By RON MALY
As a kid, baseball was the first sport I played.
I was probably 5 or 6 years of age when I was hitting pitches thrown to me by my dad in our backyard on 18th Avenue Southwest in Cedar Rapids.
Nothing fancy about it.
The baseball was scuffed up and covered with dried mud bigtime like it had been rescued from a sewer, and the bat I was using was probably cracked and had been sitting in a dusty corner of our garage for 2 or 3 years.
But the shabby equipment served the purpose.
I learned how to hit a moving baseball. That was the important thing.
And that was a long, long time ago.
I bring that up because I had never seen anything like I saw on the telecast of today's Chicago Cubs-St. Louis Cardinals game.
And evidently there are lots of players, managers and announcers who'd never seen it either.
I'm talking about a baseball sticking to the chest protector of Cardinal catcher Jadier Molina [pictured courtesy of MLB.com] that allowed Cubs batter Matt Szczur to reach first base after thinking he was out in the seventh inning.
Molina, one of the best and most experienced catchers in all of baseball, said he had never been involved in a situation where a baseball was stuck to his chest protector or any other catcher's chest protector.
I watched Molina being interviewed on TV following the game.
He seemed baffled.
Or else he was doing some thespian work and was just acting baffled.
He kept saying "I don't know" when asked how or why the baseball was sticking to his chest protector.
Finally, Molina displayed anger.
When asked if he had put a "foreign substance" [like pine tar] on the protector, he said, "That's a dumb question."
Sorry, Jadier, it was not a dumb question.
A few players interviewed after the game said it's common for catchers and other other players to put pine tar somewhere on their uniforms so they can get a better grip on the ball.
Pine tar is also used by hitters. They put it on the bat so they can grip it better. But no one said he had seen a baseball stuck to the chest protector of a catcher.
There were a lot of "I don't knows" after the game when reporters continued doing their interviews.
Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, a former catcher, also said, “I hadn’t seen that before. I have no idea. Never seen it. That’s all I can tell you.”
The truth is, Matheny, Molina and other players and managers don't want the public to know what sort of foreign substance is on their uniforms during games.
You know what I mean. What happens on the field and in the clubhouse stays on the field and in the clubhouse.
Whatever, Molina's screwup with the baseball stuck to his chest protector was a key factor in 4-run seventh inning that enabled the Cubs to win, 6-4.
That was the best part of the afternoon.
