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Saturday, February 17, 2007
Precious little fun, fame for catchers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Lake Buena Vista, Fla. — Pitchers and catchers report early: It’s the way of the baseball world. Pitchers need to work their precious arms into shape, and pitching, according to various estimates, is either 75 or 90 percent of the game. So what does that make catching, and why should the poor guys who wear all that unwieldy gear have to be here so soon? Couldn’t the pitchers just throw against a wall?
“Did Brian tell you to ask that question?” said Kyle Davies, one of the Braves’ precious pitchers. “We need to be here,” said Brian McCann, the No. 1 catcher. “It comes with the position. When you’re a catcher, you know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“It’s the nature of the beast,” said Clint Sammons, a rookie catcher who isn’t on the Braves’ 40-man roster but is here already because the team’s many precious pitchers need all the targets they can find. “They might put up some nets [for the pitchers to throw into] or something.”
In spring training, a pitcher throws one session to a catcher every other day or so. A catcher catches four pitchers every blessed day. That’s why the Braves have seven catchers — plus bullpen coach Eddie Perez and bullpen catcher Alan Butts, who also don the unwieldy gear — in camp. Said Bobby Cox: “Catchers take a beating. They’re squatting and getting beat up. It’s bad if they don’t get any recovery time. You especially don’t want your No. 1 guy to get a bone bruise [on his catching hand] because that can last all season. Remember, these guys haven’t caught anybody in a while.”
The catchers remember every time they do a deep knee-bend, which catchers do all the time down here. According to McCann, it takes more than a week just to work through the soreness that comes from the unnatural act of squatting. “This is as much for us,” he said, “as it is for [the precious pitchers].”
Yet what happens after the first official pitcher-catcher workout? Pictures of precious pitchers get splashed on the front of sports sections from coast to coast, and never is there a photo of a poor catcher squatting and straining and wearing his unwieldy gear.
Davies has some sympathy for his battery mates. At Stockbridge High, he pitched and caught. “I’d throw in the bullpen,” he said, “and then I’d go catch everybody else.” Then he got wise and became a full-time pitcher, and now he’s precious himself.
For all that, the catchers insist the time they spend in early camp — they had to report Thursday, while other position players are given five more days’ vacation if they choose to avail themselves — isn’t wasted. They get to take batting practice. They get to do their squatting. They get to remember how thankless their jobs truly are.
“We need to know what kind of stuff the pitchers are throwing,” said Perez, the former catcher who actually rose above his humble position to become the most valuable player of the 1999 NLCS. “I used to catch [Greg] Maddux, and he’d come in with something different every year. The same with [Tom] Glavine.”
Maddux and Glavine won their Cy Youngs and did their TV commercials and are bound for Cooperstown, and what did their receivers receive? “It’s always like that for catchers,” said Perez, deadpan. “We don’t get too much coin. See, pitchers are stupid. They wouldn’t be where they are without us. They make a lot of money, and they never give us any.”
Pitchers and catchers report at the same time, and there the similarity ends. The pitchers get pampered even as they’re working. The poor catchers squat and sweat and grunt. It’s a dirty job, and apparently somebody has to do it. Apparently the precious pitchers would get all huffy if, you know, someone asked them to throw against a wall.
Permalink | Comments (15) | Categories: Braves / MLB, Mark Bradley
Tiger’s presence a make or break
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Is it or is it not a warning signal? It isn’t a tournament that has taken the PGA Tour by storm, though it is unique in its own way. Foundation for scoring is the Stableford System, tweaked now and then since The International was first played 21 years ago. “Modified Stableford” it had become, but that’s beside the point.
Well, maybe it isn’t. There is something about it that Tiger Woods doesn’t care for, and therein lies a story. He played at Castle Pines only two times. His best finish was fourth. He didn’t make the cut the other time and never went back. He could have made a difference. As Jack Vickers, the founder and curator of The International, said the other day, “There are the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ If Tiger Woods doesn’t show up, you’re a ‘have not.’ We didn’t fit into his picture.”
Vickers was speaking up at last rites for The International. He was officially throwing in the towel. He became the first casualty of the “new” tour, the race for the FedEx Cup, the Tour’s unabashed emulation of NASCAR’s holy grail. Vickers had seen The International date switched to the Fourth of July. “Tough timing,” he said. Then he was not able to come up with a title sponsor, one willing to part with $8 million to put its brand on the tournament. It’s not that Vickers is soliciting funds; it’s the principle of the thing.
He’s richly bankrolled. Some refer to him as an “oil baron.” He endowed Jack Nicklaus to build the Castle Pines course, then had to dig deeper when costly renovation became necessary. Players who came to play were treated like royalty. Some didn’t care for the scoring system. One hole could take you out or win the tournament for you — the 17th, for instance, which attracted spectators like a train wreck.
It isn’t often you find a sponsor who exits once the season has begun. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem did have the moxie to join Vickers for the bailout. They were cordial on the face of it, but deep down Vickers is bitter. The switch in scheduling, the absence of Woods — who’ll travel the planet to play but not to Colorado to support one of the Tour’s generous and creative sponsors — all brought The International down. (Strange, Woods has played in four events overseas, including the Ryder Cup, and hasn’t had a winner, but here in the United States his “streak” is ballyhooed.)
Meanwhile, the tour is taking a tremulous venture into television. So far this year, viewing has been switched around among three networks and three sets of broadcasters. Presumably, the Golf Channel is the home team, but then you find Nick Faldo and Kelly Tilghman, of TGC, mixed in with Johnny Miller, Jim Nantz and various other personnel from NBC and CBS. It all creates sort of muddled viewing. Most surprising of all is that the PGA Tour should marry up with the Golf Channel for 15 years. That’s a long commitment to a channel that’s like a chick just breaking the eggshell.
Up to now, I’d have to say the jury is still out on the Faldo-Tilghman team. They have nothing of the relaxed interchange that Faldo had with Paul Azinger. Tilghman still comes off a bit stiffly, and you are struck with the thought, “Can you imagine 15 years of this?” Maybe I’m just an old turk who has a tough time adjusting to the new.
What you see, I’d surmise, is the PGA Tour trying to create its own world, as has the NFL, and if NASCAR doesn’t already have one in the works, there’s great promise there.
Anyway, this began with the shock of The International breaking ranks. You don’t expect to see a mass bailout, but it does cause one to wonder: What of those seven tournaments on the schedule after the Tour Championship? What future is there in bucking college and NFL football, the World Series and the dash to NASCAR’s Cup?
This is a heavy load for one viewer who is trying to adjust to a newly revised scheme of televised golf, one who has come to the disturbing realization that the presence of one player can be the key to whether a tournament survives or not. Can’t blame Tiger Woods, but that’s the way it is, and it’s alarming.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Briscoe cleared the path for Vick
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
You study the blur on NFL Films, and you see that it is a quarterback weaving between defenders faster than the wind. Although he is short for his position, he still shocks your senses with his legs and his arm behind a creaky offensive line.
I’m talking about …
Well, not him.
“The other guy is just the left-handed Marlin Briscoe,” said the real Marlin Briscoe, 61, chuckling inside the bookstore at Morehouse College. As one of life’s forgotten Jackie Robinsons, Briscoe joined Doug Williams and James Harris on campus this weekend to sign their new book called “Third and a mile: The trials and triumphs of the black quarterback.”
Briscoe took a break to tell of a conversation he had with that left-handed Marlin Briscoe.
You know, Michael Vick.
Let’s return to last July in Los Angeles, where Briscoe and Vick were part of Nike’s brilliantly conceived commercial that featured NFL coaching and playing stars of the past and present. Between filming sessions, Briscoe gave Vick something to watch in a nearby trailer. It was a DVD called “The Field Generals,” and it highlighted the career of Briscoe, along with those of black quarterbacks Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham, Vince Evans, Williams and Harris.
The way Briscoe remembered it, Vick returned from the trailer with wide eyes and a bright smile. “He said, ‘Man, I didn’t know you guys were that good,’ ” Briscoe said. “See, they had never seen [most of ‘The Field Generals’] play, because, in some cases, you’re talking about the late 1960s and the early 1970s. These guys were only kids back then.”
In Vick’s case, he wasn’t around back then. He was born 12 years after Briscoe became the first black starting quarterback in the modern NFL (actually, the AFL at the time). Even so, you have those striking comparisons between Briscoe and Vick. Now here’s one of the striking contrasts: While Vick flashed his middle-fingered hand signal last season at the hometown crowd after his idea of hearing excessive booing, Briscoe just played and prospered while encountering much worse.
The same was true of those other Jackie Robinsons. There were the death threats to Harris, the first black quarterback to lead an NFL team to the playoffs when he did so with the Los Angeles Rams in 1974. There were the racial slurs that Moon’s wife, Felicia, endured while sitting in the stands (home and away) with their kids during the 1980s and watching Moon’s Hall of Fame career with the Houston Oilers.
Mostly, there were tons of black quarterbacks such as Sandy Stephens, Wilburn Hollis and Jimmy Raye who weren’t allowed to battle hate mail or racial slurs. That’s because they weren’t allowed to bring their brilliance as quarterbacks from college to the NFL.
“All of a sudden, when I played for Denver, I never got any mail, and that’s because they were trying to hide the death threats from me,” said Briscoe, who still was abused in other ways. Consider that he was a rookie in 1968, the year of political assassinations, a stirring black protest at the Summer Olympics, violence during Chicago’s Democratic Convention and Vietnam. You also had Briscoe shaking the world — or at least pro football — with a then rookie record 14 touchdown passes for a season. Such a feat by a black quarterback scared many around the league more than it impressed them.
Not coincidentally, Briscoe spent the next eight years in Buffalo, Miami and New England as a wide receiver.
“Aside from Fran Tarkenton, I was able to create a buzz in the league with my running, but being black, I wasn’t accepted,” Briscoe said. “They looked at me as being just a runner, but I don’t know how you can ‘run’ 14 touchdown passes. Mobile quarterbacks, back in those days, were considered a no-no, because people liked the prototypical, dropback passers.”
Sounds like the controversy involving Vick and his backup, Matt Schaub, the traditional quarterback. Sounds like Briscoe was the right-handed Vick.
Permalink | | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
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