It is a cardinal rule of sports journalism: No cheering in the press box. Don’t take sides. Check your partiality at the door. Let the fans be fans and just report.
It’s not that hard, really. We Knights of the Keyboard, as Hall of Fame Red Sox slugger Ted Williams sarcastically called the sporting press, most often are too busy juggling game developments, deadlines, statistics and the English language to have time or energy for rooting. Plus, it doesn’t take long in the business to understand there is no direct line between a jock’s admirable athletic skill and moral virtue. That tends to dull favoritism.
What we cheer for is the story. So now, from a distance—officially retired, and only catching glimpses of the World Series on television—I might have given in to my pre-teen fandom for the Dodgers against the Red Sox. I certainly retain a clear bias regarding the Dodgers’ classic uniforms. (Love the red numbers.)
But the way the narrative played out, with an especially nice ending for Red Sox pitcher David Price, I found it easy to muster a quiet hoorah for a fellow who years ago made a good impression in what, for him, was a decidedly uncomfortable situation.
That was July 9, 2011. I was one of a handful of Newsday scribes assigned to Yankee Stadium in anticipation of Yankee favorite Derek Jeter’s pursuit of a 3,000th career base hit. A big deal. My job, specifically—if Jeter were to produce that hit—was to talk to Jeter’s victim, whichever Tampa Bay Rays pitcher surrendered the hit.
That turned out to be Price.
“I’d rather not be the answer to this trivia question,” he said hours after the fact. “But I am. It’s tough, but he’s one of the best hitters who ever played baseball, so he was going to do it to somebody, and it just happened to be me.”
All the fuss that day was about Jeter, of course, but there always is another side to the tale. In covering sports, I often am reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon, in which Linus excitedly reports to Charlie Brown about watching a televised football game in which the home team conjures an improbable last-second victory.
Linus details how the home team is behind, 6-0, stuck on its own one-yard line with three seconds to play, when the quarterback throws a perfect pass and the receiver avoids four tacklers and somehow scores.
With the decisive extra point, “The fans went wild,” Linus reports. “You should’ve seen them. Thousands of people ran onto the field, laughing and screaming. The players and the fans were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and dancing and everything. It was fantastic!”
Charlie Brown says, “How did the other team feel?”
So I was one in a small clutch of reporters who approached David Price that July day to ask how he felt to be the defeated antagonist in a stadium full of laughing, hugging, dancing Yankees and their fans.
Price noted how unavoidable the Jeter commotion was. “It was everywhere,” he said. “I mean, walking out of the tunnel and looking at all the signs saying, ‘Congratulations, Jeter.’”
Jeter had singled off Price in the first inning for his 2,999th hit, and when he stepped to the plate in the third inning, “You’ve got 50,000 people screaming for Jeter to get a hit,” Price said. On top of that, Price was supplied a baseball marked with a “J-3” in the event Jeter would strike his 3,000th hit in that at-bat.
Sure enough, Jeter made a 3-and-2 Price curveball disappear over the leftfield fence to lift the Yanks into a 1-1 tie. “I really didn’t care,” Price said, “if the guy got [No. 3,000] off me, as long as he didn’t drive in a run or score a run. And he did all those things.”
His response was to “tip his cap” to Jeter. He reminded that, in his major league debut three years earlier, he had given up a home run to Jeter, who hardly was known for hitting homers. The thing was, Price certainly didn’t ask for sympathy; rather, he described pitching before a full house in what he called “the grandest stage in baseball” was what “any player could ask for.”
In his 11 big-league seasons, Price twice led the league in earned run average and once in strikeouts and has complied an envious won-lost record of 143-75. But because, in sports, coming up short in the highest-visibility occasions is too casually equated with deficient character, he has had to endure years of public scorn for a 2-10 post-season record prior to this fall.
Now, he’s the answer to another trivia question: Who twice beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, including in the title-clinching game? That’s worthy of a good cheer from a long-ago Dodgers fan.