STANDARD PROCEDURES
Hypocrisy reigns in all veins of sports coverage
WHAT’S wrong or right with these pictures?
1) Again last week, as it surfaced on the losing side of a federal fraud case, the name “Lance Armstrong” still inspires widespread public and media condemnation. He warrants no forgiveness as an athlete who reached the top of his sport both in fame and fortune because he was a drug cheat who lied about it, over and over, until he could lie no more.
And he remains past-tensed, cooked. Goodbye, good riddance.
Yet, why is Armstrong different than Alex Rodriguez? He, too, reached the top of his sport’s fame and fortune as a drug cheat who then repeatedly lied until he could lie no more.
Regardless, Rodriguez is now so much in demand that he serves two national networks, ESPN and FOX, as their highly paid and promoted lead on-air baseball analyst.
And the Yankees, who didn’t want to pay him the millions they owed him — in 2014 they wanted him out and forever gone as a suspended disgrace to his pinstripes — then brought him back to help sell tickets in his last two seasons. They now engage him as a spring training instructor.
2) Last week, with the Yankees rained out, YES aired Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, Dodgers at Yanks, the three-homers Reggie Jackson game that ended the Series on Oct. 18, which now is about when the AL and NL championship series begin.
The game’s ABC telecast had Howard Cosell and Tom Seaver in the booth. In the top of the eighth — and thanks to reader Jeff Lake of Binghamton for the heads-up — Cosell noted that Yankees starter Mike Torrez’s last pitch was clocked at 95 mph, thus he’s not likely tired. Seaver: “He has still only thrown about 92, 93 pitches. He had 86 at the start of this inning. So there’s no reason, really, to be tired.” The Yanks won, 8-4. Torres went the full nine, allowing nine hits and two walks. Length of game: 2:18. Such a game today would be unimaginable. Torres would have been pulled after five or six, the game would have included 12 pitchers, not five, and would have run four hours. 3) Thursday, another rotten night to play baseball, one couldn’t help but notice while watching the game on Ch. 11 that Yankee Stadium again was close to empty.
Still, attendance was announced as 36,665 — nonsense by about 20,000.
Monday, another miserable night empty house against the Marlins. The 8 ½-inning game ran 3:38. Attendance was announced as a laughable 32,526. But again, don’t believe what you see, believe what you’re told.
At 12-0, Yanks, bottom of the seventh, there was an all-in conversation on the mound with pitching coach Larry Rothschild, all mouths covered with gloves or bare hands to ward off lip-readers and spies.
4) The TV fad that places a distracting, annoying, wildly misleading and totally irrelevant strike zone box over live pitching is here, there everywhere, as if we couldn’t have become or remained baseball fans without an artificial rectangle atop every live pitch.
Live pitches in Wednesday’s White Sox-A’s, an NBC SportsCalifornia telecast seen on MLBN, had to be thrown through, around or on the edges of that box. Make
believe has taken over.