BACK TO REALITY
Weekend starts with MLB throwback before descending into preposterous present
ALTHOUGH unconditional lust for TV money no longer makes summer Saturday afternoon baseball in New York City ritual, this Saturday began with some hope for a sport otherwise inexorably driven to devour itself.
MLB Network’s highlights show of Friday night’s games, perhaps accidentally, showed a losing team defeat a winning team because one player didn’t accede to style-over-substance conditioning turned modern regimen. In other words, he wasn’t ashamed to play hard.
The Padres, down 2-1 to the Pirates, had a man on when Cory Spangenberg tied it with what normally would be a double to right. But Spangenberg must’ve grown up without ESPN. Bolting on contact, he tripled. He’d score on an error to give the Pads a 3-2 lead, soon a 3-2 win.
What a shame there wasn’t a vulgar Deadspin vandal, a Dan Le Batard or a SportsCenter Top 10touter in the room to explain how such an un-cool dude is allowed to win the game!
Next up was Rays-Yanks on Ch. 11, a game and telecast that repeatedly spoke words and offered graphics to emphasize that this was one between teams in contention. It also was one at which to fecklessly shout, “Hold it! Hold it, right there!” to search for the sense in modern baseball. Where do we start? Well, there was that fifth inning, two-out home run by Steven Souza to give the Rays a 3-2 lead. The ball was hit down the left-field line, so Souza decided to do what Paul O’Neill and replays explained he did: He stood near home plate and watched to see, 1) if it stayed fair, 2) if it would be a home run.
Both answers were in the affirmative, a home run a mere two rows back.
But O’Neill ignored or missed the larger point: Why didn’t Souza bother to run, especially given that it was so clear — and with two outs in such a big game — that he was so unsure? This was indefensible, negligent highest-level, highest-paid baseball that we couldn’t miss. Yet analyst O’Neill said zip.
But by then, the game was listing toward new-age insanity. A 3-2 game in the sixth had already included five pitchers as these are days when reasonably effective starters are pulled in the fourth after allowing two straight singles.
When the Yanks took a 4-3 lead in the sixth, O’Neill brightened: “This is where Joe Girardi can have some fun with that bullpen.”
Fun? If by fun he meant that this is when managers can swap opportunities to lose games — treating them as if they’re the first game of spring training — O’Neill nailed it.
In the seventh, Rays’ manager Kevin Cash, another By the Book acolyte with the scars and bruises to prove it, brought in Steve Cishek, who then struck out the side on just 16 pitches. Not enough that Cishek made like Sandy Koufax and with the DH, there’s no need to pinch hit for him, Cash had Tommy Hunter start the eighth.
“Cishek,” Michael Kay flatly said, “did his job.”
He was lightsout! So why in the name of straight flushes was he pulled?
In the top of the seventh, two on and two out, Evan Longoria popped up behind the plate. Catcher Gary Sanchez, regardless of his conspicuous defensive deficiencies, chose to make a stylish one-handed snap catch of the fly, finishing with his mitt and the ball whipped toward the ground.
Hold it, right there! That’s preposterous, selfand team-imperiling baseball. But that, too, went unspoken.
In the eighth, the bullpen “fun” continued when the Rays tied it with a Lucas Duda home run off David Robertson, “Fun Time Joe’s” fifth pitcher.
By the top of the eighth O’Neill no longer saw the fun, instead lamenting that the previous night’s game “was so nice, with [Masahiro] Tanaka going so far into the game.”
In the bottom of the eighth, Hunter was at least as good as Cishek. The Yanks went one, two, three on just five pitches,
Cash pulled him. First he pulled Koufax then Don Drysdale. At 4-4 in the ninth, Cash brought in his latest in a series of designated Mariano Riveras, Brad Boxberger, who didn’t retire any of the three he faced before the Yanks won on a Brett Gardner single off Dan Jennings, the game’s 12th pitcher.
All that was left was a Yankees mob celebration for having won a game both teams tried to lose, followed by Meredith Marakovits’ questions to Gardner from her collection of “How important is it” “How were you able to” and “How difficult is it” gems.
Then Sunday, the Rays and Yanks, stuck in stupid, did it again.