Losing My Perspicacity May 3, 2024

Brittney Griner tells her story, Finally, a good baseball fight, and all hail the bees

Author

Julie DiCaro
May 02, 2024

Happy Free Friday! I’ll be honest. I’m on day one of vacation out west, and there may have been more fish tacos and margaritas than I anticipated this evening, so this might be a shorter newsletter than I usually do on Fridays. But together, we persist. Things will return to normal on Monday, when I’ll still be on vacation, but at least the brutally cramped plane ride and waitress who kept suggesting more cocktails for me and mine will be in the rearview mirror.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. LMP is 100 percent reader-funded and is also my main source of income, so please consider subscribing. As a reminder, I never import subscribers from elsewhere. If you’re getting this email, it’s because either you or someone you know signed you up as a subscriber. If you no longer want to receive this email, you can simply unsubscribe or drop me a note and I’ll be happy to remove you from the list. But I hope you’ll stick around. For less than the cost of one of my many cocktails tonight per month, you can get LMP in your inbox every morning and secure the right to comment on posts.

Brittney Griner talks About Her Life in a Russian Prison

Screenshot: ESPN

The Phoenix Mercury’s Brittney Griner spoke at length to the New York Times Magazine about her nine months in Russian prison, and the story is even more harrowing than you’d expect. Here's what J. Wortham wrote:

Less than two years ago, Griner was starting her nine-year sentence in a penal colony in Russia, sewing uniforms for the Russian military and subsisting on spoiled food. She lived for glimpses of the sky, which she could see only through weathered rebar when the guards took prisoners outside. She had never been further from the sport that made her a household name. She could barely get through multiple rounds of horse, her lung capacity shot from smoking so many cigarettes. She rarely got to hear from her wife, Cherelle, or her family and friends, and she had no idea when — or if — she would be coming home.

Griner goes on to say she’s just now getting her body back from the deprivation it suffered during her confinement, revealing that she can barely watch video of herself from last season. “When I look back at the videos, it’s cringe. The season, any pictures from last year — I don’t want to see it or look at it,” she said. Then there’s the reason she cut off her signature locs:

Her curls, she confided, have been in recovery, too. When images of Griner were broadcast around the world with her long locs shorn, it seemed like an indication of the cruelty she was enduring. But Griner told me that cutting her hair was actually a rare moment of agency during her imprisonment. Her locs were always damp. There was no hair dryer, and her hair never fully dried after a shower. All the women were forced outside to exercise, she recalled, despite freezing temperatures and snow. The prison was barely heated, and she worried she would catch pneumonia. She decided to cut her locs off.

And it gets worse:

Prison in Russia reopened old wounds, memories of her adolescent body as an object of fascination and prurient speculation. Guards heckled her, made lewd jokes, asked about her genitalia. Once, she recounted, while returning from the shower with a towel draped around her neck, a guard stopped her and looked her up and down. The guard used her baton to push the towel out of the way and stared at Griner’s chest. Griner was furious but unable to do anything about it.

I don’t want to share much more of the piece because J Wortham deserves all the credit for this beautifully written story and she should get the clicks. But one thing I did want to share was Griner’s explanation for why she had marijuana in her luggage in the first place. Of course, weed is currently legal in 24 states, and it’s ridiculous that what you can pick up on your way to work in one state can land you in prison in another. But the retort racists and misogynists have always fallen back on is, “Well, why did she have drugs in her suitcase in the first place????”

Here’s why:

As soon as she felt the cannabis-oil cartridge stowed in a zippered inner pocket in her backpack, her stomach sank. Medical marijuana had been prescribed by a physician in Arizona to treat her chronic pain, but it was illegal in Russia. “I was like: Oh, [expletive]. Oh, this is about to be bad,” she told me, and continued to detail the events of the day. Another cartridge was found in a roller bag.

Griner talks about running late, not clearing out her carry-on luggage before she started shoving her essentials into it, and nearly missing her plane. I’m sure someone else has reported on Griner having a legitimate prescription for medical marijuana for a legitimate injury. I would imagine being 6’9 comes with some chronic pain, but I don’t remember reading about it before now. It’s also worth pointing out that while weed is illegal in Russia, the wink-wink understanding between Russian teams and American players has always been that they could live in Russia as they do in the US.

It's funny how that context for Griner having cannabis on her luggage always gets left out of the conversation. Here’s to hoping that telling her story publicly will help Griner find some peace.

NOW the MLB Season is Underway

Those of you who have been with me since my old blogging days (shoutout to the LOHO crowd!) probably know that I love few things in life as much as a good bench-clearing baseball brawl. I’m not sure there is anything on earth as entertaining as a good baseball fight, and this one (though two days ago), was an absolute banger:

The first thing I want to point out here is that Abner Uribe actually landed a punch on José Siri, something we almost never see in baseball fights. A good baseball fight has several components: First, there’s the initial argument, in which two guys pretend to go head-to-head while they do the whole “hold me back!” thing. Then, a bunch of guys just start pushing and pulling on each other, like a rugby scrum, but no one actually manages to get their hands on the enemy. A rare expectation here is Pedro Martinez, who managed to bounce a 72-year-old Don Zimmer down the pitching mound back in 2003. (Honorable mention to Kyle Farnsworth for his kyledriver against Paul Wilson.) And thirdly, the bullpen guys get to the melee way too late and try to get the whole thing going again, but rarely succeed.

Uribe, however, tosses the entire playbook out the window and punches Siri in the face right off the bat. Is that the first time someone in MLB has landed a punch in a baseball fight since Nolan Ryan gave Robin Ventura the business? My personal favorite baseball fight of all time took place in 2007 between the Cubs and the Padres when Chris Young, wearing the most unflattering pants in the history of baseball, threw at Cubbie fan favorite Derrek Lee. What you don’t see in this video, but which anyone who witnessed it will never forget, was Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano flying out of the dugout while removing his belt at the same time. What was he planning to do with the belt? We never got to find out because a teammate grabbed him before he had the chance to do anything. I think about what could have been at least once a month. As long as no one gets hurt, MLB fights are usually pretty damn entertaining.

Anyway, Uribe was suspended for six games, Siri got three, and MLB also disciplined a bunch of others involved in the donnybrook. But to the MLB announcer who said, “You don’t want to see that!” as soon as the pushing and shoving started, I said, “Yes, we absolutely do.”

Save the Bees, Save the World

As you may have heard, the honeybee population in North America is having a really tough time these days. Pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals designed to control pests have had a devastating effect on honeybees, and the number of hives in 2023 is reportedly less than half of what it was in the 1950s. And honeybees are important!

They directly contribute to a third of America’s food: apples, peaches, lettuce, squashes, melons, broccoli, cranberries, tree nuts, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, plums, clementines, tangerines, sunflowers, pumpkins, alfalfa for your beef, and guar for your processed foods. Ninety-eight percent of organic vitamin C sources, 70 percent of vitamin A, and 74 percent of lipids; $17 billion worth of crops annually from honeybee pollination alone. The demand for their services has tripled in the past 50 years and shows no signs of abating.

Enter absolute hero Matt Hilton, a beekeeper who safely removed and relocated a hive of bees (with a “non-pesticidal solution”) who had chosen Chase Field as the unfortunate spot to swarm.

After safely vacuuming up the bees, Hilton stuck around to throw out the first pitch between the Dodgers and DBacks.

And he turned out to be such a hit, that Hilton now has his own Topps baseball card:

The hero baseball didn’t know it needed. I can’t wait to see Woody Harrelson play him in the movie. On a final note, support your local beekeepers and leave the dandelions alone.

Cheers and have a great weekend. See you all on Monday!

Reply

or to participate.