Southpaw Split Screen
Calder on the passing of Vin Scully, and Ian on the latest in the Deshaun Watson scandal.
Dear readers,
It was a painful week in the world of sports. On Thursday, a Russian court found WNBA star Brittney Griner guilty of carrying cannabis oil through airport security, sentencing her to nine years in a Russian penal colony. The verdict didn’t come as much of a surprise—her trial was basically a show trial—but the brutal reality of her sentence is still difficult to digest.
If there’s a silver lining to this latest development, it’s that the end of Griner’s trial means that the U.S. government can begin in earnest to negotiate for her release. On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the Kremlin was “ready to discuss” a prisoner swap for Griner and detained Marine Corps veteran Paul Whelan, likely in exchange for Russian arms trafficker Viktor Bout. This is somewhat encouraging news, but as friend-of-the-newsletter Maya Goldberg-Safit has pointed out, there’s nothing straightforward or guaranteed about prisoner swaps. Continued public pressure on the Biden administration to secure Griner’s release is more important now than ever.
Meanwhile, the sporting world lost two giants this week: NBA Hall of Famer Bill Russell and legendary baseball commentator Vin Scully. More on that below.
In somewhat lighter but still depressing news, the Washington Nationals, Ian’s favorite baseball team, have traded away one of the best players in baseball, the 23-year-old Juan Soto, to the San Diego Padres. The Nationals were languishing in last place before the trade, and now they are essentially unwatchable. Ian has responded by deciding to become a Mets fan, if only for the remainder of the season. (“Don’t call me a fair weather fan, call me a heartbroken man in search of love,” he says in his defense.) Fortunately, there is room enough for all on the bandwagon. We welcome you with open arms.
A couple of other stories caught our eye this week, so we’re giving you a bit of a two-for-the-price-of-one Southpaw bonanza this week: Calder on the passing of Vin Scully, and Ian on the latest in the Deshaun Watson scandal. Enjoy!
-Calder and Ian
Vin Scully Let Baseball Breathe
By Calder McHugh
For whatever reason, I caught the baseball bug early when I was a kid. Baseball is objectively a poor spectator sport, and yet I couldn’t take my eyes off the game, especially when the New York Mets took the field. It is an interest that has led almost entirely to pain: the Mets have not captured a World Series in my 25 years on planet Earth.
So, maybe to inject some positive memories into a team that has produced so few in my lifetime, my parents (Mets fans themselves) bought me a VHS tape of highlights from the 1986 World Series, the last one the Mets won. I literally wore it out. By the time I was five or six, I could recite Vin Scully’s call of Mookie Wilson’s ground ball, the one that snuck through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 10th inning of Game 6 (“Little roller up along first…”) to keep the Mets alive for one more day.
What I did not hear in that tape, because it sped fairly quickly through the highlights, was the silence. For almost two full minutes after Ray Knight touched home plate to win the game, Scully said nothing, allowing viewers to enjoy just the sounds of delirium from the crowd. Then he cuts back in, with his iconic voice, to finish the call:
“If one picture is worth a thousand words, you have seen about a million words. But more than that, you have seen an absolutely bizarre finish to Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The Mets are not only alive, they are well, and they will play the Red Sox in Game 7 tomorrow.”
If you listen to some of Scully’s other famous calls—Kirk Gibson's home run in the 1988 World Series, or Sandy Koufax's 1965 perfect game—he does the exact same thing. He just allows the moment to breathe.
Scully, who retired in 2016 after almost 70 years of calling baseball games and died this week at the age of 94, was the last broadcaster who was allowed to do this. Listen to any baseball broadcast today and the announcers speak as though they are under an edict to fill all of the dead air. The babble is even worse on the national broadcasts that Scully used to call — ESPN, TBS, FOX, now Apple TV and Peacock. All of them fill the screen with never-ending graphics or interviews, anything to distract you from the action (or lack thereof) on the field.
Baseball is a dying sport, we are reminded at every turn, a relic of a bygone era. And sure, it is less popular than it was in Scully’s heyday. But I can tell you firsthand: some kids still sit down to watch a ballgame and are immediately transfixed. Vin Scully understood the gravitational pull that the game exerts on some of us, and he directed us towards the action on the field, even during the dog days of summer when a ballgame feels less like appointment viewing and more like part of the texture of the day. He knew that summer is long, that his voice might serve as mostly soothing background noise until the leaves turn, when there are fewer teams left playing, and when millions of people sit transfixed as a speedy outfielder hits a little roller up along first.
Deshaun Watson’s Suspension is the NFL’s Idea of Justice
By Ian Ward
On Monday, the NFL’s chief disciplinary officer announced a six-game suspension for Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson, who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment by 25 separate women, most of them massage therapists who treated Watson at the direction of his former team. In the 16-page ruling announcing the decision, Sue L. Robinson, a former U.S. district judge, framed Watson’s suspension as a significant step forward for the NFL in its handling of sexual assault accusations. She wrote: “Although this is the most significant punishment ever imposed on an NFL player for allegations of nonviolent sexual conduct, Mr. Watson’s pattern of conduct is more egregious than any before reviewed by the NFL.”
Robinson isn’t wrong — this is, indeed, the longest suspension that the league has ever meted out to a non-violent sexual assailant — but, in typical NFL fashion, her framing obscures more than it elucidates.
When it comes to the NFL’s handling of disciplinary issues, there is no such thing as “justice, full stop” — there is only “justice, compared to what”? Is Watson’s six-game suspension “justice” compared to the chummy deference that the NFL has traditionally shown toward players who’ve been accused of sexual assault? I guess you could spin it that way — though even that might be a stretch. But is Watson’s suspension justice when compared to the full-season suspension that Atlanta’s Calvin Riley received for betting on games? Or the 12-game suspension that Oakland Raiders’ Vontaze Burfict got for a helmet-to-helmet hit? Or the 16-game suspension that Baltimore’s Darren Waller served for violating the league’s substance abuse policy?
You get the point. There is no better window into the league’s real priorities than its disciplinary decisions, and its pitifully flimsy punishment for Waston demonstrates once again that the league cares much more about “protecting the integrity of the game” than it does about protecting women from the serial predation of its players.
The blame, though, doesn’t lie with Robinson herself. Here’s the rub: Robinson’s ruling is so transparently inadequate that it has given NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell the rare opportunity to cosplay as The Adult in the Room. Because the NFL’s disciplinary officer is appointed jointly by the league and the NFL players association, the league retains the right to appeal the officer’s decision, an option which it availed itself of on Wednesday. On Thursday, the league announced that its appeal will be heard by Peter C. Harvey, a former attorney general of New Jersey, who is expected to issue a decision in the coming months. According to people in the know, Harvey is expected to suggest a penalty closer to the one that the NFL sought in the initial inquiry: a season-long suspension, some sort of financial penalty, and mandatory counseling for Watson.
But all of this is sort of besides the point. Per the league’s new disciplinary policies, which were established in the 2020 collective bargaining agreement, the commissioner can’t have the first word on disciplinary matters, but he still has the final word on these decisions. As the CBA stipulates, “the Commissioner or his designee will issue a written decision that will constitute full, final and complete disposition of the dispute and will be binding upon the player(s), Club(s) and the parties to this Agreement.” In other words, all this pseudo-legal back and forth is just procedural theater. Goodell still ultimately decides.
As the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins pointed out this week, there’s a sick sort of irony in this whole thing. The entire reason that the independent disciplinary officer exists is that Goodell and his cronies in the league’s front office proved themselves to be so pathologically deceitful and corrupt in their handling of disciplinary matters that the players’ association insisted on creating a third-party arbiter to remove disciplinary power from Goodell’s hands. Now that very same arbiter, bound by the mish-mash of conflicting precedents and incoherent policies that Goodell left in his wake, is stuck taking the blame for the NFL’s moral bankruptcy while Goodell grandstands about fairness and moral rigor. Perhaps picking up on this dynamic, Robinson devoted a significant portion of her decision to explaining how she was more or less hamstrung by the deficiencies of the league’s policies.
The seriousness of Watson’s offenses should not be lost in all of this. From the very beginning, Watson has categorically denied any wrongdoing, despite the mountains of evidence showing that he serially harassed his massage therapists. At the end of the day, though, it was Robinson herself who summed up the situation best, writing in her decision: “The NFL may be a ‘forward-facing’ organization, but it is not necessarily a forward looking one.” Whatever else you may think of her decision, she hit that nail squarely on the head.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . Bill Russell’s life off the court? “Bill Russell Was a Revolutionary,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (August 1, 2022).
. . . cricket and climate change? “Is Cricket Sustainable Amid Climate Change?” by Jeré Longman and Karan Deep Singh in The New York Times (August 4, 2022).
. . . bedlam at Bedminster? “A Perplexing Afternoon At The Saudi-Funded Golf Tournament In Trump’s Backyard,” by Chris Thompson in Defector (August 1, 2022).
. . . big complexes, bigger money? “The next youth sports arms race,” by Roman Stubbs in The Washington Post (July 29, 2022).