Dave Eiland: Bigot?
Ian O’Connor has uncovered the newest scandal to rock the Yankees’ clubhouse: their pitching coach may be a bigoted piece of shit. Behold:
Dave Eiland, pitching coach, stepped into the postgame buzz with a message for any Yankee arm traumatized by the unforgiving nature of the world’s first $1.5 billion Wiffleball field.
Ian: Maybe you don’t know this, but it’s damn near impossible to hit a Wiffle ball more than about 120 feet. You basically picked the exact opposite of the right thing to say. Nice work, dipshit.
It went something like this:
Rub some dirt on it.
This may not be such a great idea. The Mets’ trainers have been treating players with mud all season, and I don’t think that’s working out so well.
“You’ve got to be mentally stronger,” Eiland said. “You can’t let the ballpark beat you.”
“Don’t let it stab you, either. This is the West Bronx, after all.”
Yes, Eiland’s staff is for men only.
This is the kind of disgusting discriminatory bullshit that we, as a nation, should all be past by now. Women have been playing – and excelling at – major league baseball since 1947, when Jackie Robinson finally broke the gender barrier. Lynn N. Ryan taught us that women could pitch just as well as men back in the 1970s. But somehow these lessons have been lost on the Yankees roster; Shelley “David” Duncan has gotten a few tastes of the big show, but is mostly neglected and left to rot down at AAA.
“If you make a good pitch that goes out of the ballpark,” he said, “you can’t let it affect your next pitch or the next hitter you have to face. You have to put it behind you and be mentally strong.
“If you’re not mentally strong enough to handle it, you can’t pitch here.”
You have to take an IQ test to crack the Yankees’ rotation. Eiland wept when Mussina retired.
This was no indictment of Chien-Ming Wang or any other survivor of the Yankees’ 8-6 victory over Texas, a development made possible by a spirited midgame comeback and a 320-foot home run from Melky Cabrera in the eighth.
Little-known fact: Chien-Ming Wang lectures at MIT during the offseason. Phil Hughes is one semester short of graduating from Bronx Community College.
Cabrera’s victim, C.J. Wilson, didn’t get the Eiland memo. With mammoth ice packs wrapped around his beaten left shoulder and elbow, the Rangers’ reliever sat in the losing locker room and spit tobacco juice all over the absurdity that is the new Yankee Stadium.
After 20 minutes of this, Wilson bellowed, “ME LIKE THROW.”
“It looked like it was a straight-up fly ball,” Wilson said of Cabrera’s winner. “It was like the ball that [Johnny] Damon hit in the first. I was like, ‘Oh, pop-up.’ I didn’t really react.”
And then?
“And then I was like, ‘Oh crap. I forgot where we are.’”
“When snacktime is? Me want Jell-O.”
The Rangers were trapped inside Coors Field East, where good pitches often die a slow and painful death. Babe Ruth’s daughter said the old man might’ve hit 100 dingers in a single season here, inside The House That Ruthless Men Built, and maybe she sold her old man short.
And here O’Connor shows us that he’s so lazy he can’t even get the stadium’s nickname right. (You may recall that Mike Vaccaro caught us that its proper nickname is “The Lightweight Cylindrical Bandbox That Lonn Built”.) Ian: This is why you write for some shitrag in New Jersey.
“I could pee over the fence here,” Reggie Jackson said.
…
“I was praying it would come up short,” said Texas manager Ron Washington.
Now we know how guys train for Old-Timers’ Day.