By Dejan Kovacevic | 12:30 a.m. Sunday
I am negligent, over four years on this beat, of not writing enough about John Grabow.
On those occasions when he has given up a key home run, you can expect to read quotes from him. (He always will make himself available.) And, every once in a while, when he has an outing like the one last night -- one batter, one out, two men stranded, inning over -- he will get the kind of parenthetical mention I used in this morning's gamer.
Not good enough.
Stepping back for a moment, Grabow now has inherited 33 runners and allowed eight of them to score. In a sport filled with an increasing amount of statistics, the role of the middle reliever -- certainly the left-handed guy called on in tough situations -- can be singularly defined by that number. And few in the National League have been better at it than Grabow. Last year, the figure was 47 inherited, 17 scored. Since the end of June, he has been scored upon seven times in 32 appearances. He has a 2.88 ERA. Opponents are batting .215 against him.
He is also, in the intangible sense, one of the premier competitors on the team.
That is good enough.
Linkage to the general coverage ...
Pirates 6, Astros 4: Matt Capps' 20th save comes with an unusually large gathering for a late-September game. Sure, they came mostly for the band, but they seemed to appreciate the ninth inning.
Opinion: Columnist Bob Smizik suggests "Come watch history!" as the Pirates' 2009 marketing slogan.
Notebook: Jack Wilson did get a warm ovation as he pinch-hit last night for the first time in nearly a month, but those people seemed to miss out on the meaning. That will not happen if Wilson gets an at-bat this afternoon. Also, Frank Coonelly promises no sequel to the Fan Appreciation Day debacle of 2007.
Power rankings: Paul Meyer's comment next to the local club's position sums it up nicely.
And from other realms ...
From the team's official site, watch Ryan Doumit's swing on this two-run double last night. Has a little Brian Giles to it.
This will surprise no one, but ESPN's Jim Caple calls PNC Park the best sporting venue anywhere in the United States. And he offers this explanation: "Because a team that gets almost everything else wrong got everything right with this, the finest sports facility in the country. Because it is the perfect blend of architecture and environment."
A New York Times piece about Yankee Stadium illustrates the passion that many in the Bronx have had over the years for the Pirates because of No. 21. Thanks to old friend Ian DeArdo, who once gave me a full-day tour of London despite having known me only through the Q&A forum.
Bud Selig takes out a full-page ad in the Houston Chronicle to explain Major League Baseball's controversial decision to move those two home games against the Cubs to Milwaukee. But, with the Astros losing everywhere they go -- including here last night -- the complaints will ring increasingly hollow.
Bad day for Brian Moehler and the Astros, writes Brian McTaggart of the Chronicle.
In the blogosphere, Charlie Wilmoth at Bucs Dugout wonders why I -- and others -- did not cover the Nyjer Morgan/police thing the other night. I never speak for anyone else, but I have one very simple response for why I left it out of the paper:
It was not news.
1. There is almost no circumstance in which it reasonably can be considered news that someone gets pulled over for having tinted windows, then is not detained or arrested. On the police blotter for the City of Pittsburgh that day, if there were 728 incidents, that one surely ranked No. 728. On the list of crime stories published in the Post-Gazette that day, it would not have made the honorable-mention list. It was nothing.
2. Celebrity is a factor when making news judgments. Thus, I would argue that if one of the presidential candidates were pulled over in such a manner, for something that minor, it would qualify as news. Not a professional sports athlete. Not even a prominent one. To repeat, it was nothing.
3. I thought Russell Martin's remark regarding the police profiling was at least interesting enough to link to the L.A. Times' coverage solely for that purpose.
4. Morgan described himself as having lost his temper. He meant that he lost his cool or patience, in talking to him a couple times since then. Nothing happened. If Morgan actually had lost his temper with the police, there would have been quite the incident.
Finally, on a personal aside here that is semi-related, the local police have been far more visible along Federal and General Robinson streets after games, as anyone attending games regularly can attest. And they have been tough.
I was pulled over myself about a month ago on General Robinson. It was about 90 minutes after the game -- when I usually leave the stadium -- and the officer told me that I was swerving across the street's three lanes. I had no recollection of doing so but, being someone who obsessively checks text messages and other distracting fare, neither could I argue it much. He wanted to see if I was drinking, even though I told him I never had a drink in my life and felt I had demonstrated not only that I was coherent but also that I had just finished working at PNC. Even pulled out my Baseball Writers pass and my Post-Gazette ID.
Made no difference. He called for multiple backups, and my SUV suddenly was surrounded. I sat there for nearly a half-hour, with one of the backup policemen holding a flashlight in my direction the entire time, while they did a background check and asked me to tell my story again and again.
Was that newsworthy?
If I really did swerve or drive a little recklessly, then what I did probably was more egregious than the shading of Morgan's windows.
But would that same incident have been newsworthy, whether it was me or somebody a lot better known than me?
I respect Charlie's viewpoint on this and any matter, just as I acknowledge that there are some diehards who want every morsel they can get about their favorite team. But the judgment that is made at a newspaper relating to a police/crime story is made independent of sentiment like that.
Posted
Sep 21 2008, 12:30 AM
by
Dejan Kovacevic