Newsday’s Ken Davidoff on the first golf cart related near-fatality of Spring Training.
When a spring training session produces little more than words, as was the case yesterday at Legends Field, who better to close it out than George Steinbrenner?
The Boss delivered brilliantly yesterday, stating his opposition to the dopey World Baseball Classic while thumping both WFAN’s Sweeny Murti (right foot) and Newsday’s own Jim Baumbach (left shin) with his massively destructive golf cart.
Murti is day-to-day; Baumbach won’t be able to stretch his vocabulary for at least two weeks.
Steinbrenner, who fancies himself some kind of great patriot for his contributions to the U.S. Olympic Committee (as opposed to his campaign contributions to Richard Nixon), is amongst the short-sighted souls purely worried about how the WBC might mess with his own self-interests. Though deeply flawed (mandatory pitch counts, the mercy rule, no Sidney Ponson on the Netherlands’ squad) the WBC could have a dramatic impact on how baseball’s global talent pool. David Stern might vouch for that, if not Sepp Blatter.
For the record, I think the Boss is perfectly capable when it comes to tooling around the Legends Field complex in a golf cart. Just like I don’t see any reason why Dick Cheney should be forced to turn over his shotgun. Older people can do all sorts of great things in today’s society (Grandma Luge, Tom Glavine, etc.).