I recently heard a sports talk show host say something intelligent. Now, that in itself was cause for me to pay attention to the rest of his dissertation. However, I was on Route 26, in the heart of Idaho’s miles and miles of wheat fields, and, naturally, just as his thought piqued my interest, I lost the station on the radio.
That reminded me of the days when, if you were driving at night, in the forties or fifties, the only radio station that would come in consistently was WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Now you’re wondering, what intelligent thought could have come out of the mouth of a sports jock? I don’t know who he was as I lost his station before I could find out, but what he said was “sports are all about mistakes.”
He pointed out that, in baseball, for example, a home run is most often a result of a mistake on the part of the pitcher delivering the pitch. A slider, intended to be down and in and end up near the rear foot of the batter, merely spins, but doesn’t break and all of a sudden the batter swings and the ball finds a new owner in the outfield stands all as a result of a mistake in locating the pitch.
By the same token, the media coverage of sports seems to focus on mistakes. As with all other news, it’s bad news, mainly about mistakes, that make headlines. In Boston, much more ink and chatter was spent on the Yankees’ shelling of David Price in Game 3 of the recent series than was spent on the magnificent performance of Chris Sale in Game 2.
This is true of almost all sports. Ask Sandy Leon, the Red Sox catcher and sometimes hitter, who misread a pitch on last Monday against Max Scherzer and swung over a ball that actually bounced between his legs, striking him out and, as Jerry Remy would say, went through the five hole, all the way to the backstop. While the runners were advancing a base on the wild pitch, Leon was still trying to figure out what had happened.
Ask Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks coach, who made the mistake of calling for a pass when he had plenty of time to win a Super Bowl by running the ball and made Malcolm Butler’s name a household word and, in so doing, gave Bill Belichick the opportunity to get blamed for another mistake that Patriot’s fans will also believe cost them a Super Bowl title when he didn’t play Butler in this year’s Super Bowl. Mistakes are what decide football games, too.
If a basketball player on defense fights his way through a pick while his teammate switches to cover his man and both end up on the same man while the loose man makes a lay up, the mistake caused the score.
The cornerback who is covering the receiver coming out of the backfield and releases him to a safety that is not there because he is in different coverage, has made the mistake that allows the receiver to be open for an easy score.
Ask David Price, who is finding out that, even though the Red Sox management are the ones that bet $217 million on him and came to him with the offer without him promising them anything, is now being blamed for what the sports jocks and fans are calling a mistake. The mistake was in assuming that David Price would continue to perform at the level he produced in the short time he was at Toronto and Detroit the year before, when he had been 18-5 with a 2.45 ERA — but the Sox made that mistake, not David Price.
Ask any manager in baseball who has been blamed for starting the wrong pitcher, putting the wrong reliever on the mound, sending the wrong pinch-hitter to the plate or not pinch-hitting when he should have and they will tell you that baseball is a game of mistakes and he gets blamed for most of them.
Sports are all about mistakes. If pitchers didn’t make mistakes, there would be few hits and many boring baseball games. If batters didn’t make mistakes, there would be lots of high-scoring baseball games. That is the nature of sport and that is what the sports jocks thrive on.
When Jackie Bradley, Kevin Kiermaier or Kevin Pillar make a great catch in the outfield, or Eduardo Rodriguez has an effective outing, it doesn’t even earn a mention on the talk shows. On the other hand, David Price gets shelled by the Yankees, Julian Edelman gets caught with an illegal substance or the reliever that Cora brings in gets shelled and becomes the subject of every talk show and newspaper article.
On a more positive note, I have said many times that I disagree with people that say that pitching is 75 percent of baseball. I firmly believe that pitching is more like 95 percent of baseball. Anybody that watched the Yankee/Red Sox series from New York last weekend saw the perfect example of that. The two best hitting teams in baseball, teams that are close to equal to or are perhaps more powerful than any Murderer’s Row or other powerhouse ever assembled, were completely shut down by three outstanding pitching performances, two by Yankee pitchers and one by a Red Sox pitcher.
In all three games, the hitters on the team with the dominant pitching shelled their less effective opponent. Sabathia, Sale and Severino showed the over 141,000 fans that showed up for that series that pitching is the name of the game.
Is it possible that this year is going to go down to the last game of the season when, by the way, the Yankees will be in Fenway on September 30 for the finale of a three-game series and the season? If it does, and you are watching it on television that day, look for me in Section 2, Row 14, Seat 1. I was in the grandstand in 1967 when the Sox won it on the last day and don’t intend to miss it if it goes to the wire again 51 years later.