‘Ambush’ proves Crew SC owner can’t be trusted

Ray:

Michael A. Thompson, St. Peterburg, Fla.

Michael: Say this for Precourt: He’s not alone. Major League Soccer is a complicit partner in this hijacking, and I can’t help but wonder if city leaders were proactive enough to ward this off. Maybe. My sense is that Precourt had this in mind when he put up his cash.

Ray: Should the Crew depart our fair city as threatened, perhaps “America’s first soccerspecific stadium” can finally fulfill its one true destiny and become the high school football stadium, dinky aluminum bleachers and all, that its architectural DNA demands.

Thad Woodman, Westerville

Thad: Well, it’s a lock that high school football teams won’t be relocating to Texas.

Mr. Stein: Mike Strapp (Mailbox, last Sunday) implied how Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, like so many pitchers of bygone eras, were expected to go the distance in games they started, particularly in the postseason.

The cruel downside to the heroic efforts of the “finish what you start” duo is that their careers were drastically shortened by their over-the-top workloads coupled with their power pitching.

Koufax retired at age 30. He had circulatory problems that would cause his fingers to become numb and turn a sickening white color. For a day or two after he pitched, he was unable to comb his hair due to excruciating pain in his golden arm, and he had trouble performing mundane tasks such as changing his clothes, tying his shoes, eating, shaving, etc.

Drysdale retired abruptly at 32 due to a torn rotator cuff that could not be repaired. He commented, “A torn rotator cuff is a cancer for a pitcher, and if a pitcher gets a badly torn one, he has to face the facts, it’s all over, baby.”

Richard Zaborsky, Dublin Richard: True enough on both counts. But I’m still guessing that if Joe Maddon came to the mound in the bottom of the fifth of a 1-1 game, Drysdale would tell him to pound salt.