The uncomfortable dance between athletes and media has been going on since some guy sat down and etched criticism in a stone tablet about a gladiator.
It's an even more unusual dynamic when the media people cover a team as a traveling beat, spending even more time with the players. Turns out familiarity really does breed contempt.
It can get uneasy, even if the media is announcers who travel with the team.
That was apparently the case recently when David Price of the Boston Red Sox unloaded on player-turned-announcer Dennis Eckersley on a team flight.
Eckersley, a Hall of Fame pitcher, does some part-time announcing for the Red Sox. He seems to broadcast for the viewers and not the players, meaning he won't hesitate to be critical if he sees that need.
Reports suggest those tendencies have angered some of the Red Sox players, and Price began taunting Eckersley aboard the plane.
That's an uncomfortable situation. The best strategy is always to walk away from trouble, but that's hard to do at 35,000 feet.
Steve Stone found that out in 2004, when he was announcing for the Chicago Cubs. Stone was sitting on the plane, reading a book, when suddenly he had pitcher Kent Mercker confronting him about on-air comments that the players perceived as negative.
There's a Pittsburgh columnist who had a similar encounter with a Pirates player many years ago when the writer was working for a suburban paper. The man had written a column critical of the player's sudden media boycott. The player responded with a vile series of loud insults that were apparently designed to goad the writer into a fight he couldn't possibly win.
Instead, he sat in silence and suffered through listening to the player denigrate his mother on the way to Chicago.
Teams fly charters exclusively these days, so the players feel like the plane is an extension of the clubhouse, which is their turf.
The Red Sox have resolved the latest issue by having the announcers travel apart from the team. That's inconvenient, at minimum. Sometimes it's close to impossible, given airline schedules and the total lack of logic that sometimes afflicts the baseball schedule.
Traveling with the team in any manner has always been a dicey proposition.
Earl Lawson covered the Cincinnati Reds for a long time. He once witnessed two players fighting on the team bus, but he couldn't write the story for his paper. He had been turning in cab expenses, and writing the bus skirmish would have exposed his ruse to the paper's accounting department.
Sometimes a player will vent on the ground. The Pirates had Wally Backman in 1990 and played him out of position at third base. He wasn't very good there, and Bruce Keidan expressed that opinion at length in a column.
Backman waited for weeks to respond. When Keidan finally showed up, Backman unloaded on him with a profane tirade that was purely personal. It didn't matter that it was a Sunday morning, and many teammates were down the hall at a chapel service. Keidan, a thick-skinned veteran of covering baseball in Philadelphia, took the abuse and moved on.
(By the way, anyone who doubts Backman's gift for profanity should check out the You Tube clips where he's wired for sound as a minor league manager. Don't share them with the kids).
Writers write, commentators comment, players play. It's an odd relationship, and it comes with bumps in the road.
Or in the case of Price and Eckersley, it comes with some turbulence through the skies.
(John Mehno can be reached at: johnmehnocolumn@gmail.com)
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