I read it in the Times

June 28, 2013

Unusual in that one of the pieces appeared in the main section, not on the sports pages:

Dan Barry, author of Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game, does a follow-up of sorts in this profile of Doc Edwards, one of those “baseball lifers.” Edwards, 76, was manager of the Rochester Red Wings when they lost to the Pawtucket Red Sox 33-innings, the subject of Barry’s well-received 2011 offering.

The same day, the Times ran this item about interpreters for Japanese players. Reminds me of a piece I wrote for the language quarterly Verbatim about Roger Kahlon, then the interpreter for the Yankees’ Hideki Matsui.

Roger Kahlon got into big-league interpreting after a buddy who translated for former Mets player Masato Yoshii suggested it.

Late last month, there was this piece about how throwing out the first pitch at a game used to be something special. Nowadays, according to Andrew Keh

[I]t is regarded as a marketing opportunity, a sweetener in sponsorship deals between baseball teams and groups that want a piece of the spotlight.

The rite, now carried out nightly, is handed to actors and reality television stars, sponsors’ representatives and contest winners, and people dressed as animals as well as actual animals.

I guess I’m guilty of being one of those pretenders to the honor when I threw out one of those first pitches in a Trenton Thunder game last year (actually, it was probably the 17th pitch, since I had to share the mound with several others, much to my disappointment).

Hey, at least I didn’t embarrass myself like these people did (more than once).

Say what you will about him, Pres. George Bush did the nation proud when he threw this strike in Game Three of the 2001 World Series, just weeks after 9/11. Can you imagine if he had botched it?

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Tagged as: Dan Barry, Doc Edwards, Hideki Matsui, Ron Kaplan

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