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Guarding Secrets

February 8, 2013

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January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.

  • Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine.  Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
  • After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
  • A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed.  From duped to duplicitous.
  • And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.

How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.

How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often.  There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail. 

The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.  No secret is beyond discovery.

Change of Pace

January 30, 2015

Michael Schwimer is little known to us in Michigan. He was a 6-8, 240-pound relief pitcher out of the University of Virginia who was drafted in the 10th round by the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008.
In his minor league career, Schwimer earned 20 wins against 10 losses with a respectable 2.51 ERA. He struck out an eye-popping 12 batters per nine innings.
When Schwimer made his Major League Baseball debut for the Phillies in August of 2011, he served up a game-tying home run to the first batter he faced. He was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in February of 2013, and was released by the Blue Jays the following August. You might say Schwimer majored in the minors. That’s where he peaked as a professional baseball player.
As a player, Schwimer made few waves. He wasn’t a “game changer.” And yet, he may still be known as one who helped to change the game itself.
Schwimer is widely reported to be the first MLB player to use a glove that was made of synthetics, not leather (which weighs twice as much), and was made using a plaster cast of his hand. It was a custom-made, form-fitting glove.
The result looks almost like a toy glove, fit for T-ball; but MLB gave it a “thumbs up” in December of 2011. MLB players have been warming to the glove, although very slowly.
To which Schwimer responds: “It takes forever for any change to occur. But when change happens, it happens really fast.”
That almost sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said – like, “it takes forever for change to occur, and then it doesn’t.” But experience very often teaches us the truth of this sentiment.
As the MHSAA reprocesses two of its toughest topics ever – out-of-season coaching rules and 6th-graders’ roles in school sports and the MHSAA – it seems like there is no progress toward change. And no change is the possible outcome of both long journeys.
But it’s also possible that, for one or both topics, the time will come when wisdom and will combine to create constructive change, which then seems to be occurring almost overnight.
My hope is that we find that formula before a rash of problems causes a tipping point that results in a rush toward solutions that are poorly conceived and/or politically imposed by outside entities.