WORMS TURN

The baseball season is headed into its September home stretch as usual, but this year things seem out of whack. I refer, of course, to the National League, where the Washington Nationals lead the East and the Pittsburgh Pirates also are contending for a playoff spot. The natural order has been violated, much like if the sun suddenly rose in the west or a Republican politician had a good word for Obamacare.

Of the two disturbances in the Force, it’s hard to say which is weirder. If the Pirates just finish the campaign with a winning record it would be astonishing because they’ve been on the losing side of the ledger for the last 19 years, the longest such streak in U.S. professional sports history. From 2005 through 2010 they averaged 97 losses a season, another milestone in futility.

 The Nats’ record is all recent, because they only moved to the nation’s capital from Montreal in 2005, but they’ve yet to finish a plus-.500 season there.  And although the Expos are their biological parents their true legacy is that of the Washington Senators,  a franchise so woebegone that in the 1955 musical “Damn Yankees” a guy had to sell his soul to the Devil (Ray Walston, actually) to cop a pennant for the team, and even then almost fell short.

The fact that baseball still is doing business in Washington is surprising.  While the D.C. area has a big population (about 5.5 million) its favorite sport is politics, with much of its professional class consisting of transients who are there for a few years to pad their resumes with public service on their way to more-lucrative employment elsewhere. The city’s two previous shots at the Big Leagues missed: the Senators moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul after a 60-year run (1901-60) and the expansion outfit that replaced them departed for Texas after 12 mostly futile years in 1972. Together the two teams accounted for a grand total of three American League pennants, the last coming in 1933, and one World Series title, in 1924. That record makes even Chicago’s look good.

The Nationals’ name is borrowed from a sometimes-handle of the Senators’ first incarnation, but a more-apt moniker would be the Exemptions, after the anti-trust pass our Government still gives the National Pastime. That freebie isn’t worth what it was before the game’s so-called Reserve Clause bit the dust in the 1970s, but it still gives a legal waiver to some of the game’s dubious employment and administrative practices and packed enough clout to make the city a perennial first in the next-franchise line.

Sportswriters love uplift so it would be nice to report that the two teams grittily bootstrapped their way to improvement, if not yet success. Fact is, luck has had at least as much to do with their rise as skill. The Pirates’ surge owes mostly to the blossoming of Andrew McCutcheon, their 25-year-old centerfielder. A first-round draft choice in 2005, he’s become a star in his fourth Major League season, having a Most-Valuable-Player-type campaign. Slim and swift as well as strong, he reminds of a pre-steroidal Barry Bonds, the star of Pittsburgh’s last contending teams in the early 1990s.   

The major luck part of the Bucs’ equation has come from A.J. Burnett. The team picked the much-tattooed 35-year-old pitcher off the scrap heap after two bad seasons with the New York Yankees, and he’s rewarded them with a 15-5 won-lost mark whose plus-10 standings difference exceeds their  nine-game margin over .500 (70-61).  Hamazing.

The Nats have thrived off doing poorly, which is how it’s supposed to work with the annual amateur-player draft but rarely does. In 2008 their 59-102 won-lost record was baseball’s worst and earned them the No. 1 pick the next year. Often that’s no big deal but that time it allowed them to draft Stephen Strasburg, the most-heralded pitching prospect in memory.

If that weren’t enough they were stinko again on the field  in 2009 (59-103) and the next year got to use another no-brainer pick to corral Bryce Harper, the top-rated position-player prospect since Joe Mauer 10 years earlier. Strasburg’s now their top starter and a Cy Young Award candidate, and while Harper is no star yet at age 19 despite his All-Star Game selection in July, he’s been an everyday starter for the team in center field.

 The guy who was supposed to carry the run-producing load for the Nats is the ex-Phillie Jason Werth, whom they gave an eye-popping contract ($126 million over seven years) in 2011. That hasn’t gone well—Werth had a bad first season in D.C. and has missed most of this one with a broken wrist—but a much-cheaper Adam LaRoche, a first-baseman long on my “most underrated” list, has picked up the slack. Similarly, the young left-handed pitcher Gio Gonzalez, who was passed through three organizations (the White Sox, Phillies and A’s) before landing in Washington, has been almost as good as Strasburg and gives the Nats the second high-quality starter it takes to make serious noise.

Strasburg has been the Nats’ major “story” this season. He both wowed and worried us in his 2010 rookie year, striking out everyone in sight before going on the DL, then returning and DLing again with elbow woes that led to Tommy John surgery.  His last season was pretty much spent rehabbing, but this year he’s been great.

Amazingly again, the Nats may not let Strasburg make it to the postseason. Wary about the 24-year-old’s arm, they’ve put him on a 160-inning limit this year, and since he’s already logged 150 he’s already just about had it. Nat brass has said it figures the team will be a contender for years and wants him around to help.

A couple of points seem worth making here. One is that, given the current state of play, Strasburg and other pitching phenoms probably show up in the Bigs with stressed arms from all the throwing they did in hyper-competitive kids’ leagues starting at age 9 or 10, and anything they do as pros is incidental to that. A better prescription for professional longevity is to let gifted athletes play a variety of sports as children and hold off on specialization until they’re 15 or 16.

 The other is that things don’t always go as expected. My first sports awareness came at age 7 with the Chicago Cubs’ 1945 pennant drive, and I recall not being terribly upset by their World Series loss that year because I assumed they’d have lots of other chances. You know how that’s worked out.

NOTE: If you haven’t visited chicagosidesports.com lately, you should. It’s been running lots of lively pieces, including a few by me. A link is above. 

ACT II?

                One of my more pleasant writing assignments came about 20 years ago when an acquaintance at Lyons & Buford Press in New York told me his firm was publishing an American paperback edition of Roger Bannister’s book “The Four-Minute Mile”, and asked me if I’d do an introduction.

 I accepted quickly even after he’d apologized in advance for the pay he was offering for my 1,500 words—low three figures I now recall. The clincher was that I’d also receive an autographed copy from the author.  Truth to tell, I might have done it just for that.

I’d long admired Bannister, not just for his signal athletic achievement but for the manner in which he accomplished it and for what he did afterward.  No single-(or simple-) minded jock, he was a medical student engaged in serious study when he broke the magical mile mark in 1954. When he retired from sport later that year, after defeating his archrival John Landy at the Commonwealth Games in a mile that’s still worth replaying, he embarked on a career as a neurologist that included research accomplishments as well as private practice.  A lecture hall at his medical school is named for him, something he’s said he ranked ahead of his running honors.

 Sir Roger’s example came to mind many times as I watched the just-concluded Olympic Games. As one after another of the young winners exulted in their glories, I kept wondering what they might do for encores, and not on the playing fields.  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there are no second acts in American lives, and while the line qualifies mainly as a cute misstatement it’s usually all too true when it comes to athletes.   Worse, I have the feeling that I care more about that than do most of the people immediately involved.

Many things have changed since Roger Bannister’s day, and for many years thereafter.  Until about 30 years ago participation in high-level sports still was considered to be an interlude between youth and adulthood, with practitioners routinely pursuing off-season education or jobs that turned into livelihoods once their playing days were done. If you frequented Chicago’s LaSalle Street during the 1980s you might have bumped into Terry Brennan, Glenn Beckert or George Seals, ex-jocks plying their new trades in the financial canyon. Old athletes were all over the area, turning a buck on their names (like the putative restauranteurs Mike Ditka, Michael Jordan and Jim McMahon) if not their labors.  Ex-Bear Bill Osmanski had a long dental career in the area, ex-Cub pitcher Rich Nye was a veterinarian and Ken Holtzman ran an insurance brokerage. The list went on.

Today, of course, so much money is available even in Olympic sports that receive scant attention at other times that any necessity to earn a living post-sports is negated for some. Michael Phelps, the swimming hero, is retiring at age 27 with a reported $40 million in the bank from endorsements and with additional contracts in hand worth that much or more.  All he needs now are some tax tips from Mitt Romney and a stockbroker who’ll  explain to him the principles of risk and reward and how they apply to everyone, including him. The cautionary tale is necessary because many (most?) jocks possess the combination of ignorance and arrogance that make them easy marks for financial predators. It’s a jungle out there.

  But there’s more to life than money, and if the prospect of retirement at 27 isn’t daunting to Phelps, it should be.  The actuarial tables say that he has at least 50 more years on Earth, and he’ll have to fill them somehow.  I remember being in Las Vegas some years ago, a few days in advance of a fight I was covering, and leaving my hotel at mid-morning on my reporting rounds. The place had a tennis complex and as I left I saw Sugar Ray Leonard, newly retired from the ring and there to make appearances, on the court smacking shots against a ball machine. Five or six hours later I returned to find him still at it. The guy is seriously bored, I told myself, and a few months later wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d reneged on his retirement, preferring the rigors of his brutal sport to idleness. A swimming pool has to look very good compared with that.

It’s better to fill the hours in interesting ways, and that’s where education comes in. Last week I chuckled at an Al Michaels TV interview with the American gymnastics darlings Gabby Douglas, who’s 16 years old, and Aly Raisman, 18.  When Michaels asked them about their future plans, both cheerfully said they’d be taking their circus on the road in the coming months and sticking with their sport thereafter.  Better answers would have been high school for Gabby and college for Aly.  Athletically speaking, maturity won’t be their friend, but it could be intellectually if they play their cards right.  Their parents should clue them in on that.

Gabby and Aly—and Michael, too— can find good examples aplenty if they choose to broaden their horizons. Seb Coe, the man in charge of the London Olympics, was a gold-medal-winning middle-distance runner in the 1980 and ’84 Games and later a member of the British Parliament. Jim Scherr, a freestyle wrestler for the U.S. at Seoul in 1988, spent 10 years as chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee.   

Dot Richardson, a star softballer in 1996 and 2000, is an orthopedic surgeon. Figure skater Peggy Fleming ran a winery and paints landscapes. Magic Johnson is involved in numerous profitable and worthwhile enterprises.  Boxer George Foreman got behind a wonderful grill. Bruce Jenner, the 1976 decathlon champion, became a Kardashian.

OK, skip that last one.

Required reading for every Olympian—and for other jocks as well—should be the Irwin Shaw short story, “The 80-Yard Run.” It’s about a man who looks back in middle age to realize that his proudest achievement was a football play he made in college. It’s a sad story, but that’s the point. Forewarned is forearmed.

 

TOO BIG TO FAIL

                

I like to check out the on-line polls newspapers run, and did so a couple weeks ago at the Chicago Tribune sports-page site. The question concerned what decision the NCAA should reach in the Penn State case. The alternatives were nothing (it’s not a sports matter), the “death penalty” (no football for a year or two), and lesser sanctions.  More than 70% of the previous voters had checked the “death penalty” box. I joined the less than 10% that opted for nothing.

             

   I did so not because I thought the offenses involved—centering on the now-well-known predations of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky-- weren’t deserving of punishment. Quite the contrary, they were so heinous they transcended the confines of sport in which the NCAA functions. What Sandusky and the cover-up perpetrators did was a matter for the courts and the Pennsylvania legislature to deal with, and the process already had begun with Sandusky’s criminal conviction. Even the so-called death penalty would have trivialized the matter.

                The penalties that were handed down this week only underscored that conclusion. Measuring Sandusky’s victims’ travail in bowl-game bans, scholarship reductions and victory forfeitures (ha!) put them in the category of the recruiting violations and grades cheating that the organization usually handles. The $60 million fine, which will go to child-protection agencies, was a nice touch, but Penn State should have thought of that itself.

                The whole exercise illustrated the self-importance of the cartel that manages big-time college sports, and its essential nature.  Lost in just about any discussion of the NCAA’s role is the fact that it is both the promoter and policeman of the activities it governs, and when there’s a conflict between the two functions the promoter always wins. That’s also the case with our professional sports leagues, by the way.

 The idea that the death penalty might be invoked was naïve in the extreme. Any such action would have been bad for business, not only for Penn State but also for the 12 schools its football team plays annually, creating intolerable holes in their schedules and athletics-department budgets, and the NCAA is all about business.   To use a line that emerged from another, larger lapse of governance, Penn State was too big to fail. Any of the 100 or so other college-sports programs that fit the “big-time” label also fit that category.

 The usual image used by college-sports’ critics is that of the tail wagging the dog. Trouble is, these days it can be hard to tell which is which. The gag line that a university should strive to be a credit to its football team is funny because it’s so often true. At Penn State the university didn’t measure up.

The term the NCAA usually uses to justify the imposition of its harshest penalties is a lack of “institutional control” at the university in question, meaning that a school’s higher-ups didn’t properly oversee the athletics-department types. That couldn’t be claimed at Penn State, where according to the report by former FBI director Louis Freeh the university president, a vice president, the athletics director and the football head coach—the venerable Joe Paterno—were in cahoots in covering up Sandusky’s crimes.  There was institutional control aplenty in Happy Valley, all aimed at protecting the football program at the expense of the boys Sandusky raped over the 13-year span of the conspiracy. Making it all the more appalling was the fact that it concerned an entertainment enterprise that falls outside any rational definition of a university’s mission.

Many Penn Staters don’t see it that way, of course.  Neither do the millions of deluded others who equate a university’s standing with that of its sports teams. The Pennsylvania legislature, which really runs the school, should have shelved football indefinitely, out of atonement and to make the point that the sun would come up without it.  It hasn’t because the voters wouldn’t stand for it. Go Lions!

    The NCAA must shoulder blame for helping create the monster that college sports have become.  So should the nation’s sporting press for elevating Paterno to sainthood before the stuff hit the fan. We news people like to say we revere the truth, but we love an easy story line more, and buying Joe’s self-proclaimed “Success With Honor” mantra was as natural as taking a second helping at the press-box game-day buffet.  

I had no idea what Joe, et al, would hide later on, but I never bought his sanctity act. In 1984, when I was just starting my Wall Street Journal column, I took note of his repeated claim of 90% graduation rates for his footballers with a piece debunking it, pointing out that it didn’t include players who’d flunked out, dropped out, were flushed or turned pro before their senior years. As best as I could determine, the team’s real rate was a quite-respectable 60% or so, but Joe felt compelled to gild the lily anyway. Anyone who’d lie about small things probably also wouldn’t be straight about bigger ones, I figured.

The truth about Joe—and about every other successful big-time college coach—wasn’t that he was bad or good but that he was a hard man who made it in a hard business, one in which the only results that count are on the scoreboard.  The motto “Whatever It Takes” hangs on many locker-room walls, and applies to coaches as well as to players.  We should remember that before casting our heroes in bronze.

WHO'S IN FIRST?

            The Olympics begin in London in a couple of weeks (July 27), and I’ll be just where I want to be, which is in front of a television set. While it’s generally true that everyone at home sees sporting events better than anyone in the stadium, it’s especially true for the Summer Games, a smorgasbord so large that no one can down it whole.

            As a free-range columnist at five such fests (in Los Angeles, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney), I would peruse each day’s crowded calendar and pick the venue I thought would yield the most interesting results. I didn’t always choose right, so I missed a lot of really good stuff.

            The joke that every Olympics news person knows is about the reporter who calls his desk during the Games. “What’s happening at the Olympics?” his editor asks. Replies the reporter, “How should I know? I’m at the Olympics.”

            A hi-def TV, comfortable lounger and clear personal schedule won’t solve all Olympic-spectating problems, however. At these Games, as at its predecessors, the question of who’s winning will be problematic, not so much in individual events as in the national standings that summarize them.

Nationalism is a touchy subject on Olympia, which like Billy Martin in the old Bud Lite commercials, feels very strongly both ways about the matter. On the one hand, the official Olympic creed proclaims that the most important thing about the Games is participating, not winning, but on the other hand their administrators stoutly resist doing anyway with the national uniforms, flags and victory-stand anthems that stir popular passions, sometimes in unpleasant ways, but are good for business. So while the national medal standings are unofficial, they’re mentioned prominently and without protest in every account of the proceedings, and followed avidly.

Trouble is, the standings can raise almost as many questions as they answer. A case in point was the last Summer Games in Beijing, where athletes from the United States collected the most overall medals—110 to 100 for runnerup China-- but the Chinese won more gold medals, 51 to 36. Further, the fairness of the whole system is questionable when one notes that a 10-second effort in the men’s 100-meter dash final counts for the same number of medals (3-- one gold, one silver and one bronze) as the basketball tournaments in which 12-person teams must prevail over a grind of eight 40-minute games. How about a count that gives the basketball-medalist nations 12 medals each instead of one, huh? Huh?

  The U.S., of course, is a large and rich nation with a deep gene pool, so it always does well in the summer standings, no matter how they’re tallied. Since the modern Games began in 1896 we lead the medals list with 2,302 overall and 929 golds to l,l22 and 440 for second-place USSR/Russia and 725 and 208.5 for third-place Great Britain. We’ll again will be in the hunt for the top spot in London, along with Chinese, whose emerging economy has been harnessed to produce athletic glory from its abundant human stock.

Do not, however, expect to see American and Chinese jocks vying head-to-head in many events; rather, they’ll mostly be playing different games, as they did in 2008. The Summer Olympics encompasses 302 medal events spread over 26 sports. They’re really not one event but many, and which are most important depends on where you sit.

 For example, Americans traditionally have been very good at track and field and swimming. That’s fortunate for us because T&F (called “athletics” in Olympic parlance) is the main medals source in the Games, with 47 events offering 141 medals, and swimming is second with 34 and 102. In ’08, we won 23 medals in track and 31 in swimming, while the Chinese, with 2 and 6 respectively, were pretty much a non-factor in each.

So why weren’t we runaway victors in the medals count? Because the Chinese put their energies elsewhere, collecting a total of 36 medals in diving, weightlifting, badminton and table tennis, sports in which the U.S. registered a big “O.” You can bet that those activities received mucho TV time in the People’s Republic, maybe as much as T&F and swimming got in our land.

The Chinese approach to the Olympics is reminiscent of that of the former East Germany, another odious regime. With a population of less the 20 million people, the East Germans set out to demonstrate the superiority of their system by pouring their resources into winning big on the Olympic stage. They succeeded by finishing second or third in the medals count in four Summer Games (1972, 1976, 1980 and 1988) and collecting more metal than the U.S. in two of those (’76 and ’88).

They did it mostly by zeroing in on sports where participation and performance standards were relatively low, namely women’s track and field, women’s swimming, rowing and canoeing. They eschewed team sports because these yielded too few rewards (see above). And—oh, yeah—they doped like crazy.

About the only sport that’s important in both the U.S. and China—and where the two nations will clash directly for superiority in London—is gymnastics. The Chinese got the better of that contest in Beijing, winning 18 medals to the U.S.’s 10, but the U.S. will field strong squads on both the men’s and women’s sides this year, and should make a game of it. I’m sure you’ll be tuned in.

As usual, women’s gymnastics will get lots of TV time in the U.S. That’s because its participants are young, tiny and cute, and do the sort of circus tricks that boggle the mind. But while gymnastics is fun to watch it’s brutally hard to do, and its fearsome injury rate makes its label of “football for girls” apt. I watch, but through the fingers that cover my eyes. Real football is getting to be like that, too.

  

FINDING TIGER'S MOJO

As a writer I enjoyed covering golf, partly because its deliberate pace encouraged analysis and partly because its participants—mostly nice, middle-class guys—were unusually articulate for athletes. Also, golf courses are pleasant places to stroll once the necessity to hit the ball has been removed. For newsies the game provides a good walk unspoiled. 

I don’t watch it very often now.  I don’t know most of the tour players anymore and sans that contact find them hard to warm up to. I hate to sound like Andy Rooney, but it seems to me that most past-era golfers had more personality in their big toes than the present ones have in their whole bodies. Every young American player these days is a country-club kid who majored in greens maintenance at some Sunbelt U., and every European contestant has been a pro since puberty. What can you say about these guys once you’ve given their scores?

But I do tune in occasionally, and a couple of Sundays ago turned on the last round of the U.S. Open about when the leaders were teeing off. The first guy on my screen was Tiger Woods, which wasn’t surprising. Wherever he’s played the last 15 years, in contention or not, he’s been the star, and he was among the top-dozen low scorers teeing off this day.  Surprise, though; the announcers were saying that Tiger was having a really bad round and had dropped well off the pace. They mentioned his name only in passing during the four hours that remained in the telecast.

It took a while to sink in, but it’s occurred to me since that an era might be over. Tiger ‘s 75-73 finish in the Open, which dropped him from a first-place tie to a final 21^st place, and coming on top of his 40^th-place finish in last April’s Masters Tournament, seems to have convinced even the TV people that he’s no longer the whole story in golf. The days of all-Tiger-all-the-time appear to be over, at least for the time being.  

Don’t get me wrong, Tiger still can play. He’s won a couple of events on the PGA Tour this year, might add another this weekend, and ranks high on several of the circuit’s statistical categories. He’s a threat to win in any given week but, then, so are Bubba Watson, Rory McIlroy, Lee Westwood and Phil Michelson, among others. Not only has the Tour’s A list been lengthened to eight or 10 names, from one, but the idea that Tiger will beat Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 career victories  in the game’s “majors” (the Masters, U.S. and British Opens and PGA Championship) no longer is taken for granted. Tiger has 14 but none since 2008, and any future wins promise to be harder to achieve than his previous ones.

 If you follow this space you probably know that I’ve never been a Tiger fan; I never wished him bad luck but I always found him hard to root for. Part of that has been my reaction to his upbringing as a golfing prodigy by his soldier-father Earl, a process that was more an exercise in conditioning than anything resembling a childhood. When he first appeared on the PGA Tour in 1996, at age 20, Tiger was not simply a talented young man embarking on an adventure but a tycoon with multi-million-dollar endorsement contracts in hand and surrounded by a posse of handlers from IMG, the sports agency and marketing octopus. Anyone wishing a moment of his time had to run a gauntlet of IMG trolls, and few made it.  He’s always been more of a brand than a person, and neither the passage of time (he’s 36 now) nor adversity in various forms has changed that.

One reason for Tiger’s decline has been physical.  Like baseball pitchers, golfers spend their time honing a single motion, so it’s a stretch to call many of them athletes. The young Tiger, though, was a jock in every way, and his superior strength and flexibility gave him an advantage over his competitors that, I believe, never has been recognized properly.  The years, however, inevitably take their toll, and two knee surgeries plus a variety of muscle strains have showed he’s not exempt. Even though one can play top-level golf well into one’s 40s, Tiger ain’t the man he used to be, and probably knows it better than anyone.

The main stones in Tiger’s shoe, of course, are the revelations that changed him from a sports-page character to a tabloid star. They came to light in the most-humiliating way after he rammed his Escalade into a tree near his driveway in the wee hours of a November, 2009, morning, fleeing a wrathful wife who’d discovered his infidelities. The bimbo explosion that followed cost him his family and a divorce settlement reportedly worth $750 million. It made Bill Clinton look like a friar, destroyed Tiger’s carefully groomed image of rectitude and discipline and turned his name into a punch line.

That would be painful for anyone, but must be especially so for Tiger, a man for whom control is everything. The fellow who exacted a code of omerta from friends and associates suddenly found that, rather than being in a row, his ducks had scattered, probably never to be realigned.  He’s living the popular nightmare of appearing in public in his Jockey shorts.

Tiger dropped from view for six months, receiving “treatment” for “sex addiction.”  When he returned to the links the depth of the injury to his psyche was apparent in his two-year (2010 and 2011) failure to win on a Tour he once dominated. He’s become more accessible now, but in a stilted sort of way, as though he’s had to be schooled to handle normal conversations. On the course he presents a cranky, peevish mien that bespeaks dissatisfaction with his lot.

Tiger ought to read Andre Agassi’s biography, “Open.” Like Tiger, the tennis player was a wonderchild who wrapped himself in a profitable but stifling corporate mantle for much of his career. In his 30s, though, he found his own voice, which led to pleasure in his work and a post-sports existence that seems altogether worthwhile. If Andre can do it, maybe Tiger can, too.     

  

SCORING

                A distinction often is made between participant and spectator sports, but the line between them needn’t be as firm as it’s usually drawn. For instance, horse racing is a participant sport in my book because without betting there’s no racing, and anyone who takes the trouble to bet intelligently is participating, even though he doesn’t get manure on his shoes doing it.

               

              Similarly, one can participate in baseball from the stands by keeping score, or, more precisely, keeping a scorecard. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, and it’s one of the main things that draws me to the game. With pen or pencil in hand, I not only record each play but also describe and evaluate it.  Indeed, in some hands scoring can approach art, and if the artist usually is the sole appreciator of the work, much of art is like that.

                It’s worth noting, I think, that of our Big Three sports (baseball, football and basketball) baseball is the only one that offers the evaluator role to its fans. Every ballpark in the land has scorecards for sale, and a fair number (albeit, sadly, a shrinking one) of people use them.

 You can buy scorebooks for basketball, and I used one as a young reporter who had to produce his own box scores for high school games.  Eventually I became a pretty fair hand at it. But the hectic pace of most games pretty well precludes their employment by the folks in the stands.

 There’s no standard way to keep track of football action, leaving everyone in the press boxes to his own devices. I had my own play-by-play format, using players’ uniform numbers and abbreviations, but the product served mainly to tide me over until the home team distributed its official, spelled-out sheets.  I’ve never seen a football fan even try this.

Baseball lends itself particularly to scorecard keeping because of its leisurely tempo and static player positioning.  Its basis is a system that assigns a number to each player on the field, to be used when he figures in a play. Pitcher is 1, catcher is 2, first baseman 3, second baseman 4, third baseman 5, shortstop 6, left fielder 7, center fielder 8 and right fielder 9. A shortstop-to-first groundout is recorded as 6-3, a routine fly ball to the left fielder as a 7.

Hits normally are inscribed by tracing the outline of a diamond with each base advanced; some score sheets come with faintly outlined diamonds in each box to facilitate that process. An extra fillip, which I use, involves noting to which field a hit was made; for instance, I record a single to center as /8.  If you want to be more detailed you can note whether the hit was a line drive (8L), grounder (8G) or bloop (8B).

 One way of scoring a home run is to trace the full outline of the diamond and either fill it in or put a dot in its center. I circle the letters HR and add the number of the field to which it was hit (e.g, HR9). I find that it stands out better that way.

Additional standard symbols come into play. “E” is for an error, “W” for a walk, “IW” for an intentional walk, SB for a stolen base, HB for a hit batsman, U for an unassisted putout and “K” for a strikeout.  That last thing was the invention of Henry Chadwick, an early baseball writer and historian, who thought that “K” was the most prominent letter in the word strikeout.  Many scorekeepers use a straight “K” for a swinging strikeout and a backward version of the letter when strike three is called. Alternatively, you can score them as Ks or Kc.

There’s plenty of room in scoring for creativity and individuality. I reward a particularly good fielding play with a star or an asterisk; others use an exclamation point.  If a fly ball is deep, I score it, say, 7D. If it’s to the warning track it’s 7WT, or to the wall 7W.

If you think a batter reached base on an error, and the official scorer gives him a hit (that happens quite a lot), you can mark the play with a question mark or just go ahead and record an error. It’s your card, so why not?

When Phil Rizzuto, the old Yankee broadcaster, went off on one of his tangents, he marked the boxes of the batters he missed with the notation “WW,” for “wasn’t watching.” He had a lot of those.

Back in the day, getting a proper scorecard was easy; I recall that the Cubs used to sell a really good one—large and made of sturdy cardboard—for 15 cents. Having lived in Arizona for the last 15 years, I haven’t been to Wrigley Field lately, but they probably don’t do that anymore. I’ve noticed that some parks now offer score sheets only in ad-filled, slick-papered programs that are bulky, hard to write on and sell for several bucks, so I’ve bought by own scorebook and take it with me to games. I know that’s nerdy, but I don’t care.

A main advantage of scorekeeping is that it keeps your attention on the field, where it belongs.  With all the distractions today’s game offers, that can be hard to do. I once asked Jerome Holtzman, the great baseball writer, if he ever got bored covering a couple hundred games a year, year in and year out. “When I get bored with baseball I watch the game,” he replied.

    

                

NEWS & VIEWS

                NEWS: Kerry Wood retires.

                

                VIEWS:  All athletes retire eventually, either on purpose or by necessity, but this one came as a jolt. That’s not because of Wood’s age (34) or professional longevity (14 seasons in the Major Leagues), both of which were appropriate to his announcement. It’s because of the image that I and, I’m sure, others carry of the pitcher.

                It stems from the May 6, 1998, weekday afternoon in which Wood, a 20-year-old Chicago Cubs’ rookie, tied a record by striking out 20 Houston Astros en route to a one-hit, 2-0 victory. Memorable days like that have been rare in the annals of his woebegone team, but this certainly was one. Working at home I was able to watch the game on TV, and it was marvelous to behold.

The Astros that day were a formidable bunch, their lineup including the probable future Hall of Famers Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, but the tall right-hander handled them like the big kid pitching to little ones in a Little League matchup. His fastballs hissed and his sliders seemingly took 45-degree turns. And he was so young! His—and his team’s—future glowed rosily.

It didn’t work out that way. Wood missed a month with arm problems before his rookie year ended, and he sat out the entire next season with elbow surgery.   While he managed to have a few decent seasons after that, he spent so much time on the Disabled List that some thought his initials were D.L. His career victory total of 86 fell about 200 short of what many might have predicted after his signal achievement.

Steve Stone said when Wood retired that the pitcher’s body failed him, but I think the canny broadcaster was being disingenuous. My take is that Wood’s problem was mental, and perhaps rooted in his May glory day. He didn’t want to just retire the batters he faced, he wanted to blow them away, every one, and in consequence strained and restrained his arm while never bothering to develop the subtler ascents of his art.  His focus seemed always to be on the “K,” not on the “W,” which, as you may have noticed, are his actual initials.

NEWS: Joe Ricketts doesn’t like President Obama.

VIEWS: Most billionaires don’t, of course, and some of them are bankrolling ad campaigns to persuade people that the Prez is a freedom-hating Kenyan socialist who is either a Muslim or an acolyte of the black-liberationist Christian preacher Jeremiah Wright (never mind which). But most billionaires don’t head a family that owns a Big League sports team, as Ricketts does.

 When poppa’s political plans surfaced, his offspring who run the Cubs dived for cover, and eventually took him with them. That was after someone pointed out that the team was seeking city and state financing for a proposed $300 million Wrigley Field renovation, and that the city and state involved are led by Democrats who might not appreciate their patriarch’s activities.

In truth, though, the government-off-my-back political stance Ricketts espouses has been thoroughly trashed by his family’s ball club. While the Cubs are looking for taxpayer bucks in Illinois they already are getting them in Arizona, the otherwise famously conservative state where they make their spring headquarters. There the city of Mesa is putting up $84 million of the $99 million it’s supposed to cost to build the team new spring-training digs, replacing the ones the city had built for it previously. The deal also includes a Cub option to buy city land for commercial development around the stadium, at lower-than-market prices.

The Cubs have trained in Mesa since 1979, yet like most enterprises angling for a government handout they threatened to move (to Naples, Florida) if they didn’t get one. This is from a low-rent burg that’s as hard up as most these days and has had to lay off employees to close budget gaps. But what are political principles when there’s money to be made, right Joe?

NEWS: I’ll Have Another goes for horse racing’s Triple Crown.

VIEWS: No three-year-old has won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes in the same year since Affirmed in 1978, but I’ll Have Another could end that drought at the Belmont in New York on June 9. That would give his sport a needed shot of favorable publicity, albeit probably a short-lived one.

Don’t get your hopes too high, though. Since Affirmed’s feat, 10 other colts have won the Derby and Preakness but failed in the grueling (1 ½-mile) Belmont, and trends in equine breeding and training that emphasize speed over stamina make its accomplishment less likely than in past years. Also, the Derby co-favorite Union Rags and Dullahan, the fast-closing third-place finisher in the Kentucky race, should be on hand to challenge, and because they skipped the Preakness will have the advantage of freshness.

Further, and typically for racing, I’ll Have Another’s tale has a dark side. That would be the history of his trainer, Doug O’Neill, who last week was slapped with a 45-day suspension and $15,000 fine for doping another horse in California, his usual stomping grounds. The penalty was the fourth levied against the man whom my Turf Paradise race-book cohorts say is known back home as Doug O’Needle.

O’Needle (oops, O’Neill), however, is an angel compared with Rick Dutrow, who in 2008 saddled the last Derby-Preakness winner, Big Brown. That fella has been cited for various violations 64 times in nine states since 1979, and last October in New York was socked with a big one that includes a 10-year suspension. Still, he trains on while his appeals pend and was the second-winningest trainer in the last meet at Aqueduct. Similarly (and conveniently), O’Neill’s most-recent penalty won’t kick in until after the Belmont.

Racing’s big story in recent decades has been the rise in the use of medications, legal and otherwise, to keep horses running, and the related upswing in on-track spills that threaten the lives of horses and jockeys. The underlying problem is that the sport is run by a hodgepodge of state governing bodies that vary greatly in honesty and competence. It and boxing need the most regulation but get the least. No Triple Crown should obscure that.