TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Adventures in Corkyland
Sammy Sosa came back from his suspension this week, greeted by a cascade of boos. With a little time to reflect on the affair, here are my thoughts on the corking incident.

Is he guilty of using corked bats in regular games? Outside of the obvious counterpoint, the evidence says no. The man has broken thousands of bats over his career. Only one has had cork. When his bat supply was x-rayed by MLB, they all came out wood. His claim is that he kept a corked bat for batting practice, to marvel the fans with long dingers. I’ve seen him hit them out of Wrigley during batting practice many times, I can believe that he had a little help. MLB uses special balls for its homerun derby at the All-Star Game. I witnessed the duel he had with Barry Bonds in the warm ups before the derby in Milwaukee. I’d never seen baseball fly so far. Sammy’s explanation fits the data. He screwed up, he paid the price. Move on.

Will we move on? I think that we will. Sammy is a master at manipulating the media. Corking his bat isn’t the worst accusation Sammy has faced, not by a long shot. Turn the wayback machine to 1991. A young Sammy Sosa, then a member of the White Sox, is late for spring training. Why? He’s being detained by the local authorities in the Dominican Republic. His wife has accused him of beating her with a rum bottle. There’s a lot of he-said-she-said in the affair, and certainly we don’t have the drop-dead evidence of cork exploding out of a bat. But the accusation was valid enough that Sosa was held in a country where baseball players walk on water. Granted that this is now ancient history, but you never hear about this. In the avalanche of stories we’ve been treated to by the media, this incident never comes up. A man who is held up as a hero to young children was once accused of brutally beating his wife, yet it’s been swept under the carpet. Sammy Sosa also promised to build a hospital in the Dominican Republic, but in the end it turns out that his charity was a way of paying some relatives a salary, no hospital was ever built. This is also forgotten. Imagine if Barry Bonds had these acts on his resume, we would never hear the end of it.

For another look at how Sammy is treated by the media, consider the case of Dick Allen. To be more specific, there were times when Allen would skip batting practice. He felt that it didn’t help him much and that it was a waste of his time. This "poor attitude" towards practice is held up by some as an argument against Allen’s marginal Hall of Fame case. Sammy took batting practice with non-standard equipment. Granted that a BP fastball isn’t a great match for in-game conditions either, but Sammy was treating BP as a circus rather than serious training. Perhaps it was for only a few swings in the many he would take each day, but he was more interested in pleasing the fans on the streets beyond Wrigley than he was in working on his game. Yet nobody seems to bring this up.

I found it a little ironic that he was booed so loudly in Cincinnati. After all, the overwhelming weight of the evidence points to Sammy’s innocence. Not only that, but he has owned up to his mistake and served the sentence that others have served for the same crime. Yet the fans in Cincinnati made their negative feeling heard very loudly. Why? Because there’s a taint now. Perhaps this was a one-time incident, but in the back of everybody’s head there’s still that suspicion, "am I watching a real achievement, or the results of cheating?" In other words, is the baseball here valid? What does this have to do with Cincy? Think about the guy with the bad haircut. I’d wager that most of the people booing Sammy would welcome Pete Rose back into baseball. But the weight of the evidence is not pointing to Pete’s innocence (it’s not as strong as Dowd might like, but it certainly was strong enough to get Pete to agree to the banishment). Unlike Sammy, Pete hasn’t owned up to his mistakes, nor has he completed his sentence. If you boo Slamming Sammy, you have to boo Charlie Hustle.

posted by David 4:47 PM

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Here's a story that caught my eye. The lowdown is that some people are unhappy with the police in
Benton Harbor
Benton Harbor and have been rioting as a result. I've actually been through there, on my way to minor league baseball in Michigan. Benton Harbor has a neat little place in baseball history.

Benton Harbor was home to the House of David movement. I'll admit to not knowing too much about their beliefs, but I do know that they had a barnstorming baseball squad, perhaps the most famous one in history. They were they guys with the beards who played the Pepper game. They played against Negro Leaguers, local semi-pros or whoever they could schedule. A visit from the House of David team was often the biggest thing going in three counties. There's a nice little museum devoted to the movement and team out in Benton Harbor, worth a visit if you get the chance.

My father has different memories of Benton Harbor. He never visited, could remember "Benton Harbor lunchboxes", in other words, Heathkits. These were "solder it yourself" electronics that were big in the '50s and '60s.

It's kind of amazing that a small city in Michigan could have so much Americana.

posted by David 4:41 PM

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

NBA Playoff Ratings
This URL caught my eye:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/finals_ratings_ap/

Cutting to the chase, the NBA Finals have lost two-thirds of their audience from five years ago. Granted that five years ago we were watching the likes of Air Jordan and Dennis Rodman, but for crying out loud, two out of every three people who watched the NBA Finals back then decided that they had something better to do this time around. Yes, ratings are down for everything because with the explosion of cable we have so many more choices, but two out of three?

You know that if this were true of the World Series the talking heads would be declaring the end of baseball as we know it (and probably blaming greedy players). But the NBA seems to get a free pass that baseball does not. For example, the Yankees put together a nice run in the late 90's and baseball is doomed because it has competitive balance problems. But what about the NBA? Did you know that this was the eighth year running that one of the three biggest media markets in the country was represented in the NBA Finals? That this marks 20 years out of 24 that we've seen a team from New York, LA or Chicago at the end? Seems to me that the large market teams in the NBA have some kind of competitive advantage (MORE DETAILS), but somehow it is baseball that has a problem.

Want to know what I was doing instead of watching the NBA Finals? I was watching the College World Series. Ping!

posted by David 7:52 PM