landed managerial jobs of late—Kirk Gibson with the Diamondbacks and Don Mattingly with the Dodgers— qualify on that ground.
But there are other roads to the same destination. Baseball’s is a male society where physical strength and pugnacity are respected, and some of the best managers of yore could go nose-to-nose with players 30 years their junior and not come off second best. Walter Alston, Chuck Tanner, Ralph Houk and Frank Robinson were said to excel in that category, as does the Angels’ Mike Scioscia among present-day skippers.
Billy Martin was in a class by himself here. “A lot of people looked up to Billy. That’s because he’d just knocked them down,” noted Jim Bouton, the ex-Yankee pitcher and author.
If you’re a little guy, nastiness can fill the same purpose. “He cussed so awful last year I didn’t want to sit next to him,” Orioles’ pitcher Scott McGregor once said of his famously diminutive and cantankerous manager, Earl Weaver. “The Lord was going to strike him dead if he kept talking like that and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.”
Communications skills help, too, but not in the usual business way. A manager may have wisdom to impart but conveying it to players whose minds are likely to be elsewhere can be difficult. This was true back in The Great McGraw’s day. “One per cent of ballplayers are leaders of men,” he lamented. “The other 99 per cent are followers of women.” Decades later Mayo Smith averred, “Open up a ballplayer’s head and you know what you’d find? A lot of little broads and a jazz band.”
Substitute “rock band” and you’re right up to date.
One thing some players have no trouble concentrating on is their manager, and why they don’t like him. This requires manipulative skill on his part. “The secret to managing a club is to keep the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided,” Casey Stengel said.
Like in any field, a manager has bosses who must be placated. “Me and my owners think exactly alike,” Jim Fregosi said. “Whatever they’re thinking, that’s what I’m thinking.” Support from your team’s fans can’t be expected; as the football coach Duffy Daugherty put it, “Coaches are responsible to an irresponsible public.”
You live or die not by your own efforts but by those of others. Job security hardly exists--“If you’re looking for job security, drive a mail truck,” said Alvin Dark—and even relative success is no guarantee of continued employment. “They get tired of seeing you. Really, that’s all it is,” said Sparky Anderson.
Still want the job? Sure you do, so you’d better hurry. The line forms on the left.
Just about all of us guys have played baseball at some point in our lives, and feel that the knowledge gleaned thereby transfers easily to the highest level of the game. Silly as that sounds, the repeated evidence of our senses makes it plausible. Again and again we sit before our TV screens, urging our team’s manager to do or not do something, then see him come to grief when he goes against our wishes.
That’s particularly true if you’re a Cubs’ fan, by the way.
Now, it seems, we might get our chance to prove our mettle. No less than 10 Major League teams have had managerial openings since the recent end of the regular season, and while three have been filled (by the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Braves), seven remain—with the Cubs, Mets, Brewers, Pirates, Mariners, Blue Jays and Marlins—and more could follow. That’s quite a help-wanted list in these job-tight days, and if the lineup of applicants is long it’s surely no longer than that for many less-interesting positions.
Go ahead and send in your application. It couldn’t hurt.
Don’t feel deterred by a lack of baseball smarts, because they’re more common that you might think. Plenty of people inside and outside the professional game know full well when to bunt, steal, hit and run, squeeze, pitch out, change pitchers and do all the other managerial stuff, even the super-difficult double-switch. Most of us easily can do what the ex-pitcher Bill Lee considered the job’s most-frequent duties, namely “sitting on your ass, spitting tobacco and nodding at stupid things.”
Managerial candidates need some positive attributes, of course. One is locker room “cred,” which is helpful in gaining players’ attention. A common way to get this is by having had a good Major League playing career. Two of the fellas who’ve landed managerial jobs of late—Kirk Gibson with the Diamondbacks and Don Mattingly with the Dodgers— qualify on that ground.
But there are other roads to the same destination. Baseball’s is a male society where physical strength and pugnacity are respected, and some of the best managers of yore could go nose-to-nose with players 30 years their junior and not come off second best. Walter Alston, Chuck Tanner, Ralph Houk and Frank Robinson were said to excel in that category, as does the Angels’ Mike Scioscia among present-day skippers.
Billy Martin was in a class by himself here. “A lot of people looked up to Billy. That’s because he’d just knocked them down,” noted Jim Bouton, the ex-Yankee pitcher and author.
If you’re a little guy, nastiness can fill the same purpose. “He cussed so awful last year I didn’t want to sit next to him,” Orioles’ pitcher Scott McGregor once said of his famously diminutive and cantankerous manager, Earl Weaver. “The Lord was going to strike him dead if he kept talking like that and I didn’t want to be there when it happened.”
Communications skills help, too, but not in the usual business way. A manager may have wisdom to impart but conveying it to players whose minds are likely to be elsewhere can be difficult. This was true back in The Great McGraw’s day. “One per cent of ballplayers are leaders of men,” he lamented. “The other 99 per cent are followers of women.” Decades later Mayo Smith averred, “Open up a ballplayer’s head and you know what you’d find? A lot of little broads and a jazz band.”
Substitute “rock band” and you’re right up to date.
One thing some players have no trouble concentrating on is their manager, and why they don’t like him. This requires manipulative skill on his part. “The secret to managing a club is to keep the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided,” Casey Stengel said.
Like in any field, a manager has bosses who must be placated. “Me and my owners think exactly alike,” Jim Fregosi said. “Whatever they’re thinking, that’s what I’m thinking.” Support from your team’s fans can’t be expected; as the football coach Duffy Daugherty put it, “Coaches are responsible to an irresponsible public.”
You live or die not by your own efforts but by those of others. Job security hardly exists--“If you’re looking for job security, drive a mail truck,” said Alvin Dark—and even relative success is no guarantee of continued employment. “They get tired of seeing you. Really, that’s all it is,” said Sparky Anderson.
Still want the job? Sure you do, so you’d better hurry. The line forms on the left.
Friday, October 1, 2010
DEREK, TYLER AND JAMOOK
NEWS—Derek Jeter fakes being hit by a pitch. Gets away with it!
VIEWS-- On September 16, in a road game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Ray’s pitcher Chad Qualls threw inside to the New York Yankees’ Jeter, who spun away from the plate as though the ball had struck him. He was awarded first base by umpire Lance Barksdale.
Videos clearly showed that it was Jeter’s bat that was struck, not his person. Jeter later admitted as much. An uproar ensued, partly because of Jeter’s good-guy reputation and partly because Jeter rhymes so nicely with “cheater.” One website I saw took a poll and 57.5% of those responding said they thought the Yankee captain had sinned, while the rest thought that his “acting” was a legitimate part of baseball.
As usual, the majority is wrong. Getting away with what you can, and pretending to be in the right no matter what the circumstances, are time-honored parts of all our major team sports. While golfers and tennis players descend from a “gentlemanly” tradition and are expected to call fouls on themselves, the base runner who, say, knows he was tagged out but still is called “safe” while advancing would risk his teammates’ scorn and an umpire’s rebuke should he offer an immediate confession.
That’s okay because sports are considered to be little worlds unto themselves, subject to their own customs, and as long as no one gets hurt one should be able to follow them without being seen as dishonorable in the society at large. Remember that the team-sport model—not golf’s and tennis’s—prevails in the broader community. When’s the last time you sent the state a check because you found yourself speeding and no cop was around to ticket you?
NEWS—The Chicago Cubs’ Tyler Colvin is hospitalized after being speared by a piece of a teammate’s broken maple bat while on the third-base line. Baseball continues to “study” the bats issue.
VIEWS—Bats have been exploding all over the Major Leagues since maple, shorter-grained and more brittle than traditional ash, became the game’s wood of choice a decade or so ago. Flying-bat injuries have been numerous, including ones to fans, umpires and coaches as well as players. Several of them have been scary but none more so than Colvin’s, with the bat splinter puncturing his left upper chest and threatening to pierce his lung. He was released from the hospital three days after the September 20 incident in Miami, but the rookie’s season was declared over.
Baseball’s response was the same as it’s always been--“we’re studying it.” That’s what it says when it wants to wish a problem away. Truth is, the players union is as much to blame as the commissioner’s office, because many of its members like maple bats’ combination of hardness and light weight. That’s the same sort of shortsightedness the union displayed for all the years it opposed steroids’ testing on privacy rounds, forcing players to make the Faustian choice of endangering their long-term health for the short-term performance gains steroids can bring.
A few inches up and Colvin might have caught the projectile in his neck. A few inches down and it might have found his heart. Alas, it looks like that’s what it will take to get baseball’s head out of the sand on this one.
NEWS—The Arizona Diamondback’s Mark Reynolds could be the first every-day player whose strikeout number is higher than his batting average for a season.
VIEWS-- Reynolds, the D’Backs’ third baseman, has been my least-favorite ballplayer these past few seasons. That’s partly because he epitomizes the careless, swing-for-the-fences ethos that infects many players today. Just as bad, when he’s asked about his proclivity to whiff, he answers with a rhetorical shrug. That’s his style, he says, in effect. Live with it.
The D’Backs do because he hits more home runs than most, but while power hitters often strike out a lot the not untalented but muscle-headed Mark has taken the negative side of the equation to new heights, or depths. In the 107 years that began the modern game, no player ever struck out 200 or more times in a season. Reynolds did it with 204 in 2008, his first full year up, then upped his record to 223 the next season. So far this year he’s fanned 208 times, bringing his career total to 764 in 2,238 total times at bat. That’s an atrocious once every 2.9 trips.
And while he’s hit 32 home runs this season, his current batting average is.198. That’s below .200-- the so-called Mendoza Line which is the game’s bench mark for ineptitude. It’s named for Mario Mendoza, the utility infielder who dipped below it several times in his nine seasons (1974-82) with Pittsburgh, Seattle or Texas. But Mendoza made his living with his glove, while Reynolds, erratic afield, can’t claim distinction there.
About the only ameliorating factor for Reynolds is that many of his teammates are almost as bad as he is. Five of them have more than 100 Ks so far this season, and with 1,495 of them all told as of yesterday the D’Backs already have set an all-time team swish record, by about a furlong. Strung together that’s enough outs for 55 complete games—more than one-third of a season-- without making contact.
This week the genius who covers the D’Backs for the Arizona Republic did a piece seeking the reasons for their last-place divisional standing and 95 losses to date. He concluded, with player quotes for support, that a “losing mentality” was to blame.
Losing mentality? Maybe, but hitting the ball more often wouldn’t have hurt.
VIEWS-- On September 16, in a road game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Ray’s pitcher Chad Qualls threw inside to the New York Yankees’ Jeter, who spun away from the plate as though the ball had struck him. He was awarded first base by umpire Lance Barksdale.
Videos clearly showed that it was Jeter’s bat that was struck, not his person. Jeter later admitted as much. An uproar ensued, partly because of Jeter’s good-guy reputation and partly because Jeter rhymes so nicely with “cheater.” One website I saw took a poll and 57.5% of those responding said they thought the Yankee captain had sinned, while the rest thought that his “acting” was a legitimate part of baseball.
As usual, the majority is wrong. Getting away with what you can, and pretending to be in the right no matter what the circumstances, are time-honored parts of all our major team sports. While golfers and tennis players descend from a “gentlemanly” tradition and are expected to call fouls on themselves, the base runner who, say, knows he was tagged out but still is called “safe” while advancing would risk his teammates’ scorn and an umpire’s rebuke should he offer an immediate confession.
That’s okay because sports are considered to be little worlds unto themselves, subject to their own customs, and as long as no one gets hurt one should be able to follow them without being seen as dishonorable in the society at large. Remember that the team-sport model—not golf’s and tennis’s—prevails in the broader community. When’s the last time you sent the state a check because you found yourself speeding and no cop was around to ticket you?
NEWS—The Chicago Cubs’ Tyler Colvin is hospitalized after being speared by a piece of a teammate’s broken maple bat while on the third-base line. Baseball continues to “study” the bats issue.
VIEWS—Bats have been exploding all over the Major Leagues since maple, shorter-grained and more brittle than traditional ash, became the game’s wood of choice a decade or so ago. Flying-bat injuries have been numerous, including ones to fans, umpires and coaches as well as players. Several of them have been scary but none more so than Colvin’s, with the bat splinter puncturing his left upper chest and threatening to pierce his lung. He was released from the hospital three days after the September 20 incident in Miami, but the rookie’s season was declared over.
Baseball’s response was the same as it’s always been--“we’re studying it.” That’s what it says when it wants to wish a problem away. Truth is, the players union is as much to blame as the commissioner’s office, because many of its members like maple bats’ combination of hardness and light weight. That’s the same sort of shortsightedness the union displayed for all the years it opposed steroids’ testing on privacy rounds, forcing players to make the Faustian choice of endangering their long-term health for the short-term performance gains steroids can bring.
A few inches up and Colvin might have caught the projectile in his neck. A few inches down and it might have found his heart. Alas, it looks like that’s what it will take to get baseball’s head out of the sand on this one.
NEWS—The Arizona Diamondback’s Mark Reynolds could be the first every-day player whose strikeout number is higher than his batting average for a season.
VIEWS-- Reynolds, the D’Backs’ third baseman, has been my least-favorite ballplayer these past few seasons. That’s partly because he epitomizes the careless, swing-for-the-fences ethos that infects many players today. Just as bad, when he’s asked about his proclivity to whiff, he answers with a rhetorical shrug. That’s his style, he says, in effect. Live with it.
The D’Backs do because he hits more home runs than most, but while power hitters often strike out a lot the not untalented but muscle-headed Mark has taken the negative side of the equation to new heights, or depths. In the 107 years that began the modern game, no player ever struck out 200 or more times in a season. Reynolds did it with 204 in 2008, his first full year up, then upped his record to 223 the next season. So far this year he’s fanned 208 times, bringing his career total to 764 in 2,238 total times at bat. That’s an atrocious once every 2.9 trips.
And while he’s hit 32 home runs this season, his current batting average is.198. That’s below .200-- the so-called Mendoza Line which is the game’s bench mark for ineptitude. It’s named for Mario Mendoza, the utility infielder who dipped below it several times in his nine seasons (1974-82) with Pittsburgh, Seattle or Texas. But Mendoza made his living with his glove, while Reynolds, erratic afield, can’t claim distinction there.
About the only ameliorating factor for Reynolds is that many of his teammates are almost as bad as he is. Five of them have more than 100 Ks so far this season, and with 1,495 of them all told as of yesterday the D’Backs already have set an all-time team swish record, by about a furlong. Strung together that’s enough outs for 55 complete games—more than one-third of a season-- without making contact.
This week the genius who covers the D’Backs for the Arizona Republic did a piece seeking the reasons for their last-place divisional standing and 95 losses to date. He concluded, with player quotes for support, that a “losing mentality” was to blame.
Losing mentality? Maybe, but hitting the ball more often wouldn’t have hurt.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
HEARING VOICES
One of the good things about life these days (the list is shrinking) is Major League Baseball’s Extra Innings package, which for $160 puts on my cable-TV menu just about every ballgame that’s televised anywhere-- more than 2,000 over the course of a season.
That works out to about 12 cents a game, a bargain by any measure. While my viewing is heavily tilted towards the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, my 1 and 1A favorite teams, I’ll sometimes skip around of an evening, watching a couple innings of this contest and a couple of that. That’s particularly true at this time of year, when the pennant and wild-card races are being decided. It puts me into baseball in a way that’s not possible otherwise, something for which I’m grateful.
Extra Innings also has enabled me to listen to most of the broadcasters of the day, a mixed blessing. I’m sorry to report that the state of their art is less than brilliant, consisting mostly of generic TV voices, unreflective homerism and incessant complaining about how the umpires are screwing the broadcasters’ teams. If I didn’t watch most games with half an eye, depending on the broadcasters’ vocal inflections to determine when to look up from my crossword puzzles, I’d turn off the sound altogether.
Part of my problem with today’s baseball voices no doubt stems from my being spoiled in that regard early in life. The first games I heard, on radio, were described by Bert Wilson, the Cubs’ announcer of the 1940s and early ‘50s. Wilson was a blatant homer whose signature line was “I don’t care who wins as long as it’s the Cubs,” but that was okay with my pre-teen and teen selves, which saw baseball just that way. Wilson died of a heart attack while still in his prime, something I blame on the frustrations of having to watch the terrible Cub teams of his later years. I still mourn him.
In 1955, the year of poor Bert’s demise, I went off to college at the U. of Illinois in downstate Champaign-Urbana. There, on St. Louis station KMOX, I was introduced to the jolly, raspy voice of Harry Caray, then the Cardinals’ broadcaster. I hated it when he mouthed the gloating line “the Cardinals are coming tra-la, tra-la” when the Redbirds surged, but came to love him in similar poses in Chicago, both with the White Sox (1971 –81) and Cubs, for whom he held forth from 1982 until his death in 1998.
Harry also was a homer, but his favoritism was that of a fan, not a shill; nothing quite matched the derision in his voice when he’d say “Heeeee popped it up!” after a Cub or Sox player failed with runners in scoring position. He exuded bonhomie, and, after spending an evening with him on Rush Street in the ‘80s, I can attest it was no pose. I also can tell you that his drink of choice was scotch and soda, not the beer he was paid to hawk.
I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1961 and ’62, when Ernie Harwell was breaking in as the Detroit Tigers’ voice. No one made baseball sound friendlier or more welcoming.
I worked in Pittsburgh from 1963 until mid-1966, where I got to listen to the great Bob Prince. No one made baseball more fun than “The Gunner,” so nicknamed not for any rapid-fire delivery, as many supposed, but because an irate husband once approached him weapon in hand while Prince was chatting up the guy’s wife in a bar. I could do a whole column on Prince. Maybe someday I will.
I lived in New York from mid 1966 into '69 and loved it when Phil Rizzuto would get so wrapped up in one of his goofy stories that he’d miss entire half-innings of the Yankees’ games he called. Rizzuto made scorekeeping history with his notation “ww”—for “wasn’t watching”— which he used for players’ turns at bat he missed.
Next to those giants, most of today’s broadcasters look small. You can’t tell one from another from their voices, their homerism grates rather than amuses, and if you removed the words “incredible” and “unbelievable” from their vocabularies, they hardly could speak. The other day I was watching a Detroit telecast of a Tigers-White Sox game when, in the drowsy second inning of a 0-0 game, Tiger pitcher Max Scherzer slipped a slider past a Sox hitter for a called second strike. “What a pitch! Unbelievable!” cried the Tigers’ announcer, Mario Impemba. “Wow!” chimed in his sidekick, Dan Dickerson.
“Unbelievable!” and “Wow!” for a strike two in a nothing situation? What do those jokers say when something really exceptional happens? Would they know it if they saw it?
This is not to say that all of today’s broadcasters, uh, suck. Jon Miller, who does the San Francisco Giants’ and ESPN national games, is concise and witty, and a nice counterpoint to his peevish ESPN partner, ex-player Joe Morgan. The L.A. Dodgers’ Vin Scully does a radio broadcast on TV but brings it off with his fine phrasing and elocution. The New York Mets’ Ron Darling is an able analyst, destined for bigger things on the tube
Far and away the most-interesting guy out there, though, is Ken Harrelson, the White Sox’s voice for most of the last 30 years. I have to admit that “The Hawk” is an acquired taste. He’s an awful umpiring whiner and was something of a bully with previous broadcasting partners Tom Paciorek and Darrin Jackson, although his present sidekick, the astute and acerbic Steve Stone, doesn’t let him get away with that. Every other word out of Harrelson’s mouth is a catch-phrase; how many “duck snorts” or “chopper two-hoppers” can you take in a nine-inning game, dadgummit?
Yet much of his shtick is funny and his enthusiasm for the game is infectious. One Saturday afternoon last month I was in a South Lake Tahoe sports book, playing the horses, while an Oakland A’s- Tampa Bay Rays game was running in an adjacent TV lounge. An A’s player hit a home run and two young men—apparently locals in a town that roots for Bay Area teams—arose as one and emitted Hawk’s signature cry, “You can put it on the board, YES!”
I had to laugh, as did everyone else within earshot. And you don’t often see such lines migrate in this era of parochial tastes and interests.
That works out to about 12 cents a game, a bargain by any measure. While my viewing is heavily tilted towards the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, my 1 and 1A favorite teams, I’ll sometimes skip around of an evening, watching a couple innings of this contest and a couple of that. That’s particularly true at this time of year, when the pennant and wild-card races are being decided. It puts me into baseball in a way that’s not possible otherwise, something for which I’m grateful.
Extra Innings also has enabled me to listen to most of the broadcasters of the day, a mixed blessing. I’m sorry to report that the state of their art is less than brilliant, consisting mostly of generic TV voices, unreflective homerism and incessant complaining about how the umpires are screwing the broadcasters’ teams. If I didn’t watch most games with half an eye, depending on the broadcasters’ vocal inflections to determine when to look up from my crossword puzzles, I’d turn off the sound altogether.
Part of my problem with today’s baseball voices no doubt stems from my being spoiled in that regard early in life. The first games I heard, on radio, were described by Bert Wilson, the Cubs’ announcer of the 1940s and early ‘50s. Wilson was a blatant homer whose signature line was “I don’t care who wins as long as it’s the Cubs,” but that was okay with my pre-teen and teen selves, which saw baseball just that way. Wilson died of a heart attack while still in his prime, something I blame on the frustrations of having to watch the terrible Cub teams of his later years. I still mourn him.
In 1955, the year of poor Bert’s demise, I went off to college at the U. of Illinois in downstate Champaign-Urbana. There, on St. Louis station KMOX, I was introduced to the jolly, raspy voice of Harry Caray, then the Cardinals’ broadcaster. I hated it when he mouthed the gloating line “the Cardinals are coming tra-la, tra-la” when the Redbirds surged, but came to love him in similar poses in Chicago, both with the White Sox (1971 –81) and Cubs, for whom he held forth from 1982 until his death in 1998.
Harry also was a homer, but his favoritism was that of a fan, not a shill; nothing quite matched the derision in his voice when he’d say “Heeeee popped it up!” after a Cub or Sox player failed with runners in scoring position. He exuded bonhomie, and, after spending an evening with him on Rush Street in the ‘80s, I can attest it was no pose. I also can tell you that his drink of choice was scotch and soda, not the beer he was paid to hawk.
I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1961 and ’62, when Ernie Harwell was breaking in as the Detroit Tigers’ voice. No one made baseball sound friendlier or more welcoming.
I worked in Pittsburgh from 1963 until mid-1966, where I got to listen to the great Bob Prince. No one made baseball more fun than “The Gunner,” so nicknamed not for any rapid-fire delivery, as many supposed, but because an irate husband once approached him weapon in hand while Prince was chatting up the guy’s wife in a bar. I could do a whole column on Prince. Maybe someday I will.
I lived in New York from mid 1966 into '69 and loved it when Phil Rizzuto would get so wrapped up in one of his goofy stories that he’d miss entire half-innings of the Yankees’ games he called. Rizzuto made scorekeeping history with his notation “ww”—for “wasn’t watching”— which he used for players’ turns at bat he missed.
Next to those giants, most of today’s broadcasters look small. You can’t tell one from another from their voices, their homerism grates rather than amuses, and if you removed the words “incredible” and “unbelievable” from their vocabularies, they hardly could speak. The other day I was watching a Detroit telecast of a Tigers-White Sox game when, in the drowsy second inning of a 0-0 game, Tiger pitcher Max Scherzer slipped a slider past a Sox hitter for a called second strike. “What a pitch! Unbelievable!” cried the Tigers’ announcer, Mario Impemba. “Wow!” chimed in his sidekick, Dan Dickerson.
“Unbelievable!” and “Wow!” for a strike two in a nothing situation? What do those jokers say when something really exceptional happens? Would they know it if they saw it?
This is not to say that all of today’s broadcasters, uh, suck. Jon Miller, who does the San Francisco Giants’ and ESPN national games, is concise and witty, and a nice counterpoint to his peevish ESPN partner, ex-player Joe Morgan. The L.A. Dodgers’ Vin Scully does a radio broadcast on TV but brings it off with his fine phrasing and elocution. The New York Mets’ Ron Darling is an able analyst, destined for bigger things on the tube
Far and away the most-interesting guy out there, though, is Ken Harrelson, the White Sox’s voice for most of the last 30 years. I have to admit that “The Hawk” is an acquired taste. He’s an awful umpiring whiner and was something of a bully with previous broadcasting partners Tom Paciorek and Darrin Jackson, although his present sidekick, the astute and acerbic Steve Stone, doesn’t let him get away with that. Every other word out of Harrelson’s mouth is a catch-phrase; how many “duck snorts” or “chopper two-hoppers” can you take in a nine-inning game, dadgummit?
Yet much of his shtick is funny and his enthusiasm for the game is infectious. One Saturday afternoon last month I was in a South Lake Tahoe sports book, playing the horses, while an Oakland A’s- Tampa Bay Rays game was running in an adjacent TV lounge. An A’s player hit a home run and two young men—apparently locals in a town that roots for Bay Area teams—arose as one and emitted Hawk’s signature cry, “You can put it on the board, YES!”
I had to laugh, as did everyone else within earshot. And you don’t often see such lines migrate in this era of parochial tastes and interests.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
RICKY FOR THE HEISMAN
I’ve never paid much attention to the awarding of the Heisman Trophy, given to the young man voted best college football player for a particular season. Begun in 1935 as an exercise in self-promotion by the Downtown Athletic Club, a now-defunct Manhattan men’s club, it honors individual performance in the quintessential team sport, and is more a product of hype than anything else.
Like many things in our culture, it’s gotten more objectionable as it’s gotten bigger, with the ESPN program that announces its awarding resembling nothing so much as a cheesy game show (“And the winner is….”). Caring who gets it is a sure sign that something’s lacking in your life.
However (and you knew there’d be a “however”), I have a candidate for this year’s award-- Ricky Dobbs of Navy. Not only was he the best and most exciting collegiate player I saw last season, and promises to be that again this year, but there’s every reason to believe that he’s an actual student at a university that exists for reasons other than fielding a football team. If those things eliminate him from consideration by the actual electors, so be it. I’d rather lose with Ricky than win with a more-conventional candidate from some Enormous State U.
The Heisman is about football, so a few words about Mr. Dobbs’ qualifications in that activity are in order. He’s a quarterback, the right position for the award (almost all the winners have been QBs or running backs), but not a usual sort of one, just as Navy isn’t your typical big-time football team. It runs what’s called the triple-option offense, which is based more on deceiving opponents than overpowering them. That’s because Navy doesn’t field the dozens of stud-jock aspiring pros that some of its foes do.
In the triple-option, the quarterback (Ricky) gets the ball from center and then must decide whether to pass it, pitch or hand it off, or run with it himself. It’s a reaction call based on what the defense does, and thus requires decision-making skills as well as physical ones. In practice, Navy’s is a running offense, and last season, en route to a 10-4 won-lost mark, it ran the ball about eight times as often as it threw it, a most-unusual ratio. It depends on crafting long drives with 4-, 5- or 6-yard gains, thus controlling the ball and keeping foes’ offenses off the field.
That doesn’t sound very interesting, but it can be. The best college game I saw last year was Navy versus Missouri in the Texas Bowl. Navy thoroughly flummoxed lummoxy Missou, going through, around and over it for a 35-13 victory, with the bouncy Dobbs running for 166 yards, passing for 130 more and scoring three touchdowns. He scored 27 TDs over the season, a national record for quarterbacks. In other games against the big boys last season, he helped Navy beat Notre Dame and lose narrowly to Ohio State.
It’s remarkable in itself that Navy can compete with the likes of Missouri, ND and OSU. While athletes undoubtedly get preferred treatment for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy (as they also do at Ivy League and other schools that award no athletic scholarships, per se, but still field varsity teams), by all accounts they get no breaks once they’re there. Freshman year at Annapolis begins with seven grueling summer weeks of what amounts to basic training, and every midshipman (that’s what a student is called) has to complete a four-year course load heavy with math and the physical sciences in addition to military subjects.
School days begin with 6:30 a.m. reveille and end with lights out at 11 p.m. Uniforms are worn everywhere and there’s lots of marching and formations. Dorm rooms must meet white-glove neatness standards. (Yours did, too, right?) After graduation there’s a five-year service obligation that can involve getting shot at. You have to wonder how those guys keep their minds on football even part time.
If anyone can juggle multiple obligations, apparently it’s Ricky. Not only is he captain of this year’s Navy team—a signal honor-- he’s also vice-president of his senior class. In high school in his native Douglasville, Georgia, just west of Atlanta, his nickname was “The Mayor,” indicating an active and gregarious nature.
His Navy web-site biography notes that his birth date, January 31, 1988, was the day Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory. Young Mr. Dobbs says he’d like to do that, too, once his Navy stint is ended, then go on to be president… of the United States.
The kid doesn’t make it easy on himself, does he? That alone deserves a trophy these days.
Like many things in our culture, it’s gotten more objectionable as it’s gotten bigger, with the ESPN program that announces its awarding resembling nothing so much as a cheesy game show (“And the winner is….”). Caring who gets it is a sure sign that something’s lacking in your life.
However (and you knew there’d be a “however”), I have a candidate for this year’s award-- Ricky Dobbs of Navy. Not only was he the best and most exciting collegiate player I saw last season, and promises to be that again this year, but there’s every reason to believe that he’s an actual student at a university that exists for reasons other than fielding a football team. If those things eliminate him from consideration by the actual electors, so be it. I’d rather lose with Ricky than win with a more-conventional candidate from some Enormous State U.
The Heisman is about football, so a few words about Mr. Dobbs’ qualifications in that activity are in order. He’s a quarterback, the right position for the award (almost all the winners have been QBs or running backs), but not a usual sort of one, just as Navy isn’t your typical big-time football team. It runs what’s called the triple-option offense, which is based more on deceiving opponents than overpowering them. That’s because Navy doesn’t field the dozens of stud-jock aspiring pros that some of its foes do.
In the triple-option, the quarterback (Ricky) gets the ball from center and then must decide whether to pass it, pitch or hand it off, or run with it himself. It’s a reaction call based on what the defense does, and thus requires decision-making skills as well as physical ones. In practice, Navy’s is a running offense, and last season, en route to a 10-4 won-lost mark, it ran the ball about eight times as often as it threw it, a most-unusual ratio. It depends on crafting long drives with 4-, 5- or 6-yard gains, thus controlling the ball and keeping foes’ offenses off the field.
That doesn’t sound very interesting, but it can be. The best college game I saw last year was Navy versus Missouri in the Texas Bowl. Navy thoroughly flummoxed lummoxy Missou, going through, around and over it for a 35-13 victory, with the bouncy Dobbs running for 166 yards, passing for 130 more and scoring three touchdowns. He scored 27 TDs over the season, a national record for quarterbacks. In other games against the big boys last season, he helped Navy beat Notre Dame and lose narrowly to Ohio State.
It’s remarkable in itself that Navy can compete with the likes of Missouri, ND and OSU. While athletes undoubtedly get preferred treatment for admission to the U.S. Naval Academy (as they also do at Ivy League and other schools that award no athletic scholarships, per se, but still field varsity teams), by all accounts they get no breaks once they’re there. Freshman year at Annapolis begins with seven grueling summer weeks of what amounts to basic training, and every midshipman (that’s what a student is called) has to complete a four-year course load heavy with math and the physical sciences in addition to military subjects.
School days begin with 6:30 a.m. reveille and end with lights out at 11 p.m. Uniforms are worn everywhere and there’s lots of marching and formations. Dorm rooms must meet white-glove neatness standards. (Yours did, too, right?) After graduation there’s a five-year service obligation that can involve getting shot at. You have to wonder how those guys keep their minds on football even part time.
If anyone can juggle multiple obligations, apparently it’s Ricky. Not only is he captain of this year’s Navy team—a signal honor-- he’s also vice-president of his senior class. In high school in his native Douglasville, Georgia, just west of Atlanta, his nickname was “The Mayor,” indicating an active and gregarious nature.
His Navy web-site biography notes that his birth date, January 31, 1988, was the day Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory. Young Mr. Dobbs says he’d like to do that, too, once his Navy stint is ended, then go on to be president… of the United States.
The kid doesn’t make it easy on himself, does he? That alone deserves a trophy these days.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
DECLINE AND FALL
A couple of months ago—when summer was starting—I prayed for an end to the Gulf oil-leak disaster. I reasoned that the daily gush of bad news it engendered was souring the national mood and preventing a return of some much-needed optimism.
Now the leak has been plugged, but the mood is no better. Alas, the hits to our pride just keep on coming.
Among the latest was relayed by the New York Times’ sports page last Sunday. The headline was innocuous enough--“New Strength Atop the PGA Tour”-- but the body of the story related how “international” players, meaning those from countries other than the U.S. of A, had won 17 of the first 34 tournaments on our leading golf circuit, an unprecedented number. It went on to note that “internationals” had captured two of the men’s sport’s first three majors, that 12 of the Tour’s top-30 players were Europeans against 10 Yanks, and that youth appeared to be on the side of the foreigners, portending future setbacks.
Ohmygosh, thought I. If we’ve lost golf, what’s left?
The news was especially bad because it signaled the end rather than the beginning of our surrender of the so-called “country club” sports to alien hordes. Middle-class America used to produce top-flight competitors galore in those polite activities, but, apparently, not so much any more. Arizona could pass a law to fix things—and probably will-- but it wouldn’t help. When, as the poet says, the center cannot hold, we’re in deep doo-doo.
Exhibit A in this regard is tennis, and has been for some time. Where Jimmy, John, Andre and Pete once ruled the men’s side of the sport, a Swiss (Roger Federererer) and a Spaniard (Rafael Nadal) now hold sway, with no end in sight to their reigns. Worse, no American was among the top 10 players in the latest ATP rankings for the first time since the measure was introduced 37 years ago. Andy Roddick was the top Yank at No. 11, and he’ll turn 28 in a couple of weeks, not a good thing in a young man’s game. Behind him are only Sam Querrey and John Isner, a couple of misplaced basketball players with little chance for “major” glory. The outlook isn’t brilliant.
Women’s tennis looks better, but only on the surface. The Williams sisters Venus and Serena (African-Americas and, thus, hardly typical country-club types) still are slugging it out successfully with the Olgas and Svetlanas in WTAland, but Venus turned 30 in June and Serena will be 29 next month, and age probably will mean the same thing to them that it does to Our Andy. Beyond Venus and Serena you have to drop all the way to No. 45 to find the next American in the rankings, and to No. 80 after that.
The best women golfers of this century’s first decade were Annika Sorenstam of Sweden and Lorena Ochoa of Mexico. Now, mostly South Koreans lead the pack. In the early years of the Asian influx a proposal made the rounds that LPGA Tour players be required to speak at least some English. That was shouted down as un-PC and the Tour decided to join rather than fight the trend. Once the LPGA was a just-about all-American affair. Now, 12 of its 27 events are played outside the U.S., and that number grows annually.
The internationalization of men’s golf also has been in progress for some time, but until this year it’s been obscured by the sport’s recent domination by Tiger Woods. Alas again, the bimbo eruption that punctured Our Tiger’s cherished cocoon of control has meant that he no longer can sink his putz (oops, putts) like he used to, and “internationals” have moved quickest to fill the void he left. Maybe Tiger can get his mojo back, maybe not. Meantime, the likes of Northern Ireland’s Graeme McDowell (June’s U.S. Open winner) and South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen (the British Open champ) are thriving.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. Tennis and golf require access to expensive facilities and instruction, tying them to the better-off economically. Talent being spread about equally around the globe (as I believe it is), success thus goes to the youngsters in that group who commit early and put in the hours on the practice courts or tees that almost no one thinks of as fun. Our middle-class kids, with their multiple-choice lives, aren’t willing to put aside their video games and Blackberries long enough to do that. Unless or until that changes, we’d better get used to hearing other national anthems played on the “country-club” victory stands.
Now the leak has been plugged, but the mood is no better. Alas, the hits to our pride just keep on coming.
Among the latest was relayed by the New York Times’ sports page last Sunday. The headline was innocuous enough--“New Strength Atop the PGA Tour”-- but the body of the story related how “international” players, meaning those from countries other than the U.S. of A, had won 17 of the first 34 tournaments on our leading golf circuit, an unprecedented number. It went on to note that “internationals” had captured two of the men’s sport’s first three majors, that 12 of the Tour’s top-30 players were Europeans against 10 Yanks, and that youth appeared to be on the side of the foreigners, portending future setbacks.
Ohmygosh, thought I. If we’ve lost golf, what’s left?
The news was especially bad because it signaled the end rather than the beginning of our surrender of the so-called “country club” sports to alien hordes. Middle-class America used to produce top-flight competitors galore in those polite activities, but, apparently, not so much any more. Arizona could pass a law to fix things—and probably will-- but it wouldn’t help. When, as the poet says, the center cannot hold, we’re in deep doo-doo.
Exhibit A in this regard is tennis, and has been for some time. Where Jimmy, John, Andre and Pete once ruled the men’s side of the sport, a Swiss (Roger Federererer) and a Spaniard (Rafael Nadal) now hold sway, with no end in sight to their reigns. Worse, no American was among the top 10 players in the latest ATP rankings for the first time since the measure was introduced 37 years ago. Andy Roddick was the top Yank at No. 11, and he’ll turn 28 in a couple of weeks, not a good thing in a young man’s game. Behind him are only Sam Querrey and John Isner, a couple of misplaced basketball players with little chance for “major” glory. The outlook isn’t brilliant.
Women’s tennis looks better, but only on the surface. The Williams sisters Venus and Serena (African-Americas and, thus, hardly typical country-club types) still are slugging it out successfully with the Olgas and Svetlanas in WTAland, but Venus turned 30 in June and Serena will be 29 next month, and age probably will mean the same thing to them that it does to Our Andy. Beyond Venus and Serena you have to drop all the way to No. 45 to find the next American in the rankings, and to No. 80 after that.
The best women golfers of this century’s first decade were Annika Sorenstam of Sweden and Lorena Ochoa of Mexico. Now, mostly South Koreans lead the pack. In the early years of the Asian influx a proposal made the rounds that LPGA Tour players be required to speak at least some English. That was shouted down as un-PC and the Tour decided to join rather than fight the trend. Once the LPGA was a just-about all-American affair. Now, 12 of its 27 events are played outside the U.S., and that number grows annually.
The internationalization of men’s golf also has been in progress for some time, but until this year it’s been obscured by the sport’s recent domination by Tiger Woods. Alas again, the bimbo eruption that punctured Our Tiger’s cherished cocoon of control has meant that he no longer can sink his putz (oops, putts) like he used to, and “internationals” have moved quickest to fill the void he left. Maybe Tiger can get his mojo back, maybe not. Meantime, the likes of Northern Ireland’s Graeme McDowell (June’s U.S. Open winner) and South Africa’s Louis Oosthuizen (the British Open champ) are thriving.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. Tennis and golf require access to expensive facilities and instruction, tying them to the better-off economically. Talent being spread about equally around the globe (as I believe it is), success thus goes to the youngsters in that group who commit early and put in the hours on the practice courts or tees that almost no one thinks of as fun. Our middle-class kids, with their multiple-choice lives, aren’t willing to put aside their video games and Blackberries long enough to do that. Unless or until that changes, we’d better get used to hearing other national anthems played on the “country-club” victory stands.
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