The following is a transcript of Eric Crawford's Sports Page segment. You can watch the segment on WDRB News in the morning or throughout the day, or on demand at WDRB.com
There’s never been any lack of spitting in sports, goodness knows.
Just hang around a baseball dugout for any length of time, or even a football field. It’s not so much in basketball – but that’s a civilized game.
What there hasn’t been so much of – until lately – is people spitting on each other in sports.
Is this a thing now? Or just a stupid thing?
Jalen Carter of the Eagles spits on Dak Prescott before the very first play of the very first NFL game of the regular season -- and is ejected. What kind of way is that to start the season? (After the taping of this segment, Carter was fined $57,222 by the NFL.)
Just a little while before that happened, Luis Suárez of Inter Miami spit on a member of the Seattle Sounders’ staff after Miami’s 3-0 loss there in the Leagues Cup final. You probably didn’t hear about that because it was in Major League Soccer. He was suspended for six games. (But there were other circumstances. He also has had some biting issues.)
Then over the weekend, a Florida defensive lineman had to apologize for spitting on a South Florida player. The action cost his team 15 yards and helped set up the game-winning field goal for South Florida.
Over there years, we’ve seen these incidents. Baseball player Roberto Alomar famously spat on umpire John Hirschbeck. And, forget what I said earlier about basketball, Charles Barkley once hit a 10-year-old girl in the stands when he was trying to spit on a nearby group of hecklers. The league fined him $7,500.
Baseball even tried to ban spitting altogether during COVID in 2020. It didn't take.
The famous spitting scene in the 1992 Episode of Seinfeld, titled, "The Boyfriend," in which Keith Hernandez allegedly spit on Kramer and Newman.
And then, of course, there’s the most famous sports spitting episode – Keith Hernandez supposedly spitting on Kramer during a 1992 episode of Seinfeld. We didn’t find out until later in the episode that it was really Roger McDowell who was the spitter.
Where was I? Where is this going?
Look, I don’t know where all this spitting comes from. There’s real science behind why athletes spit at all. I’d share some of it but it’s really boring, and I’m running out of time.
I’d just rather not see spitting weaponized during games. The vast majority of athletes do keep themselves in check, and act with class, and play the games with respect.
Maybe we should just celebrate those. But here in the world or sports media, you just have to bring a spit take sometime.
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