Embarrassing Moments : Along With Those Great Plays in Professional Sports, There Are Those Blunders

In a recent game against the Chicago Cubs, the Dodgers’ Mariano Duncan, running from third base, was thrown out easily at the plate on a sharply hit ground ball to the first baseman.

Why did Duncan run? There were no outs, the Dodgers’ two hottest hitters, Pedro Guerrero and Greg Brock, were coming up, and the first baseman, clearly visible to Duncan, was playing in on the grass precisely to try to prevent a run.

Duncan, perhaps, could be excused for his base-running blunder. He is young (22) and inexperienced. Still, he is playing in the major leagues and ought to know better.

So should Steve Sax, who is older and more experienced than Duncan. The next day in a close game, Sax opened an inning with a double down the left-field line. As he headed for second base, Sax had the left fielder in sight. Still, Sax gambled, tried to make it to third base and was nailed easily.

Why did Sax run when there were no outs? His blunder cost the Dodgers a run in a game they won by only one.

In just two games in that series, in fact, the Dodgers and Cubs made so many questionable plays, a reporter wondered if he was watching minor leaguers.

Curious, the reporter made notes of all the “rocks,” as they are known in dugouts, clubhouses and television booths. The list was impressive, leading to the suspicion that professional athletes make more mistakes than they should. Some samples:

--The recently retired Larry Bowa, 39, an experienced shortstop noted for his fielding skill, let a routine ground ball play him. That is, he waited for it to come to him, and the runner beat Bowa’s throw to first base.

--Dodger third baseman Enos Cabell backed up on a ground ball, a rookie mistake, let it get by him into left field and allowed a run to score.

--Chicago first baseman Leon Durham forgot to cover second base on a pop fly to center field while the shortstop was chasing the ball, thereby turning a single into a double.

--Playing in brilliant sunshine at 6:15 p.m. without sunglasses, the Cubs’ Bob Dernier made a wrong turn in center field, lost Ken Landreaux’s fly ball and dropped it. Landreaux was credited with a double.

--The Cubs’ Ryne Sandberg hit a pop fly that second baseman Sax and right fielder Mike Marshall both misplayed, Marshall finally losing it in the sun. Sandberg then passed Dernier, who was retreating to first base, turned around and returned to the base, which was by then occupied by Dernier. The umpires, apparently succumbing to the incompetence surrounding them, called the wrong runner out.

--The remarkable inability of most major league players to bunt was again demonstrated when Sax and Dodger pitcher Jerry Reuss blew consecutive attempts to sacrifice. In another game, Sax bunted into a double play on an attempted squeeze play.

--Dropping a pop fly is one thing, but Dodger first baseman Greg Brock overran a routine one by five or six feet, the ball dropping embarrassingly behind him.

Many athletes perform with elegant perfection, but if you watch enough sports today, you soon get the idea that professionals--and sometimes even the officials--don’t always know the rules and sometimes blunder shamefully. The shoddy performances by the Cubs and Dodgers were typical of what baseball fans see a lot of today.

We’re not talking about Little Leaguers here. Good plays should be par in the major leagues, but it is not uncommon to see outfielders throwing to the wrong base, pitchers forgetting to cover first base or back up home plate, and batters and baserunners miss signs. Occasionally, somebody will even forget the number of outs or that a runner is on base. To throw wildly or fumble a ball is one thing; mental mistakes are rarely excusable.

Competent professionals mentally prepare themselves before a pitch because once the play starts, it is usually too late for them to make up their minds what to do about it. Apparently, however, some managers aren’t doing a good job of teaching, or a lot of players aren’t listening.

Some players don’t even know the rules. Toronto’s George Bell argued heatedly with umpires that the batter should have been out because of fan interference when a ball was knocked from his glove after he reached into the left-field seats to catch it at Anaheim Stadium recently.

Apparently he didn’t know, or forgot, that a player reaches into the stands or over a fence at his own risk. The batter can be ruled out only if a fan interferes with a ball that could, in an umpire’s judgment, be caught by a player on the field.

At Philadelphia a couple of years ago, Dodger Bill Russell, on third base, did not know what to do when, with the bases loaded and two outs, the batter swung at a third strike and the ball got away from the catcher and rolled to the stands.

The catcher’s throw to first base was too late to nail the runner but Philadelphia first baseman Pete Rose knew what to do.

He threw home and the catcher tagged out Russell, who would have scored easily had he not, unaccountably, stopped between third base and the plate. Russell did not know that a batter becomes a baserunner if the third strike is not caught when first base is occupied with two outs.

In a recent game, the Yankees’ Dave Winfield struck out on a wild pitch and raced to first base. Embarrassingly, the umpire had to send Winfield back to the dugout. First base had been occupied, all right, but there was only one out.

Bonehead plays have been a part of baseball ever since the infamous Merkle boner. On Sept. 23, 1908, the Giants’ Fred Merkle, who was on first base, failed to touch second after a hit that would have driven in the winning run against the Cubs.

While the Giants and their fans were celebrating their apparent victory, an alert Cub retrieved the ball and forced Merkle at second for the third out. The game ended in a tie and when it was replayed, the Cubs won it--and the pennant.

Forty years later, when officials mismeasured the Coliseum track for a big meet, the mistake was headlined “The Metric Merkle.”

Baseball players haven’t been the only athletes to embarrass themselves, of course. Their sins just seem to be exposed more often.

Jack Dempsey once lost the heavyweight championship in a fight with Gene Tunney when he forgot to go to a neutral corner after knocking Tunney down--and apparently out. Instead, he hovered over his fallen opponent, and the referee did not start counting until he retreated. Tunney got up on the count of nine and went on to beat Dempsey.

In the 1957 Kentucky Derby, Bill Shoemaker misjudged the finish line, eased up on Gallant Man for a second and lost the race to Iron Liege and Bill Hartack.

When it comes to blunders in sports, however, few can match the mistakes of Roy Riegels of the University of California and Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings. Each ran the wrong way with a football, Riegels assuring himself of a place in history by doing it in the 1929 Rose Bowl game.

Babe Meigs of the University of Chicago, legend has it, once got confused and tackled his own punt returner.

Players sometimes are so eager to intercept passes they often do it when their team would be better off if they simply batted the ball to the ground. On the other hand, Irvine Phillips of California once deliberately batted down a Stanford pass thinking it was fourth down. It wasn’t. Stanford got one more play and tied the game.

Football officials have erred embarrassingly, too. At least twice, once in a Dartmouth-Cornell game and again in a Ram-Bear game at the Coliseum, they allowed a team five downs. Dartmouth and the Bears got the benefit of the officials’ generosity.

Race driver Joe Leonard was still in contention once in the Indianapolis 500 when his car’s engine died on the backstretch and he had to be towed in. His car, his chief mechanic found, was mechanically perfect. Leonard had inadvertently hit the “kill” switch in his cockpit, shutting off the engine. The switch is a safety device to be used in case of fire.

In another Indianapolis 500, Lloyd Ruby was so eager to leave the pits that he drove off with a fuel hose still attached to his car. Another driver, Jerry Grant, once pulled into the wrong pit--it was his teammate’s--at Indianapolis and got a refill. He was penalized several laps for the embarrassing rule infraction.

Shortly after he had written a book on golf rules, professional Tom Watson broke one during the final round of a Tournament of Champions at La Costa by giving Lee Trevino a swing tip. The indiscretion--only a player’s caddy can advise him during a round--cost Watson two shots but he still won the tournament.

Even such seasoned players as Lloyd Mangrum and Arnold Palmer were guilty of embarrassing goofs in major tournaments. Mangrum once lost two strokes in the U.S. Open when he picked up his ball on the green to blow a bug off it. Palmer was penalized two shots in the 1965 PGA Championship when he allowed an obstruction, a small bridge, to be moved from his line of flight.

It is not surprising that athletes, who often achieve artistic excellence and perform as many marvelous feats of skill as professionals in other lines of work, make such errors and fail publicly and embarrassingly so often. In sports, there is the inevitability of error, no matter who is performing. Even Pete Rose, the fellow who soon will have more base hits than anybody in history, is limited in skill. He hits safely less than one-third of the time.

All professionals make mistakes. Lawyers lose cases, scientists blow experiments, pilots crash planes, doctors lose patients and journalists misspell names and report the wrong score. The athletes’ problem is that their sins are judged by connoisseurs in the stands and recorded, sometimes gleefully and often in embarrassing detail, by critics in the press box.

Still, since it has been determined by many sports scientists that there is no correlation between intelligence and athletic skill, shouldn’t more athletes, professionals, at least, do better? As Rose is fond of saying, what if a fellow who builds bridges failed two-thirds of the time?