I have a theory that baseball pitchers are more accountable than politicians. The reason? After every game, no matter if there is a victory or a defeat, the pitcher is there to answer questions and have his outing dissected. Politicians never have to do this. They can skirt issues and hide behind talking points and canned questions.
But after Monday night’s game where he gave up five runs and two homers on 48 pitches in just 2 1/3 innings, Jon Lieber stopped being a pitcher and became a politician.
Instead of dishing out his typical insipid clichés to pointed questions about his craft, Lieber sulked quietly past approximately 20 reporters specifically there to hear from him, gathered a handbag and walked through an off-limits side door. But instead of returning to complete his job -- a job that was pretty incomplete based on his work against the Cubs -- Lieber crept out a side door and left the ballpark.
Almost as bad, the Phillies' media relations representative quietly told a select few reporters that Lieber had snuck away 15 minutes afterwards.
Good job!
Yeah, I think the press is a pain in the rear, too. They can be intrusive, obnoxious, rude and tactless. But in this case, when a few camera men and scribes a simply looking for the innocuous of quotes Lieber failed to deliver.
Again.
Certainly Lieber has been around long enough to know the drill. After all, he pitched for the Yankees in the baseball media capital of the world where he would never have dreamed of pulling a secret dash stunt like the one on Monday. He knows that all he had to do was stand there for 30 seconds and say, "I wasn’t very good tonight. I didn’t have my good stuff. We'll get 'em next time." Which is pretty much all he ever says anyway, wild-card race or not.
How hard is that?
Even upon noticing the reporters waiting for him, Lieber could have said, "Look, I pitched really poorly and I really don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to go home now." That’s acceptable, and accountable.
Instead, the fans who follow the team closely lose out.