What the Heck Happened to Sports?
By Bob Gaydos
My Little League mitt, circa 1951. RJ Photography
Ruminations of an old sports editor:
The daily grind of following and writing about the Trump/MAGA assault on our democracy can be tiring, so I sometimes turn to sports in search of a break.
For example, former major league ball player Art Shallock celebrated his 100th birthday April 27. The one-time Yankee pitcher is said to be the oldest living major leaguer.
Perhaps his most notable moment in baseball history is when he replaced 19-year-old Mickey Mantle on the Yankees roster when the future Hall of Famer was optioned to Triple A for more seasoning. That was in 1951, which is the same era in which I used the glove pictured with this column to play center field for my Little League team. So I’m an old sports editor in both senses of the word.
Shallock won a few games with the Yankees, collected three World Series rings and never made more than $5,000 a year, but he seems content with his journey.
Less content recently is Yankees manager Aaron Boone. It’s not enough that he’s going through a divorce, but he recently was ejected from a game because a fan sitting directly behind Boone and the Yankees dugout was harassing the umpire.
Even when everyone pointed out that Boone hadn’t said anything, the ump still tossed him, saying, “The manager’s in charge.”
The umpire, Hunter Wendelstedt, stuck by his guns and his ego and the Yankees appealed and, surprise! MLB actually said the ump was wrong and will be penalized.
I’d say a couple of weeks without pay for this dumb stunt and a refresher umpire school. The device that charts balls and strikes said he also missed 68 percent of the strikes thrown in the game. A few other umps could use refreshing, too. Robots are looming.
In another recent case of a major sports entity surprisingly admitting it messed up, the NCAA gave Reggie Bush his 2005 Heisman Trophy back, conceding that times had changed.
Indeed.
Bush was given then denied the award for his efforts as a running back at Southern California because his family had benefited financially (trips and gifts) from his success, a big no-no for the world of amateur college athletes.
Well, that was then and now is apparently now and today’s college athletes receive lucrative payments for use of their likenesses because colleges have made millions from their efforts, much of which also went to coaches, but not to the athletes (who were supposedly getting a free college education.)
So, traditional college conferences are now scrambled to get richer TV contracts, coaches and colleges are making millions, college athletes now go where they can get the best contract, the NFL avoids establishing a farm system like baseball did and Reggie Bush is finally getting his Heisman.
Further signaling the steady demise of amateur athletics, medal winners are apparently going to be awarded cash prizes for the first time at the Paris Olympics this summer. Ain’t capitalism great?
Oh, and lest we forget, you can now legally bet on pretty much anything in any sport, while the game is in progress, in (sort of) full confidence the athletes aren’t doing the same.
I patched together this sports report mostly from social media because, if you haven’t noticed, traditional — to wit, newspaper and magazine — sports reporting has been replaced by sports personalities with opinions “reporting” on TV.
Sports Illustrated, having laid off most of its staff, was recently saved from oblivion when some company said it would keep the onetime sports standard bearer going as a monthly, not a weekly.
No thanks. Not when the magazine has lost its immediacy and stable of top sports writers that once included Frank DeFord and the incomparable Jim Murray.
Plus, The New York Times actually eliminated its sports staff, reassigning reporters to who knows what and hiring something called The Athletic, whose writers apparently know a lot about WAR and leaving the park velocity in baseball and whatever conspiracy theory potential Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers is currently spreading.
Red Smith they are not (when he was writing about sports with The New York Herald Tribune as well as The Times.)
Nor are they Al DeSantis in Middletown, N.Y., Joe Gross in Annapolis, Md., John Fox and, well, me in Binghamton, N.Y., or Dick Young, Jimmy Cannon and Mike Lupica in New York City or, for that matter, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg, who once lent me his typewriter at Yankee Stadium so I could write a piece about Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, whom I had just interviewed while he was sitting in a whirlpool bath. Yes, naked.
Guess those were the good, old days.
PS: Thanks to just-retired John Sterling, longtime Yankee radio broadcaster, for all those marvelous home run calls. “It is high! It is far! It is gone!“ A sterling effort.
rjgaydos@gmail.com
Tags: Al DeSantis, amateur, Annapolis, baseball, Bob Gaydos, Boone, Dick Young, Heismann, Jim Murray, Jim Palmer, Jimmy Cannon, John Sterling, Little League, Mantle, NCAA, Olympics, Red Smith, Reggie Bush, Shallock, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, umpires, Yankees
