It’s like baby-sitting a room filled with 3-year-olds. Turn your head for a second, and there’s a jailbreak, something gone wrong.
Monday morning I was in NYU Hospital undergoing aortic heart valve replacement, a remarkable and quick procedure — at least in my case — in which my shot valve was replaced with a porcine valve, literally, a pig’s, to improve my badly diminished breathing.
How the pig makes out with my valve is a matter of patient-client confidentiality.
Knock wood, the procedure has already improved my breathing with only a few side symptoms including involuntary snorting and sudden urges to roll around in the mud. Oh, and my wife has suspended all activity on dating sites, which she explained as “leads.”
I was home the next day, back in front of a TV and watching live games and DVRs of those I’d missed. And darn if baseball hadn’t already again abandoned simple terminology to confuse the simple and add to “walk-offs” — every game ends in a walk-off something or other, no? — WAR — what is it good for? — and whatever analytics — you can’t spell analytics without anal! — appear in a manager’s fantasy-infused pregame script.
Now we have a new pitch, “the sweeper.” But according to applied visual and historical evidence, it’s just a big, sinking curve of varying speeds I first saw thrown 60 years ago by the likes of Whitey Ford, Camilo Pascual and Warren Spahn.
I previously knew the sweeper in sports only in ice curling and as the term for the central, attack-minded fullback on soccer teams, as Franz Beckenbauer played for the New York Cosmos.
And if Ralph Branca were still among us we’d be on the phone laughing about the “invention” of this new pitch, one he saw thrown — or threw — in the 1940s and 1950s.
This week Padres manager Bob Melvin, former major league catcher, noted the improvement in reliever Steven Wilson: “The sweeper has ended up being a really big pitch for him.”
Melvin was then asked, what, exactly, is a “sweeper”?
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s new-age baseball talk. A slider’s probably got a little more depth and the sweeper probably comes across a little more. I’ve made that joke, too. I still write it down as a slider.”
But there’s no going back. Not for the near future. It’s spoken by those easily moved to sound slick and in the know.
Kinda reminds me of how NFL TV and radio analysts for about three consecutive years were eager to tell us that a team just ran a “bubble screen.” I don’t know if the bubble screen is now extinct or just unidentified. But it’s gone. If it remains it’s part of what it was — a screen pass.
But soon the four-fingered sweeper will be distinguished from the split-fingered and circle-change sweeper. Fox’s John Smoltz, in three-inning dissertations, will provide show and tells and make us wish we grew up in Djibouti playing 43-man Squamish (thanks, Mad Magazine, 1965!).
Chevy’s Keys To The Game will include starting pitchers’ ability to throw effective sweepers and pitchers who “have added the sweeper to their arsenals.”
Will this nonsense ever end? Sure. When pigs fly. Snort, snort.
More law & order issues at Bama
Alabama football and basketball remain in the nasty habit of recruiting to its campus players who carry guns.
Saturday, Jaykwon Walton, a 21-year-old transfer from Wichita St., had his scholarship rescinded after he was arrested in Tuscaloosa on a pot charge. Additionally, there were several guns found in the car.
Bama basketball coach Nate Oats, the same apologist who applied artificial intelligence to claim that his freshman star Brandon Miller, accused of delivering a gun to a teammate and soon-to-be shooting murder suspect Darius Miles, was “Just in the wrong place at the wrong time” — there’s a good time and place to deliver a gun? — was at it again.
In a “statement,” Oats declared that Walton “will not be a student-athlete at the University of Alabama.”
When did a recruit have to be a student to play for Alabama?
How long before a legit student is gunned down in the cross fire? In a “statement” will the college declare its shock, that it never saw this coming? Or just go with the boilerplate, “Our thoughts and prayers …”
And it’s coming; it’s coming.
Hard to fault Red Sox manager Alex Cora for his suspicion after Monday’s 5-4 loss to the Orioles. After all, the O’s struck out zero times — almost impossible in 2023 — to his club’s 10 whiffs.
And Cora, the Astros’ 2017 World Series bench coach, has a good sense of the suspect.
Chris Griffin, a shipper from Parx near Philly, is NYRA’s new race caller replacing the retired John Imbriale. And at 41, he’s a keeper — clear, confident and accurate.
For all his clout — remember: he can “make just one phone call” to relieve folks of their radio jobs for knocking him — Michael Kay doesn’t have the muscle to refuse to read sucker-targeting sports gambling promos on Yankee telecasts?
I did regrettable wrong to the good folks of Chillicothe, Ohio when I wrote that Yankee broadcasts are best suited for “corn fed rubes in from Chillicothe.”
I’ve long relied on Chillicothe as a town of endearment since I heard Walter Brennan use it in the 1942 film “Pride of the Yankees.”
When Gary Cooper, as Lou Gehrig, is introduced to a Yankee scout, Cooper says, “You mean the New York Yankees?” To which Brennan says, “Well, I don’t mean the Chillicothe Yankees!”
For Knicks, team play is winning play
The most attractive element of the Knicks-Cavs series was that it was predicated on basketball and not 3-point heaving.
Good defense, inside scoring opportunities, aggressive rebounding and genuine team play — as opposed to 3-point loitering — determined the series and added to the appeal of the telecasts.
I felt as if I were watching all-in basketball instead of Stephen-A.-Statsheet, give-it-to-Carmelo Ball.
And forgive my insensitivity for an injured “star,” but the Knicks played better — certainly more alertly and inclusively — with Julius Randle seated.
The addition-by-subtraction play was even reflected in the play-by-play of Mike Breen who was at the top of his game perhaps because there were five-on-five games — good old basketball — to call.
New Mets’ radio man Keith Raad seems eager to please. Just one wish from this grumpy old guy: lose the clichés.
Wednesday, after Jeff McNeil began a double play with a good stop between first and second, Raad described it as McNeil “flashing the leather” to produce a “pitcher’s best friend.”
Such a vague, hackneyed overview told us nothing. And it didn’t even allow him the opportunity to note that Pete Alonso had to make a nice, lunging catch at first to complete the double play.
Listeners, at his tender mercies, need to “see” what happened.
