The NYT is absolutely indignant that the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch at baseball games has evolved from a…
…honor was extended only a few times a season to a rarefied group that included presidents, mayors and military veterans. These days, it is regarded as a marketing opportunity, a sweetener in sponsorship deals between baseball teams and groups that want a piece of the spotlight.
In other news, water is wet and fire is hot. More:
The rite, now carried out nightly, is handed to actors and reality television stars, sponsors’ representatives and contest winners, and people dressed as animals as well as actual animals.
A capuchin monkey carried the ball out for a San Diego Padres game in September. Twice in the last two seasons, the Los Angeles Dodgers have welcomed to the mound Hello Kitty, or, rather, a person dressed as Hello Kitty.
Sometimes, there are ceremonial second, third, fourth and fifth pitches. The day after making his major league debut this month, John Gast, a promising pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, crouched up and down to catch five pitches. The honorees that day were Edward Jones, a financial planning company; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the Washington University School of Medicine; a local radio station; and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
Question left unanswered by the paper of record: do the ceremonial second, third, fourth, and fifth pitches cost less for the sponsors than the first pitch?
Also in the NYT: Antoni Krauze, a Polish film director, is working on a feature film called “Smolensk” about the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 other people. But “some leading Polish actors have refused to participate”, and the NYT sees this, and other events, as reflecting deep divisions in Poland over the crash.
The range of conspiracy theories is dizzying. So-called truthers accuse the Kremlin of pumping artificial fog over the runway, planting explosives on the plane and doctoring and then sewing victims’ bodies back together in fake autopsies. Some even contend that the Kremlin murdered Kaczynski because he had traveled to Georgia in 2008 to support that country in its war with Russia.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 29th, 2013 at 10:25 am and is filed under Art, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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