Monday, May 13, 2019

Your nutshell moment for today

Two images from your weekend, one from up north in Toronto, one from the desert in Arizona ...

The first, a basketball falling from the sky just short but not too short, dancing on one rim, dancing on the other, unleashing bedlam as it finally dropped without a peep through the net.

The second, a man holding a baseball on a pitching mound, holding it, holding it ... wait, still holding it ...

Two images. Two sports. The virtue of patience, versus the agony of being imprisoned by it.

The former revealed itself up there in Toronto, where Kawhi Leonard hit a shot that will be replayed in every NBA promotional montage from now until judgment's trump. With the scored in Game 7, with the clock down to a couple of hitched breaths, Leonard drove right past Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, elevated, and sent an awkward-looking shot into sub-orbital flight over Embiid's outstretched hand.

It came down on the rim. Bounced twice, teetering. Kicked over to the far rim and teetered there. And then, exhausted, dropped through the net without a ripple.

Buzzer. Game. Series. Madness unleashed.

And, patience rewarded, because the NBA makes you wait an eternity for moments like this. The season begins when football has barely begun; it doesn't end until baseball is deep into its own season. Children have grown to respectable adulthood in that time. The Tudors reigned longer.

But at last, patience releases you. As opposed to what happened in Arizona.

Where, on Saturday night, fans did a stretch in Shawshank thanks to Diamondbacks pitcher Zack Greinke, and baseball's stubborn cling to the rhythms of another era.

What happened was, with two men on and the count full against the Braves' Ozzie Albies, Greinke decided to ... not pitch. He held the ball. Held it. Albies called time and stepped out of the box to, um, re-adjust his stance (whatever that means). Greinke kept holding the ball. His catcher came out to confer a couple of times. Albies called time out again to, again, "re-adjust his stance."

Finally, after more than two minutes, Greinke came set and threw. It was a changeup, the same pitch  he'd thrown on the previous pitch a decade earlier. Albies popped it up.

The entire sequence was so ludicrous that Rob Friedman, on his Twitter account @PitchingNinja, cleverly overlaid it with video of the Kentucky Derby. The Derby finished faster.

And if you're asking now who, in 2019, could possibly find anything about this sequence entertaining, I would tell you plenty of 70-year-olds might. Or 80-year-olds.

They are, after all, baseball's apparent target audience these days. It's a sport seemingly trapped in a time before electricity was a thing, a sport whose idea of transportation is the horse-and-buggy and whose idea of live streaming involves a man with a fishing pole standing in some rushing mountain current. And that is to its everlasting detriment.

You know that Kentucky Derby overlay, for instance?

Try overlaying the entire Greinke sequence with the last minute of Game 7 in Toronto, concluding with Leonard's soon-to-pass-into-legend buzzer-beater.

Your nutshell moment for today.

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