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Royals clubhouse Zapruder film offers plenty of food for thought
BY: Mark Dewar. Sports Editor
No grassy knolls. No schoolbook depositories. No conspiracy theories. Not even an Oliver Stone blockbuster in the offing.
No, this time the shooter came clean.
Royals outfielder and part-time pellet gun operator Emil Brown has stepped forward, accepted full responsibility and apologized profusely for that misfired plastic pellet gun bullet of his.
Brown's stray shot accidentally found its way into the left eye of veteran KMBC-TV 9 sports reporter Karen “Left Eye” Kornacki on July 27 in the team's clubhouse prior to the Royals' game with the Texas Rangers.
In the rare event you have been far, far away and missed this story when it broke – you should also know that George W. Bush is now in his second term as president, Barry Bonds recently struck No. 756 and the movie “Superbad” opens in theaters nationwide Aug. 17 – you can still catch the video of the shooting at www.thekansascitychannel.com.
Type “Kornacki pellet” into the site search located in the upper left corner of the page. Then duck.
Kornacki was taping an interview with Royals shortstop Tony Pena Jr. when a single shot, er, pop rang out.
On the audio one can hear a pair of moans from Kornacki. They are the cries of one of those rarest of souls who values eyesight.
According to a story posted the same day on the Channel 9 Web site, the pellet struck near Kornacki's left eye, shattering her contact lens and scratching her eye.
Fortunately, Kornacki appears to be fine. She offered an immediate assurance she would be OK and that the Royals organization went “above and beyond” to make sure she would be.
A Royals trainer treated her and gave her an ice pack at the time, and she went to visit an eye doctor.
The Royals assured they would investigate.
A happy ending. Sort of. The incident appears to be dying of natural causes.
Fine. Except, that is, for one question I have yet to hear addressed anyplace to date regarding the incident: What if the trigger had been on the other finger?
That is, what if a member of the media had similarly been goofing around and fired that stray pellet? And say that pellet then wound its way, heaven forbid, into a cornea of a future franchise type such as Alex Gordon?
Let me save you a few trips to the library and a couple of days of Googling, dear friend.
That reporter would be spending the remainder of his or her sports journalism career covering dice games in a park in suburban Swabovia.
Let's take this little trip back in time: Say a reporter fires that shot in the summer of 1980 and the thing strikes the eyeball of a guy named George Brett, who just so happens to be hitting .390-something at the time and chasing the long shadow of a guy named Ted Williams?
Williams, of course, is the last player to hit .400 in a season. Teddy Ballgame hit .406 in 1941 in what is hoped to have been a predominately gun-free clubhouse in Boston's Fenway Park.
Say Brett takes enemy fire, misses two games due to decreased vision, slumps to .374 (hey, we're talking about a Brett slump here) and finishes the campaign at – oh-oh – .398.
You wanna be that reporter?
Why, your lone mode of communications in Kansas City from that point forward in those days would have consisted wholly of random, late-night meetings with Deep Throat in poorly lit parking lots nowhere near the Country Club Plaza.
Shoot – pun intended – a reporter's pellet would not even have to find a star. Hit a third-string Royals clubhouse boy, Mr. or Ms. Ace Reporter, and you are still looking at 20 to 25 years in journalistic Pawtucket.
Not to train every smoking clubhouse gun squarely back at Brown. Brown made the mental mistake on this day, but it is common knowlege in the sports media community that the professional team's clubhouse remains society's final frontier in realms of recessed development.
Anybody catch the first Chiefs episode of “Hard Knocks” on HBO last week? Exactly.
Send many a 32-year-old professional athlete into his home clubhouse unincumbered. Then sit back and set your watch and his life back 20 years.
Ex-Yankees reliever Sparky Lyle used to perform feats unspeakable to teammates' birthday cakes when fans sent cakes to the clubhouse.
In his book “The Bronx Zoo,” Lyle recounted how he and Yankees mates used to clear out the clubhouse and break into impromptu hockey games.
The players used bats as sticks and rolled-up tape as pucks. The checking was unreal. Guys lost toenails banging into walls and clubhouse cubicles. The goalkeepers put on catcher's equipment.
While inexcusable, Brown's role is ultimately forgivable. For his Wonder Years moment he does not deserve to be sent down to Omaha, or worse yet, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
No, Brown stepped up and tried to make things right and I do not anticipate we will be hearing from Brown's smoking pellet gun again anytime soon.
But in my eyes – I wasn't there so I can see – the honorable one to emerge from all this is Kornacki. I am proud of the way she represented my profession.
We live in such a litigious society nowadays. Folks sue over everything from sidewalk cracks to funny glances. More than one reporter would have gone down and stayed down, milking this mishap as if he or she had been freshly struck in the pancreas by a Zack Greinke fastball.
Not the veteran Kornacki. A sports reporter at KMBC-TV 9 since 1983, she is married to a former professional baseballer herself and is the daughter of a high school football coach.
In 1995, she earned a Kansas City Image Award for her work in the community and on the job.
Professional conduct? Kornacki gets it.
Too bad a journalist simply trying to do her job had to take one for our team – and one from the team in the case of the Royals.
It was not a beautiful day for baseball.
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No, this time the shooter came clean.
Royals outfielder and part-time pellet gun operator Emil Brown has stepped forward, accepted full responsibility and apologized profusely for that misfired plastic pellet gun bullet of his.
Brown's stray shot accidentally found its way into the left eye of veteran KMBC-TV 9 sports reporter Karen “Left Eye” Kornacki on July 27 in the team's clubhouse prior to the Royals' game with the Texas Rangers.
In the rare event you have been far, far away and missed this story when it broke – you should also know that George W. Bush is now in his second term as president, Barry Bonds recently struck No. 756 and the movie “Superbad” opens in theaters nationwide Aug. 17 – you can still catch the video of the shooting at www.thekansascitychannel.com.
Type “Kornacki pellet” into the site search located in the upper left corner of the page. Then duck.
Kornacki was taping an interview with Royals shortstop Tony Pena Jr. when a single shot, er, pop rang out.
On the audio one can hear a pair of moans from Kornacki. They are the cries of one of those rarest of souls who values eyesight.
According to a story posted the same day on the Channel 9 Web site, the pellet struck near Kornacki's left eye, shattering her contact lens and scratching her eye.
Fortunately, Kornacki appears to be fine. She offered an immediate assurance she would be OK and that the Royals organization went “above and beyond” to make sure she would be.
A Royals trainer treated her and gave her an ice pack at the time, and she went to visit an eye doctor.
The Royals assured they would investigate.
A happy ending. Sort of. The incident appears to be dying of natural causes.
Fine. Except, that is, for one question I have yet to hear addressed anyplace to date regarding the incident: What if the trigger had been on the other finger?
That is, what if a member of the media had similarly been goofing around and fired that stray pellet? And say that pellet then wound its way, heaven forbid, into a cornea of a future franchise type such as Alex Gordon?
Let me save you a few trips to the library and a couple of days of Googling, dear friend.
That reporter would be spending the remainder of his or her sports journalism career covering dice games in a park in suburban Swabovia.
Let's take this little trip back in time: Say a reporter fires that shot in the summer of 1980 and the thing strikes the eyeball of a guy named George Brett, who just so happens to be hitting .390-something at the time and chasing the long shadow of a guy named Ted Williams?
Williams, of course, is the last player to hit .400 in a season. Teddy Ballgame hit .406 in 1941 in what is hoped to have been a predominately gun-free clubhouse in Boston's Fenway Park.
Say Brett takes enemy fire, misses two games due to decreased vision, slumps to .374 (hey, we're talking about a Brett slump here) and finishes the campaign at – oh-oh – .398.
You wanna be that reporter?
Why, your lone mode of communications in Kansas City from that point forward in those days would have consisted wholly of random, late-night meetings with Deep Throat in poorly lit parking lots nowhere near the Country Club Plaza.
Shoot – pun intended – a reporter's pellet would not even have to find a star. Hit a third-string Royals clubhouse boy, Mr. or Ms. Ace Reporter, and you are still looking at 20 to 25 years in journalistic Pawtucket.
Not to train every smoking clubhouse gun squarely back at Brown. Brown made the mental mistake on this day, but it is common knowlege in the sports media community that the professional team's clubhouse remains society's final frontier in realms of recessed development.
Anybody catch the first Chiefs episode of “Hard Knocks” on HBO last week? Exactly.
Send many a 32-year-old professional athlete into his home clubhouse unincumbered. Then sit back and set your watch and his life back 20 years.
Ex-Yankees reliever Sparky Lyle used to perform feats unspeakable to teammates' birthday cakes when fans sent cakes to the clubhouse.
In his book “The Bronx Zoo,” Lyle recounted how he and Yankees mates used to clear out the clubhouse and break into impromptu hockey games.
The players used bats as sticks and rolled-up tape as pucks. The checking was unreal. Guys lost toenails banging into walls and clubhouse cubicles. The goalkeepers put on catcher's equipment.
While inexcusable, Brown's role is ultimately forgivable. For his Wonder Years moment he does not deserve to be sent down to Omaha, or worse yet, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
No, Brown stepped up and tried to make things right and I do not anticipate we will be hearing from Brown's smoking pellet gun again anytime soon.
But in my eyes – I wasn't there so I can see – the honorable one to emerge from all this is Kornacki. I am proud of the way she represented my profession.
We live in such a litigious society nowadays. Folks sue over everything from sidewalk cracks to funny glances. More than one reporter would have gone down and stayed down, milking this mishap as if he or she had been freshly struck in the pancreas by a Zack Greinke fastball.
Not the veteran Kornacki. A sports reporter at KMBC-TV 9 since 1983, she is married to a former professional baseballer herself and is the daughter of a high school football coach.
In 1995, she earned a Kansas City Image Award for her work in the community and on the job.
Professional conduct? Kornacki gets it.
Too bad a journalist simply trying to do her job had to take one for our team – and one from the team in the case of the Royals.
It was not a beautiful day for baseball.