The Old Perfessor

I'm a professor of journalism at Wingate University near Charlotte, N.C. I've also written about sports for newspapers and other publications for more than 30 years. This blog's about journalism, sports and whatever else I find interesting on any given Sunday or other day, for that matter.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Scout's honor: a day at the Big South tournament

I think I want to be a major league baseball scout when I grow up.

I had the opportunity to hang out with some during part of my day at the ballpark on Thursday at the Big South Conference tournament at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C. The lure of three college baseball games for a $10 ticket proved to be too much to resist on a day when I didn't have much of anything going on, so I made the journey down across the state line to Winthrop's comfortable 1,800-seat off-campus facility for the second full day of action.

I fell in with the scouts just before the start of the day's second game, between top-seeded and No. 4-nationally ranked Coastal Carolina (47-7 entering the game) and No. 3-seed Radford, facing elimination with a loss. But all that didn’t matter to the “bird dogs” who were in attendance at the game in abundance.

They were there mostly to watch the Chanticleers’ (it’s a rooster – look it up) left-handed starting pitcher, Cody Wheeler, a junior from Spotsylvania, Va.

I watched the game with Eric Tokunaga, a personable native Hawaiian whom I’ve gotten to know in the last year or so in the press box at Charlotte Knights’ games. He was working for the Kansas City Royals when we first met and now he evaluates talent from the high minors to high schools for the San Francisco Giants.

I saw this as a chance to soak up some “inside baseball,” so I tried to pay close attention as Eric watched Coastal’s prospect and interacted with his scouting colleagues. In the photo below, Eric records the speed of Wheeler’s pitches with a portable radar gun – nearly all of the scouts have them – while Sonny Collins, working for the Cincinnati Reds, takes some notes.



At this point in the season, they’ve all seen Wheeler at least a couple of times and I got the impression that most of them are here because they think they have to be. It’s a busy week for looking at college players in the Carolinas, as the ACC is holding its tournament in Greensboro and the Southern Conference in Charleston.

“I don’t think Wheeler is going to show me anything I haven’t seen already,” Eric said.

“At this point it’s just babysitting,” said another scout, using the term for just checking in and protecting their team’s interest in the player. The Major League Baseball amateur draft starts 11 days from now.

Wheeler picks a bad day to have a bad day. I think he never quite looks comfortable on the mound, a layperson’s judgment that is verified both by the scouts and by the results on the field.

He has every reason to relax, as his teammates give him a huge lead with a 10-run second inning. But he struggles to escape a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the first unharmed and, after two fairly easy innings, gives up a grand slam homer to the Highlanders’ Tyren Rivers in the fourth.

He doesn’t last out the fifth, and ends up yielding seven runs on eight hits in his 4-1/3 innings. He walked four and struck out three.

And contrary to Eric’s earlier statement, he has seen something new in today’s look at Wheeler. “Something in his delivery, it’s just a little off,” he said. “Maybe a hesitation in his pitching motion.”

It’s actually enough to affect the way he fields his position. Eric points this out to me when Wheeler’s follow-through takes him off the mound in such a way as to make what should have been an easy double-play ground ball back to Wheeler into a close play just to get the batter at first.

After Wheeler’s day is done, the game that everyone who’s not a scout is watching turns competitive, as Radford closes to within 10-8 before Coastal hangs on to win and advance, 11-9. By that time several of the scouts are gone, although some have stuck around to look at a couple of Coastal’s position players.

(NOTE: Two reading recommendations for anyone interested in the topic of baseball scouting. The definitive book is Dollar Sign on the Muscle, by Kevin Kerrane, an English professor at the University of Delaware. He followed Philadelphia Phillies’ scouts during the 1981 baseball season and his account is a good look at their lives and their often difficult job.

Of course, in the nearly three decades since then, evaluation of baseball talent has become more quantitative, based on statistical analysis and somewhat less on the intuitive judgments of scouts. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, while not specifically about scouting, does discuss the role of scouts in signing players and includes a sometimes-harsh critique of the scouting process. Both are just darned good books about baseball.)

And at this point, I’ve spent more than six hours in the broiling sun, as the first game of the day was also a three-hour slugfest. Host Winthrop eliminated VMI, 11-6 in that one.

So the day’s final game at 7 between High Point and Liberty was a welcome change, a lot cooler and characterized by some effective pitching and “small ball” – baseball terminology for strategy which emphasizes things like the bunt, the hit-and-run and the stolen base.

Starting pitchers Jaime Schultz of High Point and Shawn Teufel of Liberty tossed matching shutouts through five innings. (I thought the Teufel name rang a bell, and sure enough he’s the son of former Clemson Tigers star Tim Teufel, who had an 11-year career as a major league infielder).

High Point pushed across the game’s first run with a bases-loaded walk in the sixth and scratched out another in the ninth – batter hit by pitch, sacrifice, ground out, single.

But the Panthers had to hang on as Liberty loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth – again, small stuff: single, hit by pitch, hit by pitch – and scored on a passed ball. That left the winning run at second with one out, but High Point’s Kyle Wigmore came in to retire the last two batters without further damage. High Point escaped with a 2-1 win.

This game featured one of the few players in the tournament who’s already a major league draft choice. High Point center fielder Nate Roberts, a junior, was a 48th round choice of the Tampa Bay Rays last summer, but chose to return to college to try to improve his position. The statistics -- .424 batting average, 19 homers, 61 RBI entering the game -- indicate that he’s probably done so.

But, like Wheeler, he didn’t have a great game for the scouts that remained. He struggled to a 1-for-5 night at the plate although he did hit the ball hard a couple of times.

Even prospects get the blues, I guess.

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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

A sweet silver milestone


This blog is usually about journalism and/or sports and those two themes will still show up today. But permit me a personal post here on my 25th wedding anniversary.

I met my wife, Jayne, because of our mutual involvement in journalism and, because she married an incorrigible sports writer, the games athletes play have often been a backdrop to our day-to-day lives. (That's us in the photo above -- she's even more beautiful now than she was back then...Love that smile!)

As noted in this blog before, we met at a school board meeting in my hometown of Clinton, S.C., when I was working with the local school district as its public relations person and she was beginning what would be a successful journalism career as a reporter.

And I'm thankful every day for South Carolina open meetings laws, which threw us together for an extended period of time as she sat in my office each evening for about a week awaiting a daily update on a school board personnel hearing.

(If you know us personally and we haven't ever told you this story, ask us sometime. It involves a school administrator's inappropriate comments about, among other things, a mattress and a bottle of wine. And for readers from my hometown, the culprit was probably no one you would know or remember.)

This led to me asking Jayne out on a first date to a Clemson basketball game. See my blog entry from March 3, 2009, for that story. We've been an item ever since.

And one of the things that binds us together is that common interest in journalism. Because we've both worked in the profession -- and at the same place on several occasions -- we understood about postponed meals or nights out because a story got in the way, or the idea that sometimes the job just required us to work while others we knew were socializing. When the other spouse doesn't understand that, it can be a problem. I never had to worry about it and I'll always be grateful for that.

I'll also always be grateful for her at least tolerating, and sometimes being a willing participant in, my interest in going to a ball game.

Some of my fondest memories of us are from sports events:

-- going to an Atlanta Braves July 4th game in 1984 with a group of friends and getting back home to S.C. near the crack of dawn after an extra-inning marathon followed by fireworks.

-- Jayne, the intrepid reporter, marching as close as she could get without a media pass down to the lower level of Littlejohn Coliseum to take pictures of Jim Valvano, then the coach of the N.C. State Wolfpack. We've still got a couple of those photos.

-- freezing nearly to death while watching Clemson and Minnesota in the Independence Bowl. Who'd have thought the coldest we'd ever be at a football game would be in Louisiana?

-- going to NCAA tournament basketball games in the Superdome in New Orleans in 1990 and to Greensboro (all the way from Florida) in 1992 to see Duke.

-- My sweet wife treated me to a Houston Astros game for my 33rd birthday -- complete with a "Happy Birthday" scoreboard message -- on the night that Pete Rose became baseball's all-time hits leader. We still miss the Astrodome.

-- We literally walked down a red carpet to the 1994 Baseball All-Star Game gala in Pittsburgh featuring Tony Bennett.

-- And we had a ball at Coors Field in Denver about a year ago watching a Colorado Rockies game and have also enjoyed trips to Carolina Hurricanes and Charlotte Bobcats games in the past year.

Of course, the main thing was just being together and having a good time, which we manage to do just about anywhere.

So thanks for 25 years of putting up with all this, Honey, and sharing it with me. I couldn't have asked for anyone more perfect to be there by my side. Happy Anniversary and let's have at least 25 more!

Monday, May 24, 2010

Here's a post with some teeth in it

One of the things I like about covering hockey -- two years writing about the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins and occasionally about minor league hockey for the last 15 -- is what I see as the fundamental decency of the players and others around the game.

In my experience, NHL players didn't end up in the police blotter all that much and when they did, they appeared to be genuinely contrite about it. I remember then-Penguins' general manager Craig Patrick seeming sincerely embarrassed when he talked to reporters about his DWI arrest during the 1993-94 season. I always contrast that behavior with then-Carolina Panthers player Jason Peter, who went on talk radio a couple days after his DWI arrest in 1999 and laughed about it.

And even many of the "tough guys" of the sport seemed to have a good heart. If you're an NHL fan, you may remember a player named Marty McSorley, who made a good career out of making sure guys on the other team didn't bother Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux when he was a member of the Edmonton Oilers, Los Angeles Kings and the Penguins.

That career was essentially ended in 2000 when, playing for the Boston Bruins, he was charged with assault for hitting Vancouver's Donald Brashear in the head with his stick in the closing seconds of a game. The impact caused Brashear to fall to the ice and suffer a concussion. A jury convicted McSorley and he was sentenced to 18 months probation. The NHL suspended him for a year and he never played another game in the league.

Anyway, what I remember about McSorley was what a nice guy he was off the ice. He seemed to genuinely like talking to reporters and actually remember their names, asking about their families and so forth, and chatting me up one day when he found out that I was a working reporter with a Ph.D. I particularly contrasted my experience with the poor guy on our paper who covered baseball's Pirates and was forced into daily interaction -- or futile attempts at it -- with moody slugger Barry Bonds. I certainly got the better end of that deal.

I was reminded of what I liked about hockey players when I watched some of yesterday's Stanley Cup playoff game between the Chicago Blackhawks and the San Jose Sharks. In that game, Chicago defenseman Duncan Keith was hit in the face by a flying puck that a Sharks' player was trying to clear out of his defensive zone on a power play. Keith lost seven teeth and suffered cuts around the mouth, but news accounts matter-of-factly noted, he returned before the period was over and helped his team beat San Jose 4-2 for a series sweep.

(A few things to note about hockey players, pucks and teeth, other than the lack of pearly whites that some players exhibit. It's a hazard of the game -- most NHL media guides will list a team dentist in addition to a team physician. I once asked a Penguins' player if he ever worried about the possibility of being hurt. "If I worried about it, I couldn't be out here," he said. Covering a Penguins skate before a playoff game, I once got hit just in the calf with an airborne puck that wasn't shot that hard. It hurt for a couple of days.)

Now let's face it, if Keith's injury happened to a major league baseball player, the guy would be out for the rest of the season. The NFL or NBA, at least for a few games. But not only did the Chicago player return for the rest of the game, but he talked to the media about it, joking that he'd be in for a "long evening at the dentist" and revealing that two of the teeth that got knocked out were fake anyway.

"I'll take all my teeth out if we continue winning in the playoffs," he said.

Words that I'm sure were never spoken by Barry Bonds.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Graduation Day revisited

As I've noted in this blog before, I'm a big believer in the importance of ritual. I'm also a big believer in the importance of vacation.

In the last week, I've experienced both -- we just got back from a few days staying with friends at Virginia Beach, Va. Good company, good seafood and two good days taking a couple of rambunctious dogs and a four-year-old boy for romps on the beach. The real world seems a little easier to handle now.

Oh yeah, the ritual part. As I've also noted before, I'm a creature of habit and my work as a professor hardly ever gives me what I got on a daily basis in the newspaper business -- a sense that, at least for a little while, the work is finished.

Our Commencement exercises provide that kind of milestone once each year and the 2010 ceremony was held last Saturday. At Wingate, it takes place in a wonderful setting, the tree-lined and carpet-lawned Academic Quad in the middle of our campus. I've taught at WU for 16 years and the ceremony hasn't been rained on even once, a much-appreciated bit of God's handiwork.

In the last couple of years, Commencement has been moved to an earlier starting time. To accommodate the recognition of an increasing number of graduates from our professional programs in addition to our undergraduates (438 total diplomas this year) we start marching at 9 a.m.

I particularly enjoy something we started doing a couple of years after I arrived. The graduates file in between a gauntlet of faculty members, giving us the opportunity to speak to our students and share greetings, handshakes or hugs. Students and families sometimes leave quickly after everything's over, so it's my chance to try to speak to every one of my students that I possibly can.

Outstanding graduates are recognized with awards each year, as are two faculty members who receive recognition for exceptional teaching. I was especially pleased that the honorees this year were two of my favorite colleagues: sports sciences faculty member Dr. Christi DeWaele and art professor Marilyn Hartness.

The university made an interesting choice of Commencement speaker this year, NBC News correspondent Luke Russert, son of the late "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert. College graduates don't generally get to hear from a Commencement speaker who's almost their age -- Luke Russert, 24, graduated from Boston College in 2008 -- and I thought that just maybe the graduates paid a little more attention this time than in some past years.

He encouraged his fellow "millenials" to be involved citizens, whether it's in politics, service to the community or any other worthwhile cause. He said that this generation could become an important part of what he described as a "civic reawakening" in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- the benchmark event of this graduating class' growing up years.

"If you don't care about your country now, when will you?" he said.

He encouraged graduates to make constructive use of technology, particularly social networking sites like Facebook, noting its power to connect people politically and in other aspects of life. "It's one of the responsibilities of our generation to harness this technology and to use it ethically," Russert said.

He won me -- and anyone else who toils in the relative anonymity of a small college or university -- over with his assertion that "the heart and soul of this country doesn't come from Cambridge or New Haven but from places like Wingate." And he closed by urging graduates to "stay educated, stay motivated and stay inspired."

The university gave Russert what he said was his first (no reason not to believe him) honorary doctorate and also awarded one to Charlotte businessman and NASCAR racing team owner Rick Hendrick.

After that, the awarding of degrees to cheers and applause from families (only one person brought an air horn this year, thank goodness) as the sun climbed higher in the sky and those academic gowns started getting warmer. As the ceremony drew to a close, voice professor Dr. John Blizzard was called upon to reprise a long-time Wingate tradition.

Dr. Don Haskins -- nicknamed "Deano" -- was a Wingate administrator for more than 40 years, and each year he would serenade seniors with the song, "Precious Memories" at the end of graduation rehearsal. He passed away shortly after Graduation Day in 2005, but the singing of the song was re-introduced into the Commencement ceremony itself a couple of years ago. The link above is to Randy Travis' rendition. The song has been recorded by everybody from Dolly Parton to (seriously) Bob Dylan.

I'm not sure what some of our young graduates -- many of whom are from above the Mason-Dixon Line and beyond the U.S. borders -- might have made of this beautiful old Southern gospel tune written more than 75 years ago, with its lyrics about "unseen angels" and "precious sacred scenes" unfolding. But it struck the perfect emotional note as the grads prepared to go their separate ways into life's next adventure.

Precious memories, indeed. Congratulations to all 2010 graduates. And good luck.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Another golden voice gone

Ernie Harwell’s passing on Tuesday at the age of 92 was a big story in places other than Detroit, where he spent almost 40 years broadcasting the games of the Detroit Tigers.

The reaction, which has included tributes on ESPN and in newspapers across the country, is just another example of how baseball lends itself to a very personal relationship between broadcaster and fan. Moreso than any other sport – particularly any other professional sport – listeners identify with the guy behind the microphone. Even people who aren’t fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, know and probably admire, the broadcasting skills of a Vin Scully.

Harwell, born in Washington, Ga., in 1918, was one of several mellifluous-voiced Southerners who ventured North to become famous as baseball broadcasters in the 1940s. Others in that group included Mississippian Red Barber (Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees) and Alabama-born Mel Allen (Yankees).

Harwell, who began his sports media career as a newspaper reporter and copy editor, called games for the Dodgers, New York Giants and Baltimore Orioles before becoming the voice of the Tigers in 1960. He continued in that role before a brief forced retirement in 1991. Popular demand literally brought him back in 1993 and he stayed with the Tigers until he stepped down in 2002, with occasional guest appearances after that on Fox and ESPN baseball broadcasts.

He was scheduled to have received the Vin Scully Lifetime Achievement in Sports Broadcasting Award in New York City yesterday. Former Tigers' star Al Kaline accepted the award for him. The award seems fitting as Scully is now the last living member of that "Greatest Generation" of radio/TV baseball broadcasters.

Will any of today’s MLB announcers have a legacy like that of Harwell, Allen, Barber, Pittsburgh’s Bob Prince, St. Louis’ Jack Buck or Philadelphia’s Harry Kalas, who died about a year ago? (I would also include Harry Caray based on his work with the Cardinals and the Chicago White Sox, before the final years with the Cubs which are unfortunately immortalized in Saturday Night Live parody by Will Ferrell. He actually was a masterful announcer in those earlier years.)

In this day and time where the mass audience is disappearing and fragmentation is the rule, it remains to be seen if any individual can develop that same kind of fan base. But in baseball, when you have 162 opportunities to be invited into someone's home, as the old saying used to go, maybe it's still possible.

Saturday, May 01, 2010

A Saturday afternoon beatdown...uh-huh

I knew I was going to need a break today from grading final exams and papers, so earlier this week I made arrangements for a media pass to the Charlotte 49ers’ home baseball game with Temple.

I haven’t seen a live college baseball game during this particularly hectic spring, so it was a pleasure to get out and take in a game that was interesting though one-sided, a 23-0 rout for the 49ers over the visitors.

Yes, 23-0. I know it was baseball, because the 49ers don’t play football yet.

The game was the second in a three-game weekend Atlantic 10 conference series, and Charlotte and Temple are a pairing that’s a mismatch at first glance. The 49ers,who after today’s win have six straight seasons of 30 or more wins, are on top of the A-10 standings (13-4 record) and Temple’s near the bottom (8-30 overall, 5-12 conference). But the Owls had taken an 8-4 victory in Friday night’s opener – further proof that baseball is beautifully unpredictable from day to day.

Today’s game put each team back in its place. From a competitive standpoint, it was over after the 49ers scored seven runs in the first inning and added 11 more in the third. Charlotte pounded out 23 hits, led by outfielder and leadoff hitter Cory Tilton.

By the third inning the junior from Cary was 3-for-4 at the plate and needed only a triple to hit for the cycle. He didn’t get it, but finished 4-for-6 with a pair of home runs, a double and 7 RBI. At the other end of the batting order, shortstop Justin Roland was equally impressive, 3-for-5 with 6 RBI and his first home run of the season.

By contrast, the Owls were fortunate just to avoid serious injury. Shortstop Adrian Perez and second baseman Foster Dunigan collided in the third inning while converging at full speed on a ground ball up the middle. Both went flying and eventually got up, but were removed from the game. In the next inning, relief pitcher Mike Click was hit in the left leg by a vicious line drive, but stayed in the game.

Temple starting pitcher Matt Mongiardini was only beaten up figuratively, allowing seven runs in just 1/3 of an inning, doing further damage to an earned run average that was at 9.82 going in. He fell to 0-9 on the season. (I have a theory about statistics like that which seems counterintuitive – he must be a pitcher with some talent or the coach would have stopped putting him out there way before now.)

As the game wore on, someone in the press box joked about “rollover runs” – the old baseball saw about saving some for the next game when you’re winning big. The 49ers, ranked No. 8 in Division I in runs scored, got their first shutout of the season on the same afternoon when they rang up their third highest run total. (They've also put up 26 and 24 runs in a game this season.)

Starting pitcher Tyler Pilkington, a sophomore from nearby Weddington High, was impressive, allowing only five hits in eight innings, while striking out six. He's one of a significant number of players the 49ers have recruited from the Charlotte region, giving the team a strong hometown flavor.

A random note which explains the title of this post: one of the things I like about college baseball is the up-close-and-personal nature of fan interaction with players and umpires. Seems like every school has its own -- in the phrase of long-time major league broadcaster Milo Hamilton --“leather-lunged fan" who’s an unmistakable presence. For Charlotte, it’s the “Uh-huh” guy.

I don’t know whether he’s a student or booster, but he apparently has quite a following. He makes running commentary on the game, exhorting 49ers players and heckling opposing players – it’s all good-natured clean fun – and punctuating each comment with an “uh-huh” at the end. As in, “Come on number 15, get a hit for us, uh-huh.”

This sometimes gets a chorus of “uh-huh” responses and some folks even bring signs with “Uh-huh” printed on them to hold up at the appropriate time. I think I might find all of this a little wearing over the course of a full season, and on this afternoon things eventually quieted down as the 49ers took control of the game early.

But as long as it isn’t abusive and it gets fans into the game, who am I to argue with it? Can I get an “uh-huh”?