Keyser: Diving catches are amazing baseball highlights … but don’t they hurt?
From Hannah Keyser at Yahoo! Sports on September 23, 2019:
“This is a dumb question,” I’d say to preface all the interviews for this piece. And in some ways, it really is. Dumb because it’s a yes-or-no question — the kind that’s bad for quotes and uninviting to follow ups. And dumb because the answer, as it turns out, is as self-evident as it seems.
But that’s precisely why I don’t get it! Which brings me back to confusion, questions.
So much of sports writing is done from a perspective of practiced familiarity. We ask players about the sport as people who can never understand it on a bodily level as well as they do, but who endeavor to bridge that divide as seamlessly as possible. In other words, we try not to look stupid by marveling, say, at the basic locomotions of the game. Sure, a monster home run or a nasty strikeout will inspire headlines about superhuman power and deftness. But, apparently, you’re not supposed to say that pop flies seem really hard to catch and that making soft contact stings like hell.
Or, that the most impressive part of a diving catch is not the catch but the dive and the fact that they do it at all because: Doesn’t that hurt?
Read the full article here: https://sports.yahoo.com/diving-catches-are-amazing-baseball-highlights-but-dont-they-hurt-we-asked-175136646.html
Originally published: September 23, 2019. Last Updated: September 23, 2019.