{"id":272,"date":"2009-02-13T10:05:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-13T10:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/pitchers-and-catchers-report-m.html"},"modified":"2009-02-13T10:05:43","modified_gmt":"2009-02-13T10:05:43","slug":"pitchers-and-catchers-report-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/pitchers-and-catchers-report-m.html","title":{"rendered":"Pitchers and catchers report! Maybe A-Rod can take up golf…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"T.D.<\/span>Ah, spring training starts this weekend. Yes, hope springs eternal, even for a woeful Mets fan like me. Of course the ritual springtime melodrama of the crosstown Yankees is usually enjoyable for me–practically a season highlight, lately–except that with the “A-Roid” revelations (who knew?!) it’s all getting downright disgusting. Alex Rodriguez is the latest, but also the biggest and one of the least convincing steroid penitents in the majors. Don’t get me started–I’ll say something I’ll have to apologize for, too.
\nInstead, check out this story in this week’s NYT, “For Golfer, Wrong Ball Turns Into Right Move.”<\/a><\/strong> It’s about a worker bee golfer on the PGA Tour, J. P. Hayes, who turned himself in during a qualifying tournament when he discovered he inadvertently used a ball not approved for play.
\n<\/p>\n

He called officials from his hotel room for a mistake that no one else had noticed, and that probably would not have been uncovered if not for Hayes’s admission.
\nHe said he never considered not turning himself in because it was a standard of the game that golfers called penalties on themselves, even those that would result in disqualification.
\n“And I would say that almost, I would hope, anyway, that 100 percent of us play by those standards,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\nA guy like Hayes, who is always on the bubble and risks his livelihood with such an admission, says “I am certainly not any kind of hero for what I did.”
\nI’d disagree with him there, even though other pro athletes have lowered the bar. Apparently others think he’s deserving, too and he has received five unsolicited exemptions that allow him to play in tournaments he would otherwise have missed, including this week’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am. I’m no golfer–my brother does more than enough for the whole family–but T.D. Hayes could get me interested. Bravo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ah, spring training starts this weekend. Yes, hope springs eternal, even for a woeful Mets fan like me. Of course the ritual springtime melodrama of the crosstown Yankees is usually enjoyable for me–practically a season highlight, lately–except that with the “A-Roid” revelations (who knew?!) it’s all getting downright disgusting. Alex Rodriguez is the latest, but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nPitchers and catchers report! Maybe A-Rod can take up golf... - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/pitchers-and-catchers-report-m.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pitchers and catchers report! Maybe A-Rod can take up golf... - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ah, spring training starts this weekend. Yes, hope springs eternal, even for a woeful Mets fan like me. Of course the ritual springtime melodrama of the crosstown Yankees is usually enjoyable for me–practically a season highlight, lately–except that with the “A-Roid” revelations (who knew?!) it’s all getting downright disgusting. Alex Rodriguez is the latest, but…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/pitchers-and-catchers-report-m.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-02-13T10:05:43+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/files\/import\/imgs\/T.D.%20Hayes.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"David Gibson\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Pitchers and catchers report! 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}