Glanville on A-Rod

by rodinuk on May 6, 2009 9:57 AM CDT Comment 6 comments

Forgive me. I know many are sick of this, but Doug Glanville--who I guess is writing semi-regularly for the NY Times now--had this article up on the A-Rod pitch tipping story.

A couple of nice lines, I thought:

Still, we have to be careful not to make Alex Rodriguez our personal pin cushion, where we stick everything bad about baseball (or our lives) on the one person who we wanted to be everything good.

and

And let’s acknowledge that we may never know the truth. That is, if we are actually, genuinely looking for it.

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you need to make this a fanshot

sorry to be the nazi

"The House That Ruth Built, 85 years old, goes out as The House That Hamilton Knocked Down"

by blalock84 on May 6, 2009 11:39 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

i linked to this

in the morning thread, but it was very easy to miss. i was impressed with Glanville’s writing ability, but he doesn’t really say anything new. I think the world officially has tired head when it comes to A-Rod.

What is this, Horseville? Because I'm surrounded by naysayers.

by clark on May 6, 2009 11:55 AM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Actually that’s the first I’ve seen that level of detail about fielders making pitch-by-pitch adjustments.

"[Font} doesn't turn 19 until the end of May and his heater can already hit 99 on the gun. That's baseball porn." - Jason Parks

by hightowersmith on May 6, 2009 1:18 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

Holy Crap, Glanville figured it out

Hat tip to Baseball Musings:

A more likely scenario for how he may have been tipping pitches: he was sending signals to his own team, something that could easily be stolen by a sage opponent. Just as we knew when certain pitchers were throwing a curveball (based on their glove habits, or the way the catcher crouched), or throwing home instead of picking off to first (the pitcher may have turned his front foot inward, or widened his base).

This makes total sense. Arod was calling pitches and the other teams were figuring out how he was doing it. He was not intentionally calling pitches for the other team.

I suppose at some point someone from another team might have approached him and said something like, hey, we can see what you’re doing, but if you keep it up, I’ll return the favor when you’re in town. Or someone told him he was tipping pitches and being too obvious and Arod jokingly, or semi-seriously replied “return the favor when you’re out there.”

G G G E-flat_______ F F F D__________....

by t ball on May 6, 2009 1:39 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

What a sleuth.

That Glanville.

¡Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!

by Chase Irwin on May 6, 2009 8:18 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs

yeah

That makes a lot more sense. People with ego’s do stupid things thinking they’d never get caught. But I don’t think ARod is so insane that he’d come up with a scheme to tip pitches to guys.

I still think it’s a total fabrication. If there was any truth to this, who are the other participants? Assuming it wasn’t just one or two guys (obviously would have to be other SS or 2bmen), there should be many people out there who know “the truth”. It’s one thing for a guy to keep a personal secret, like steroids. But the odds of such a big secret getting leaked decreases exponentially with everyone who knows it.

Because the instant any pitcher found out about this, heads would have rolled. And hard.

by JBImaknee on May 6, 2009 8:20 PM CDT up reply actions 0 recs