"I've looked at you a hundred times as you walked by, saying to myself: here is an energetic man who must go to the mines. I even studied your gait and decided: this man will find many mines."
"From my gait, madame?" Mitya smiled.
"And why not from your gait? What, do you deny that it's possible to tell a man's character from his gait, Dmitri Fyodorovich? Natural science confirms it."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, page 385
This one's going to require a little amplification for me.
ReplyDeleteIn the 2003 ALCS, McCarver informed the world that one of biggest reasons for Mariano Rivera's success (against the Red Sox, certainly, but also in general) was his "elegant gait" as he jogged in from the bullpen.
ReplyDelete[October 15, 2003 mention here.]
Not I'm digging it, naturally scientifically.
ReplyDeleteFrom Matthew Kory at Over the Monster, this joke seemed right at home in the comment threads here:
ReplyDeleteThe Score (it's a Canadian site, so translated to English, it would be The Scoer)...
Sorry to be all truth-telly here, but did McCarver actually credit Rivera's success to the elegant gait, or was the infamous elegant gait remark just a gush, a la a certain other player's calm eyes?
ReplyDeleteI think the latter.
And yes, I know the sentence is in quotes at the site you linked to... but that doesn't make it so.
ReplyDeleteSince Ol' Second Inning has been offering more gush (and nonsense) than analysis for quite awhile, I'll go with gush. ... However, as you know, there are mediots like Dibble who seriously claim that a closer's "attitude" is more important than his "stuff" on the mound.
ReplyDeleteThat blog entry pinpoints the game in which McCarver said it, so it's pretty easy to check the actual quote. It would be when Rivera came in to pitch the bottom of the 8th in Game 5 of the 2003 ALCS. I wonder if I still have a VHS tape of Game 5 laying around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0YIJQ1jgEI
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