Geez, Michael, Don't Do That in Plain View

4/25/2014

Rick, I'm a Former Pitcher Myself, Kunkel Might Have Said

When Michael Piñeda of the Yankees was caught with pine tar on the back of his neck the other day, my thoughts flashed back to a high-school football game I covered, oh, a few years ago.

In bright sunshine, with witnesses in the stands, a defender put the slug on an opponent – on the 50-yard line. The referee tossed him. After the game, the crusty old coach told the wave of reporters (that is to say, me), “Geez, I told the guy, don’t do stuff like that in the middle of the field.”

The operative phrase was, “in the middle of the field.” Whack the guy in the bottom of the pile. Knee him. Gouge him. But, geez, not in full view.

They all know. That’s my theory about sports. Coaches have a pretty good idea what their players are up to but cannot afford to “know.” During the great steroid frolics, owners and general managers did everything but administer the injections.

(Looking back, I heard one owner make creatine jokes before I knew what he was talking about, and one terrific player talk about a “major-league coffee” before a game.)

Some of the best people I have known in baseball relied on little tricks of the trade. Rick Honeycutt used a tack in his glove to cut the baseballs, alter their aerodynamics. Got caught by the home-plate umpire, Bill Kunkel, himself a former pitcher. Geez, not in the middle of the field.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/25/sports/sports-of-the-times-rich-honeycutt-is-sharp-again.html

Rick is a great guy, now in his ninth year as the Dodgers’ pitching coach.

I once saw Elston Howard set a world record for a lumbering catcher in full gear sprinting from home plate to the dugout tunnel after catching one hellacious curve from Whitey Ford for the last strike against the Tigers. Elston took the ball with him, I might add, and was on the George Washington Bridge heading home to the beautiful Arlene Howard before the Tigers could scream for the ball – and Elston’s belt buckle, which was filed to nearly lethal sharpness.

And so it goes. Briana Scurry moved forward from the line to smother a penalty kick during the shootout for the final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup. The referee did not notice, or chose not to notice, Scurry’s dancing feet. The U.S. beat China a minute later.

Donna Lopiano, then of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and one of the strong, ethical voices in sport, called Scurry’s move cheating. I called it gamesmanship and wrote a whole column about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/08/sports/backtalk-when-is-it-gamesmanship-and-when-is-it-cheating.html

Everybody in baseball knows what pitchers do, as Tyler Kepner writes in the Friday Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/sports/baseball/missing-on-mound-a-dab-of-discretion.html

Piñeda deserved the 10-game suspension not so much for cheating but for a worse violation.

Tontería. Stupidity.

Geez, not in public.

Your thoughts?

Ed Martin

4/25/2014 02:07:51 pm

How do I game thee? Let me count the ways...

Dodger catcher Mickey Owen missed a third strike allowing the Yankee batter to reach first in the 9th and ultimately the Yankees won the game. A spitball was rumored to be involved, fooling the batter and Owen.

Sammy Sosa was caught with a corked bat, and Sammy, himself, was corked with steroids.

Mike Scott of the Astros was famous as a "scuffer" even school kids knew it.

As the King said "etc., etc. etc.

George Vecsey

4/26/2014 02:19:45 am

Ed, exactly.
So which was cheating and which was gamesmanship?
Now they are going to review the pine-tar rule -- after the season.
Meantime, Pineda sits for 10 games.
Sosa keeps the home runs, but the Cubs don't welcome him back.
But the Giants welcome Bonds. Go figure.
GV

John McDermott

4/26/2014 07:33:37 pm

My attitude-sharply focused after getting a red card for retaliating against an opponent for a nasty off-the-ball foul was was not seen by the ref-was to always make sure you got even, just don't do it right away, obviously or when everyone is looking. Pelé was a master at paying defenders back and somehow always made it look like an innocent accident, even helping his victims to their feet and apologizing. But he knew exactly what he was doing. As I once heard an Italian ref say to a player who had committed a particularly stupid and harsh foul early in a game, "Listen son, I don't want to put anyone out of the game today, so please don't put me in the position where I have to do that, OK?"

Alan Rubin link

4/27/2014 05:23:13 am

It is a combination of gamesmanship and common sense, particularly when the act is probably in plain view. As a goalkeeper who never once was a field player in ten years, I did not experience the push and shove of challenging an attacker or defender. However, we need to utilize every possible advatage to gain an edge and intimidate an attacker.

George’s Briana Scurry article is a perfect example. A goalkeeper’s body must in motion forward, no matter how slight, to maximize their reflex to any situation. I attended a NSCAA Level 1 Goalkeeping course in Philadelphia last January and was fortunate to catch Tony DiCicco for about fifteen minutes outside the course. It was a nice conversation on goalkeeping, then and now. While discussing the importance of goalkeepers staying focused 100% of the time, he emphasized that when protecting a lead in the last ten minutes the goalkeeper must get into an almost zombie zone of concentration.

He said that Briana Scurry, including both men and women, was the best one he had ever seen when the chips were down at the end of a game.

I instruct the high school and youth goalkeepers to erase the white line between the posts to eliminate any visual aid to help a ref determine if the ball went over. Also, if they might think that the ball might be over the line after a save, just act like it did not. Any hesitation or looking down might influence the ref to call a goal even if it was only partially over. I’ll never know, but I believe that I got away with a few goals in college that way.

It is difficult for a goalkeeper to get back at offending player without getting penalized. Usually, they leave it up to one of the defenders. I was told by some former high school teammates before a Lehigh game to be careful as their coach instructed them to take me out.

I did not believe them until I was constantly being dumped after making saves. I alerted the ref, but it continued. Going out to punch away a dangerous ball, I recognized the main culprit going for a header. Without any prior thought, soccer is a game of instant decisions; I lowered one fist enough to catch him in the forehead. Problem solved, but I never felt comfortable with it after. Would I do it again—YES.

John is right, you learn by experience and good refs look to control the game.

George Vecsey

4/27/2014 02:56:33 pm

Alan, you're a regular Toni Schumacher.
Who knew?
GV

Alan Rubin link

4/27/2014 04:11:03 pm

If I knew that Toni would have seen the highlights of the Lehigh-Muhlenburg game, I would have been more careful.

Ed Martin

4/28/2014 01:06:33 pm

Lehigh, in Alan's day, was primarily an engineering school, so it is not surprising Alan misspelled MuhlenbErg.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jack Ramsey' tenure at St.Joseph's was at the peak of Big Five strenghth and he had great record there including Post-seaso NIT and NCAA in ten out eleven years. As an earlier string on "point-shaving," mentioned BERG played all the great NYC and Philly teams. Lehigh was a wrestling school as I recall, Which figures.

Alan Rubin link

4/28/2014 03:57:45 pm

Ed--spelling was one of the major reasons for taking engineering. That crashed freshman year with two theme writing courses. Even with today's spell check, I often have trouble getting close enough to get a correction.

Wrestling was Lehigh's major sport, although football was very strong when I was there.

Lehigh's basketball team would not have been able to win even if the opponents were trying to throw the game.

Ed Martin

4/29/2014 03:47:11 am

Alan. LeHI may not have had a spelling major, but they did turn out gentlemen and scholars and goalies.

Alan Rubin link

4/29/2014 08:29:27 am

Ed--I can oly vouch for being a goalie.

bruce

4/29/2014 09:37:41 am

it was very odd. I kept on thinking, 'what the hell as HE thinking?'.....no subtlety at all. deserved to be caught just for being dumb.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Geez, Michael, Don't Do That in Plain View

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