REAL LONG SHOT
Maybe one day we'll get team play, common sense back
A Sa kid, did you ever mess around with a pinball machine; throw all the balls into the slot, pull the plunger to test your pinball wizardry? See if you could flipper all or several balls back up before they drained out?
That made for brief curiosity and fleeting fun. It was all too frenetic to follow let alone enjoy. All-in, full-contact pinball met its logical end minutes after we invented it. Yet, that game appears to have been reprised during the NBA playoffs.
Sunday’s Cavs-Celtics Game 7 on ESPN included 74 3-point shots. In a 48-minute game, that meant 1.55 3-point attempts every minute. Good Gail Goodrich grief!
That didn’t leave a lot of time to play thoughtful basketball. And little of it — fast breaks, give-andgoes, down-low screens, onetouch passing toward off-the-ball movement — was seen. Had it not been a Game 7, it would’ve been another dare to the better sports senses to endure.
With 74 3-point shots, the blind notion that this would’ve been a 220-plus points game is understandable. But the final score was Cavs 87, Celts 79. Only 16 of the 74 shots — 22 percent — were successful, which seemed a pitiful waste of talent, not to mention the abandonment of a cherished team sport.
Or was it in the game plan for Boston’s Terry Rozier to take 10 3s, missing all of them?
But — this is the bag we’re in.
Tuesday, prior to Mets-Braves on WOR Radio, new Met Jose Bautista was interviewed by host Wayne Randazzo. I’d never heard Bautista interviewed at length. He humbly spoke of his charitable organization giving “me a chance to reciprocate” for his professional success. Fabulous. But then why would he choose to be known as an excessively immodest, antagonizing, unsportsmanlike, in-yerface home run bat-flipper? It made no sense. Is one act a con? Both?
Also, Tuesday, the Astros had the Yankees beaten, 5-3. Reliever Hector Rondon pitched the eighth, striking out two and making one, two, three of the Yanks on just 10 pitches.
But then Houston manager A.J. Hinch provided maximum aid and comfort to his enemy, replacing Rondon in the ninth with this game’s designated closer, Chris Devenski. Soon, the Yanks would be 6-5 winners.
But from the best to the worst teams, this is now how big league baseball is now managed. It’s an epidemic moving in on 15 years. That it’s a betrayal of the practical application of baseball — that it makes no sense — makes no difference.
The next night during AstrosYanks, YES’s Paul O’Neill praised Hinch for always sticking to his plan. Apparently O’Neill approved of Hinch removing an unhittable reliever after 10 pitches, the night before.
FOX’s lead MLB analyst, John Smoltz, seems like a lovely guy eager to please his audience with info and opinions — endless info and opinions, so much so that it appears we’re headed for another postseason in which Smoltz smothers the telecasts, as he did throughout Saturday’s AngelsYanks.
By now one would reasonably think that someone at or near the top of FOX Sports would have prevailed upon Smoltz to save himself from himself, not to mention us, by having him speak a lot less.
But Smoltz represents another extraordinary epidemic, one that points to TV executives who don’t realize we’re trying to watch television!