Mariotti: Hawk jinxed Garcia perfect game

Jay Mariotti:

This is the stupidest thing anybody has written in a long, long time. Hawk is awful and I wrote about him on another thread, but this might be the one instance where he shows a shred of integrity.

That "superstition" has been eradicated by any thinking person long ago. Red Barber derided this in the 1940s, as do most announcers who have any sense of journalism or caring about their audience.

As Bob Murphy, the long-time Mets broadcaster, once said.. "If we could affect what happens on the field, we would be paid a lot more money."

Jay, you embarrassed yourself.

 

I hate it when somebody talks about a jinx. Hockey players are the worst. So if somebody predicts a championship for a team and they win it, does the person who predicted it get the credit. Jinxes are ridiculous and so is Mariotti.

 

Old story.

How can you take sides?

 

If "jinxes" were real, "Jay Mariotti Gift Sets" consisting of a voodoo doll, a pair of knitting needles, and 100 push pins would be runaway best sellers.

 

I seem to recall in both '98 and '99, Yankee announcers mentioned throughout both David Wells' and David Cone's perfect games, that they were pitching perfect games.

 

With every game at our disposal in this office, the guys around me all LOVE Hawk, and they're not even White Sox fans. So I have to endure him all the time. I've just learned to tune him out.

 

Mariotti is the only guy on Earth that could make me sympathetic to Harrelson, and he just did it.

Are you kidding me? How can you not mention it if a perfect game is in progress? Hell, I was watching on the Angels broadcast and they mentioned about the sixth inning. And I don't think they were trying to jinx it, either; in fact, in the seventh and eighth, I think they were damn near rooting for him.

I've seen my share of near no-hitters in progress on TV, and on every single one of them, the announcers made it very clear what was going on from about the fifth inning to where it was either broken up or the game ended. So how about it, Jay, is AP also to blame Wednesday because they put up no-hitter advisories? Are the Angel fans, made obvious by their wearing of red, to blame because if they were there cheering for Garcia in the last two innings, obviously they let the cat out of the bag?

 

Well, if he interacted with baseball fans once in a while, instead of writing holed up in
the ol' ivory tower, he might understand that. But, noooooooooo . . .

 

Wait, Mariotti's "vaction" is over?

 

Shouldn't AP get the real blame for jinxing every no-hitter/perfect game that gets ended after five innings? If memory serves me correctly, the AP writer has to contact New York after five innings to alert them and then keep the phone line open to update immediately. (Then again, it's been 15 years since I was an AP stringer so things may have changed.)

 

Mariotti is a horrible sportswriter. He is just trying to create some kind of controversy every week just like Dan Shaughnessy in Boston. As far as I am concerned they are both losers.

 

Actually, it was ESPN that cursed the perfecto. Our favorite sports channel broke into its coverage mere seconds before the perfect game was ended.

Seriously, I can recall many times when broadcasters told us about a no-hitter in progress. Don't think this is the first time it's ever happened, and I suppose other lucky pitchers figured out a way to finish off their milestone.