This Raider coach remembers the nasty days

By Art Spander
  
ALAMEDA, Calif. — The image survives, which is both a blessing and a curse. The Oakland Raiders were tough, evil but also wildly successful.
   
Al Davis said he relished playing on the road, in Kansas City or Denver, against division opponents the Raiders dominated, and, in his words sensing fear in the fans and the opponents. Pure Machiavellian joy.
   
But the new Raiders, the team unsure of its quarterback, the team down the list in defense, are feared by nobody. Memories don’t tackle. Recollections can’t block.
  
For defensive coordinator Jason Tarver, however, they do provide a link from past to present. “I grew up a Raider fan,” Tarver said Tuesday. “I’ve been watching. I sat in the Black Hole.
  
“It’s one of the reasons I took the job. I know what that black jersey means. Nasty. The Raiders, Ted Hendricks, played with stuff hanging from their arms. That’s my image of defense.”
   
Tarver, who turns 39 Wednesday, is from Pleasanton, Raider country indeed. He has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Santa Clara, a master’s in biochemistry and molecular biology from UCLA. No remarks that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to stop the San Diego Chargers. What you do need are defensive linemen.
  
“You got to want to knock someone around,” said Tarver. “Nasty, swarming, getting the ball back on downs.”
  
The focus has been on the other side of the ball for a reason. The Raiders are starting Terrelle Pryor at quarterback against Seattle in their last preseason game. You don’t have a chance in the NFL without a quarterback.
  
Or without a defense, because if you can’t stop the other team, your quarterback rarely handles the ball. Either, in the case of Darren McFadden, does your prize running back.
    
“Let’s see McFadden run,” said Tarver, “not the other team.”
    
The Raiders were 4-12 in 2012, the first year in the reign of GM Reggie McKenzie and head coach Dennis Allen. No fear, but perhaps some progress. Perhaps.
   
Oakland was in a 27-3 hole Friday night against the Chicago Bears in the third preseason game before losing 34-26. “We’ve got to play better defense,” agreed Allen. But he also said the Raiders were holding back on tactics, not wishing to show what they could. “Vanilla,” he phrased it.
   
Across the Bay, the 49ers, who made it to the Super Bowl, are a known entity. They are set. The Raiders are still using figurative training wheels.
  
Does Pryor replace Matt Flynn and give Oakland the read-option QB that the Niners have in Colin Kaepernick? Does rookie cornerback D.J. Hayden reach the potential that so many say he has?
   
No less importantly, when will the Raiders once more be respectable?
  
They’re still Oakland’s team, San Leandro’s team, Contra Costa’s team, the team of the working man. That familiar black shield decal, with the player in the eye patch and the twin pirate cutlasses, is pasted on so many back windows of pickup trucks and vans. It’s a symbol of individual pride.
   
So many changes in the organization, the death of Davis, the departure of his longtime chief executive Amy Trask, the assumption of power by Al’s son, Mark. Where does the franchise go? How long does it take to get there?
   
Pro football is a sport of adaptation, in the front office and on the field. “It’s a copycat league,” said Greg Olson, the Raiders’ offensive coordinator. Absolutely. If something works, give it a try. If it doesn’t, give a new head coach a try.
   
The long-held belief in the NFL was that quarterbacks who run are quarterbacks who, because of injuries, have short careers. And Redskins rookie Robert Griffin III did undergo surgery after he incurred a serious knee injury late last season. But Olson said that the trend has begun.
   
“These collegiate quarterbacks are coming out ready to shoulder the load,” he explained. “I heard RGIII will be more careful this year. He’ll slide when he has to and choose when to take his hits.
  
“Terrelle’s got kind of a dual role: be an athletic quarterback as well as a passer. But for any quarterback, you’re always talking about lessening the free hits, the ones (when offensive linemen) get beat.”
    
Olson defended Matt Flynn, who had a mediocre game against the Bears, saying, “There were different reasons he struggled. Some of it was bad luck, an illegal formation, that took away a first down. Some of it was protection. Maybe his confidence got rattled.”
   
Pryor is not easily rattled nor easily tackled.
   
“Just his speed,” Olson said of Pryor. “He just looks faster. He has the ability to make plays, and right now we’re looking for playmakers.”

On defense and offense.

Harbaugh says Colt McCoy is the backup

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — The coach even smiled. That told you as much as his words. Jim Harbaugh knows what he has. And now we know he has a second-team quarterback. Just in case.

And in the NFL, you never can get too far away from “just in case.”

The 49ers are an excellent football team, a statement not formulated after watching San Francisco beat the Minnesota Vikings 34-14 Sunday night, but in no way negated, either.

Preseason football, in truth, is exhibition football. In international soccer, they call it a “friendly,” because the results don’t count. In the standings, that is.

They count in the way a coaching staff and management determines what it has.

The Niners, who made it to the Super Bowl last year, have plenty.

“I saw a lot of good things,” said Harbaugh, who handled the questions with the ease that, well, the Niner defense handled Minnesota. “I was pleased the way we worked.”

When Colin Kaepernick, getting his first significant playing time of the summer, was at quarterback, the Niner machine was efficient and effective. It was 2012 all over again, six straight completions at one point, and eventually 7 of 13 for a touchdown and 72 yards. Hardly a surprise.

Then on came Colt McCoy, and he was a surprise. A delightful one. A week that in the minds of many skeptics began with McCoy, the new kid in town, about to be traded ended with McCoy firmly set as No. 2. Or is that just a ploy to get rid of him? You never can be sure in the Byzantine world of the NFL, but it was hard to believe Harbaugh wasn’t telling the whole truth and nothing but.

The kicker in all this is that until Sunday night, when he was 11 of 15 for 109 yards, and directed a 91-yard touchdown drive — if also throwing an interception — McCoy had been, well, "a bust" may be too strong, so we will say "disappointing."

San Francisco picked up Seneca Wallace a few days ago, and with Scott Tolzien still around and B.J. Daniels seeming like the man of the future — the new Kaepernick, if you will — McCoy was a question mark. The Niners got McCoy before the April draft. He hadn’t shown much. If anything.

The problem, McCoy said as he stood in front his locker in the Niner locker room, was he hadn’t learned the system well enough to feel at ease. “I was staying up late,” he said. “It just took a while.”

McCoy said everything finally began to click a few days ago, and he and Harbaugh had conversations that reassured Colt he would not be sent packing up if something happened to Kaepernick but rather sent in move the team.

“I wasn’t ever scared or nervous,” said McCoy, a third-round pick by the Cleveland Browns in the 2010 draft. “I saw a lot of improvement this week. This was my best week with the 49ers. I’m glad everyone liked tonight, but give credit to the other guys on the offense.”

Reports are that McCoy restructured his contract, dropping the base salary to the minimum $630,000 — he had been owed $21.5 million. Both Harbaugh and McCoy refused to discuss money.

Candlestick was maybe only half full, the usual for preseason games, but the crowd was edgy. Two men wearing Niner jerseys ran onto the field, halting the game, and then after security hauled them away a third, in an Indianapolis Colts jersey, bounded out of the stands. Go figure.

Also go figure Lavelle Hawkins, a Niner rookie wide receiver and return man from Cal. He zoomed 105 yards for a touchdown with a kickoff in the second quarter, which was beautiful. However, he strutted the final 20 yards or so and then, in the ultimate showboat move, whipped off his helmet, drawing two penalties on the one play.

He wasn’t done, eventually picking up two more big penalties. Surely he didn’t learn this from former Cal coach Jeff Tedford. “He’s got to do a better job of not getting hijacked emotionally after doing something great,” Harbaugh said of Hawkins.

The job Kaepernick did was solid. “When you get out there,” said Kaepernick, who had played only briefly the first two games, “and you find your rhythm, that’s how you want to be playing.”

Someone wondered if Kaepernick, who started last year second team and then replaced Alex Smith, was paying close attention to the quarterbacks behind him, especially McCoy.

“I’m always watching the other guys,” said Kaepernick, “seeing what they’re doing, seeing what the defense is doing and how I can help them during the game.”

Colt McCoy didn’t need much help. Neither did Colin Kaepernick.

Zito deserved a better ending

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — He deserved a better ending. Maybe not red-carpet, but not red-faced either.

Barry Zito should have been able to walk away with a smile, with the cheers of thousands ringing in his ears. That’s the way it happens in the movies. The way it happens in reality was played out on a depressing Wednesday at AT&T Park.

The guess is that the game Zito pitched against the Boston Red Sox, the game the Giants in this what-else-can-go-wrong season would lose 12-1, was his last start for San Francisco, his farewell in a year during which neither he nor his team fared well.

Zito wasn’t very effective, not that anyone expected him to be, and the Giants, who can’t field and can’t hit, were even less so. A franchise in search of itself, and reasons for the decline, surely will try someone, anyone, other than Zito from here on out — unless injury demands otherwise.

So it is time to acknowledge the man, as opposed to the player, because Barry Zito was always a man no matter how poorly he threw or how miserably he was treated by the media or the fans.

Good times — and he knew those — or bad times, Zito was mature and in control. If not always in control of a fastball or curve.

I’ve dealt with the best and the rudest in a half century of sports journalism, athletes whose response to even the most harmless of questions could be an obscenity or a quick rush to a hiding place.  

Barry Zito took the blows. What he didn’t take was the criticism as personal. He accepted it as part of the job.

Sure he had the big salary, but that’s the nature of the beast. If you had won a Cy Young Award, as did Zito with the Athletics, and you were in demand in a seller’s market, the dollars would be there.

The Giants wanted this Barry to be a softer, more kindly face of the team than the other Barry, Bonds, so they spent and acquired him.

Zito didn’t pay off. Not until last season, 2012, when needed most.

In the playoffs, in the World Series, he pitched with guile and grace. The Giants don’t win a championship without Zito. Nothing could be more apparent.

Other than the fact his days with the Giants are numbered. They sent him to the bullpen briefly, then Wednesday, gave him the opportunity to start. “He could have come out better,” said Bruce Bochy, the San Francisco manager, who is marvelously protective. “He hung a slider...”

That was smacked into the left field seats in the second inning by Will Middlebrooks. Only 2-0 at that point, but the demons were hovering.

The night before, Tuesday, the Giants won their only game of the series from Boston, a game that in itself might not have meant much but could have been seen as a small step toward the respectability that had flown with the wind.

“The season hasn’t gone the way we hoped,” Bochy had said, as if the fact had to be verbalized. It hasn’t gone the way he hoped, the front office hoped and most of all the way the fans hoped.

“But we have some pride,” Bochy said. 

And almost out of nowhere, they had a 3-2 victory over the Red Sox at AT&T Park, because Ryan Vogelsong became the pitcher he had been — and surely has a chance to be next season — and because Brayan Villarreal walked Marco Scutaro with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth on the only four pitches he threw.

Such a disaster, the defending World Series champion Giants, with a lousy defense, a pathetic offense and pitching that at best could be called erratic.

The way everything went right in 2012 is the way almost everything has gone wrong in 2013.

Except the attendance, the Giants now with 229 consecutive regular-season sellouts. The fans keep coming because the tickets were sold and — because, as on Tuesday — they may be rewarded.

“We have a huge fan base,” agreed Bochy. “I was disappointed in the way we played Monday night (losing 7-0).”

He was even more disappointed Wednesday. “We drifted mentally,” he said. “That shouldn’t happen playing a good team like Boston. We had played well the night before.”

So Zito will be gone in 2014. As will Tim Lincecum. Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner, as now, continue to be the main men of a franchise built around pitching. Vogelsong’s work Tuesday night indicates he should be No. 3. And then?

Maybe the Giants obtain another starter — without Zito or Lincecum’s salaries on the ledger, there will be room financially. More likely they go after a left fielder, someone with power.

Yet whoever is on the mound or in left, the fielding must improve. There are 30 teams in the majors. The Giants rank 29th in defense.

“It’s hard to explain,” said Bochy.

He didn’t need to explain his choice of Zito, who a month earlier had been pulled from the rotation.

“I think (Zito) has earned this,” Bochy said Tuesday. “He’s a guy who has done a lot for us. I know it’s been an up-and-down year. He’s been waiting for his turn, so he gets to go first. My hope is he goes out and throws the ball great and stays in the rotation.”

He didn’t. He won’t.

Cooperstown: Babe and the Kid, Line Drives and Lipstick

By Art Spander   

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The statue of James Fenimore Cooper sits in proper relaxation, maybe a pop fly away from the bronzes of Roy Campanella and Johnny Podres, who naturally as catcher and pitcher are located 60 feet, 6 inches apart.

This indeed is Cooper’s town. It was established more than 250 years ago by his father, in the rolling Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where the subjects of Cooper’s novels, the Mohican Indians, lived.

This also is baseball’s town, the site of the most famous of American sporting halls of fame, a shrine to myth and reality, where a visitor quickly comes upon life-size figures of the Babe and the Kid, George Herman Ruth and Theodore Williams.

That baseball almost certainly wasn’t invented in Cooperstown by Abner Doubleday but more likely in Hoboken, N.J., by Alexander Cartwright is of no great issue here. Legends do not require confirmation, only recognition.

What Milan is to opera lovers and St. Andrews is to golfers — sites that if not quite holy are close — Cooperstown is to baseball. There’s an art museum here. There’s also a golf course — Leatherstocking, named for a Cooper book. They are insignificant.

Baseball is the lure, the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame, where kids in T-shirts and shorts reach up to touch the letters of plaques honoring a Babe or a Ty Cobb or a Willie Howard Mays, as if able to grasp some bit of history.

It’s been said that one of the virtues of baseball is that it enables the generations to talk to each other. Seven years old or 70, the link is the game, grandfathers recalling their youth, grandsons projecting the future.

A half-century ago, it still was three strikes you’re out, and yes, Sandy Koufax and Juan Marichal knew how to throw those strikes the way Justin Verlander knows these days.

Main Street — what else would the main street of Cooperstown be called? — is packed with memorabilia stories and ice cream parlors. Of course.

It was the late Leonard Koppett, a fine journalist and brilliant thinker, who insisted that one of the reasons kids grow to love baseball is that at the ballgame, parents — dads, mostly — unhesitatingly buy them anything, cotton candy, hot dogs, particularly ice cream. Who wouldn’t want to go?

Maybe 10 years ago, every other shop in Cooperstown was peddling something connected with Pete Rose, who, if he’ll never get in the Hall — silly when the guy with the most hits in history isn’t a Hall of Famer — was getting wealthy from the sale of autographs.

Pete’s presence has dimmed. He was at the induction ceremonies a couple of weeks back, which drew only a tiny percentage of the usual 10,000 fans because no living ballplayer was involved, but the various stores now focus on the Yankees and Mets. That’s understandable, because the Big Apple is only about a three-hour drive away.

As with other places in the country, really the world, Cooperstown has been hurt by the economy, although at the moment most of the bed-and-breakfast locales, places with names like “Baseball, Bed and Breakfast” or “Landmark Inn,” are filled.

In another few days, as a contrast, the county sheep dog trials will be held in Cooperstown. It would be neat if the dogs could be taught to steal second. You mean they already do, grabbing the bag in their jaws and running off?

If men are predominant here, women are not ignored. There’s a shop on Main calling itself “Line Drives and Lipstick,” which despite the allusion is more boutique than dugout store.

Several shops manufacture bespoke bats or at the least engrave any name you want on any previously milled bat. “Please don’t swing the bats,” admonishes a sign at Cooperstown Bat Company. That’s inside.

Outdoors, on Main Street, where boys are trying to duplicate Miguel Cabrera, or Lou Gehrig, it’s a wonder there aren’t more broken heads or broken windows.

For Red Sox fans, and they are easily identified by their attire, it’s more a question of broken hearts. On a wall in the Hall is an enlarged reproduction of the promissory note of $100,000 the Yankees gave Boston in 1919 for Ruth. The man then in charge of the Yanks, Jake Rupert, was one of the recent Hall inductees. No reference to the Curse of the Bambino, it must be noted.

In the Hall’s souvenir shop you can buy various jerseys, including one with Yankee pinstripes and the No. 3. All well and good, except above the number is “RUTH,” which is nonsense because not only were there no players’ names on uniforms when Ruth was active but the Yankees, home or away, never had them at any time.

“Never let fear of striking out get in your way,” is the quote from the Babe, who whiffed 1,330 times in his career. Never let fear of revising his uniform get in your way, either.

Global Golf Post: An Old Tiger Rather Than Tiger Of Old

By Art Spander
For GlobalGolfPost.com

PITTSFORD, NEW YORK — This was the week we were supposed to learn something about Tiger Woods. Perhaps we did.

Woods came to the PGA Championship after a victory, after a tournament in which he shot 61 the second round. Surely we would see the old Tiger.

What we saw, however, was an older, perplexed Tiger.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2013 Global Golf Post