The Search for the Golden Arm

I know many of you think I do not like baseball that is absolutely untrue; after all I have spent one quarter of my career up to now working in professional baseball. But the sport is so backward and easy to poke fun at I can’t resist. I am sure you saw the headlines in your sport page about the Pittsburgh Pirates signing two javelin throwers from India, going to India to find javelin throwers is kind of looking for surfers in Nome Alaska. I guess they started out looking at cricket fast bowlers but took a wrong turn after a tea break and ended up at a track. This almost warrants an Ostrich Award. Wait, it gets better, then they bring them to this country and have them trained by the greatest of all pitching gurus, Tom House, the man who made Mark Pryor. The man who preaches biomechanics but has a PhD in marketing and he is good at it, marketing that is. It gets even funnier; a team actually signed these guys, of course one is left handed. If you have a male baby and you live anywhere in the world tie his right hand behind his back and get him throwing as early as possible. For left hander’s from anywhere there is gold in them thar hills! They are opening up the Indian sub continent as a potential pool of talent. How amny left handed boys do you thinkl there are in India between the ages of 16 and 20? “I’m not saying we’ve created the next Dominican Republic by any stretch,” Pittsburgh General Manager Neal Huntington said. “But it’s an intriguing market to get into, and who knows where it’s going to lead? We figured there was no cost, and it’s worth a shot to see what might develop out of it.” He added: “I’ve been greeted with a heavy dose of cynicism. Some people have asked how we can tell our fan base that we’re taking away jobs from U.S. kids, that this reeks of desperation. But it’s just a chance to spread our wings a little and see what happens.” Spread you wings and go to a track meet here in the states. If it is javelin throwers who can throw hard and far you need to go to Finland where throwing the javelin is a national obsession. I will warn you though that throwing far and hard is a lot different that throwing strikes. The learning curve is steep. It does make for a good story, I wonder who has the movie rights.