ABCDE
D
THOMAS BOSWELL
Perfect game? No.
Perfect ending? Almost.
Hours after a historic gaffe, a show of honor and grace at a baseball game in Detroit. A1
SPORTS
friday, june 4, 2010
NBA FINALS
Game 1 goes late
For coverage of Boston’s game at Los Angeles, visit washingtonpost.
com/sports.
BLOGS, MULTIMEDIA AND CHATS
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First Things First Today, 9:30 a.m. Dan Steinberg chats about the day’s hottest sports topics. World Cup An interactive map profiling all 32 teams, plus historical records, Soccer Insider blog and more. Wizards Insider Stay up-to-date on the team’s preparations for the NBA draft later this month.
WORLD CUP 7 DAYS
Guzma
“If you get the pass a little bit wrong, you can end up looking silly.”
— Clint Dempsey, U.S. midfi elder-forward
Ninth-inning error allows the Astros to rally for 6-4 win
by Adam Kilgore
houston — Matt Capps
watched the ball fly toward right field, the last out, and he knew the Washington Nationals, final- ly, were going home. He marched toward his catcher for an em- brace. Their brutal road trip would at least have a happy end- ing.
Capps had taken a couple steps when he heard the crowd at Min- ute Maid Park erupt. He turned back toward the outfield. He saw the ball on the ground. The road trip had not ended for the Na- tionals. It was only saving the worst for last.
drop tough one
On their flight home Thursday
evening, the Nationals, after their gut-wrenching, 6-4 loss to the lowly Houston Astros, likely could only wonder how they lost three straight games to the team with the worst record in the Na- tional League. For the second time in three days, Washington scored twice in the ninth to take a one-run lead. For the second time, it lost, this time on a walk- off home run by Carlos Lee one batter after an excruciating gaffe by inexperienced right fielder Cristian Guzmán on what would have been the final out of the game. “A must-win,” reliever Tyler
Walker had called Thursday’s game. The Nationals could have salvaged a series split and a re- spectable record on a 10-day road trip, the end of a span of 20 road
nationals continued on D5
´n, Nats
S
“The ball certainly takes off more — it does aff ect spin.”
— Bob Bradley, U.S. coach
“You don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a nightmare.”
— Marcus Hahnemann, U.S. reserve goalkeeper
Follow the bouncing controversy: For World Cup goalies, it’s loathe at first sight
by Steven Goff
irene, south africa —
When the U.S. national soccer team plays Australia on Satur- day in its final World Cup tune- up, the Americans will have their first chance to play a com- petitive game with the official World Cup ball, an Adidas-made sphere called Jabulani that’s causing quite a stir in the player fraternity, particularly among goalkeepers.
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Brazilian goalie Julio Cesar compared it to a cheap toy pur- chased at a supermarket and England’s David James said it was “dreadful.” Marcus Hahnemann, a U.S.
reserve goalkeeper, joined the angry chorus Thursday, saying, “This ball, you don’t know what is going to happen with it. It is a nightmare” for goalies. “The idea is to make the ball score more goals, so I guess peo- ple can shoot from 40 yards and have a chance of it going in. To
me, that’s not good soccer. . . . Technology is not everything. Scientists came up with the atom bomb; doesn’t mean we should have invented it.” Adidas claims Jabulani, which means “rejoice” in Zulu, was designed to travel more ac- curately than previous balls. In theory, improvements to the ball would lead to increased scoring. However, thanks to widespread defensive tactics, the average number of goals in a World Cup game has remained less than
three since 1958. The Americans were intro- duced to the new ball at training camp in Princeton, N.J., last month. However, in part be- cause Nike is a U.S. Soccer Fed- eration sponsor, the Adidas ball was not used in subsequent home games against the Czech Republic and Turkey. Even if it had been available,
the U.S. team still would have had to wait until its arrival in
world cup continued on D7
JONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Stephen Strasburg pitches five more scoreless innings Thursday, improving his mark to 7-2 with a 1.30 ERA in 11 minor league starts.
Strasburg is sharp
by Dave Sheinin
buffalo — He made 11 starts, including Thursday’s minor league swan song, threw 785 pitches, suffered a couple of loss- es but otherwise dazzled at every stop. He logged nearly 2,500 bus miles, including 150 late Thurs- day afternoon as he returned to Syracuse with the Class AAA Chiefs, ate countless peanut but- ter and jelly sandwiches in cramped clubhouses, scraped the mud off his own cleats in the bow- els of a dozen little stadiums. He bided his time. And now the wait is almost over. With one last display of over- powering pitching and preternat-
in his final tuneup
Next start is set for Tuesday night at Nationals Park
ural poise, Stephen Strasburg, the Washington Nationals’ 21-year- old prized prospect, waved good- bye, most likely forever, to minor league baseball. His final act in the bushes came Thursday after- noon at Coca-Cola Field: a five- inning, three-hit, five-strikeout, scoreless performance in the Chiefs’ 7-1 win over the Buffalo Bi- sons. The victory, in front of a crowd
of 14,774, left Strasburg with a 7-2 record in his 11 starts, split be- tween Class AA Harrisburg and Syracuse. His ERA is 1.08 at Class AAA, and 1.30 overall. He struck out 65 batters and walked only 13 in 551
⁄3
innings.
His next start, barring any- thing unforeseen, will come Tues- day night against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Nationals Park, and ev- erything about Strasburg — from his statistics to his words to his
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A
fter watching the highlight shows earlier this week, I could tell you about Urban
Meyer’s esophageal pain, exactly how much fluid Andrew Bynum had drained from his knee (21
⁄2
ounces), the make of Tyreke Evans’s car (Benz s550), and that Ben Roethlisberger wore a yellow T-shirt at his first practice back with the Steelers. Here are some of the things I couldn’t tell you: who won in the WNBA, and which women are still alive in the French Open. I can, however, tell you all about Venus Williams’s controversial undergarments. Ever had this experience: You
want the score of a women’s game, and can’t get it? You wait through a half hour of the evening news or ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” hoping to be rewarded with a fleeting mention of the Mystics, or the NCAA softball championship. You stare at the crawl line, trying to read the tiny print, only to hear about a NFL player’s Achilles’ in June. Female athletes and the people
who watch them don’t ask for much; they’re used to being marginalized in the sports news, given that they are a smaller audience (for now). But lately there seems to be almost no news coverage at all, and it’s not your
On television, highlights of women’s sports are running low
SALLY JENKINS
imagination. A study released this week entitled “Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlight Shows, 1989-2009,” sampled the content of highlight shows and found that they devote barely 11
⁄2
percent of
airtime to women’s sports. Michael Messner, a sociologist
at the University of Southern California, has tracked how female athletes are treated on television for the last 20 years. In his latest project, Messner and colleague Cheryl Cooky of Purdue catalogued the content of the 11 p.m. edition of “SportsCenter,” as well as nightly sportscasts on three network affiliates in Los Angeles over two-week periods in November, March, and July 2009. According to their numbers “SportsCenter” spent just 1.4 percent of its airtime on women, and the network affiliates weren’t much better at 1.6 percent. Those are the lowest figures Messner has
recorded in two decades, a span in which women’s sports participation has exploded. In 1971, the year before Title IX was enacted, just 294,000 U.S. high school girls played a varsity sport. As of 2009, the number is 3.1 million. Yet there has been a precipitous decline in news coverage since 2004, Messner finds. Five years ago, the network affiliates gave 6.3 percent of airtime to women, “SportsCenter” 2.1 percent. Now women aren’t even getting on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. Just 2.7 percent of ESPN’s crawl line went to women’s news or
scores in ’09, down from 8.5 percent in ’04.
“Back in ’89, people would say the media was lagging behind the tremendous growth in women’s sports, but it will catch up,” Messner says. “It would evolve as women’s sports grow up. But this study found it’s not.” Without question, mainstream
sports viewers are more interested in LeBron James’s free agency than the Maryland women’s lacrosse championship. We can hardly blame ESPN’s producers for recognizing that in programming decisions.
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