SATURDAY, a few hours before the Yanks-Red Sox created that warm, fuzzy feeling of a street riot, Miami played at Florida State on ABC.
In the second quarter, something so fabulous happened for FSU that its entire team and its tens of thousands of fans in the stands jumped for joy. Man, they were happy. Even ABC’s commentators, Brad Nessler and Bob Griese, got all pumped up.
Heck, if one didn’t know that it was early and Miami was up, 6-0, one might have thought that FSU had just won the game.
The joyous eruption was caused by FSU defensive back Stanford Samuels, who, on the full run, had laid Miami receiver Roscoe Parrish down, then out, with a brutal and illegal helmet-first hit to the chest.
No flag was thrown and the need for one went unmentioned on ABC, despite replays showing the contact to have been in violation of rules designed to prevent both victim and assailant from spinal cord and neurological injuries.
And as Parrish, 5-9 and 163 pounds, struggled for his next breath, Samuels posed and preened and accepted the congratulations of his teammates and the delighted approval of FSU’s fans.
Miami-FSU, you understand, is a rivalry that rivals Yankees vs. Red Sox. And both increasingly rival the Bloods vs. the Crips.
And so, a few hours later, when Tim McCarver, on Fox, opined that the street hassles that had erupted in the Yanks-Red Sox game could be traced to the DH – the absence of pitchers having to face pitchers – he made some sense, but also seemed to miss the larger picture.
After all, beanball brawls were not foreign to the AL prior to the DH.
What we now politely refer to as our “modern sports culture” dictates that the team’s best short- and long-term interests are ignored in favor of individuals’ immediate self-regard. No matter the circumstances – no matter how big the game, no matter the score – you don’t allow yourself to be “dissed.”
Is Karim Garcia such a prominent slugger that in a close playoff game he wouldn’t gladly accept first base from a pitcher as prominent as Pedro Martinez? For crying out loud, man, look around, see the bigger picture. There were two on, none out and the score was 3-2 in Game 3 of the ALCS. If he was throwing at you at that point, that’s great, no?
But Garcia could find neither the flattery nor the foolishness in the act. And there was no biding his time. No one disses him!
Manny Ramirez isn’t much for running to first base, not even in playoff games. It’s beneath him. But an (barely) inside pitch from Roger Clemens inspires him to charge the mound and to risk an ejection and/or suspension. Me first, the team later (maybe). No one disses him!
Over the last 15-20 years, we’ve watched basketball and football diminished as sports because of macho me-firsters. To hell with the score, the team, the sport.
Lately, baseball has been trying to catch up. In fact, MLB-licensed video game-makers have annually and eagerly been pouring more and more posing and strutting and incivility, including bean balls and charging the mound, into the mix. Come and get it, kids!
In the second half of yesterday’s Giants-Pats, Fox went out of its way to air a slo-mo close-up of Michael Strahan, who’d just sacked the QB, in a self-smitten muscle flex. The Giants were losing, but what did that matter to Strahan or to Fox?
Strahan didn’t always behave that way, but he lately seems to recognize what TV and marketing strategists want; he knows what sells, or, more accurately, what’s being sold. Strahan, at that moment, yesterday, represented the essence of our modern sports culture and its attendant commerce.
Miami, incidentally, won that game Saturday; it beat FSU, 22-14. Incidentally.
* It took Fox guest analyst Al Leiter fewer than three games to grow weary of Steve Lyons‘ analytical nonsense.
Friday, during Game 3 of Cubs-Marlins, Lyons kept rhetorically questioning the location of Kerry Wood’s pitches with two strikes. Lyons had “discovered” something that sounded insightful, so he was running with it.
Leiter finally explained that Wood didn’t appear to have his best stuff, then, clearly annoyed with Lyons’ take, added, “He’s not a robot!”
Good answer.