Wednesday, October 06, 2010
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/?m=1
Looking still again at that YouTube clip, the one where Sidney Crosby's face lights up so thoroughly it can't hide even the trace evidence of glee, I had to wonder what else he could do.
I mean, really.
There he was Sept. 8, standing in the left-handed batter's box at PNC Park, peering out from the cage, his hands drawing back as he strode into the baseball, the torque in his rotating hips so maddeningly perfect.
And, of course, home run.
Not just over the Clemente wall in right field. Not just into the first few rows of seats. Halfway up to outta here.
What, 370 feet?
I mean, really.
So now the Penguins are all business again, hours from some historic season-opening hockey with the Philadelphia Flyers right here at destiny's new home Thursday night, but I still had to ask Sid what else went on this summer.
Did he hit any half-court shots, perhaps winning an all-expense trip to the Fiji Islands?
"Naw."
Can he dunk a basketball?
"Naw."
He had whipped a hockey puck between the uprights at Heinz Field from 70 yards away during the announcement of the NHL Winter Classic. I saw that with my own eyes. That had no practical application, but what else can Sid do? Last time he had a few weeks away from Penguins, he just hung around the Olympics, tucking in the winning goal in overtime to win the gold medal.
Same ol', same ol'.
"I loved baseball," he said, as if that would explain everything. "Played from when I was 5 until I was 12."
Sid batted left, threw right. Never played on the big field, the one with the 90 feet between the bases. And yet one decade and one summer after he put the bat away, he homers in a major league ballpark.
"It's a good story," Penguins coach Dan Bylsma said. "There are a lot of examples of guys who've played two sports professionally or played one plus they golfed at a really high level, but with Sid you're basically talking about someone going into the batting cage for the first time in 10 years."
So you're surprised that he jacked one?
"Not really."
We're talking an athletic prodigy here, albeit one that is forever explained in hockey's numbing numerical history. The first five years of Crosby's NHL career are in the books. He's coming off the one in which he led the league in goals with 51, in faceoffs won with 1,001, and he led the Penguins into the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year. In that process he picked up his 500th career point, a plateau he climbed faster than anyone not named Gretzky or Lemieux, now the only two humans with more points per playoff game than Crosby.
But we forget sometimes the enormity and refinery of skill that such accomplishments require, particularly in hockey. Skating makes us see Crosby's business as almost a different kind of athleticism, a skill set sometimes difficult to translate, especially to the at-large American audience that regards ice as something to be salted and, if need be, chopped.
Hines Ward hitting a ball out of PNC somehow surprises fewer people, but just like Crosby, Ward bursts into a gleeful smile at the very mention of it.
"Oh yeah," beamed this town's most tenured pro footballer, "hit it out in left center."
Really? Biggest part of the ballpark? 400 feet?
"OK more toward left."
Uh-huh.
"Actually, there might be someone else in our room who could do that," Bylsma said, trying not to point at the nearest mirror. "Canadian kids love to play baseball in the summer."
Bylsma loved it to death in Grand Haven, Mich., where he played left field for the state champion Western Michigan Christian High in 1985.
"I didn't live my life to play hockey back then," he said. "I went to college to play baseball and hockey. I loved stealing bases. Loved sliding. I think I stole something like 88 of 89 bases in high school."
Bylsma went on to play nine NHL seasons with Los Angeles and Anaheim, but when he imagines a snapshot of himself as an athlete, he's sliding home, hooking it wide, wiping home plate with his left hand.
Crosby understands this now, because there was no way he could picture himself walking out of PNC Park without parking one.
"I hit two or three before that that landed on the warning track," Sid said. "I was just hoping that wasn't as far as I could hit it."
Naturally, it wasn't.
And that batting practice homer? That probably wasn't as far as he can hit it either.
As it happens, Sid lists his favorite sport other than hockey as ... football.
Don't even start.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10279/1092835-61.stm#ixzz11Zeg87am
Click on link below to see Sid's home run:
http://balljunkie.com/video-sidney-crosby-hits-a-home-run-at-pnc-park.html
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