I often despair that kids don’t play baseball anymore, they’re enrolled in soccer by deluded parents. And I often wonder why so many goalies have a weak glove hand.
I allow that the trappers they use are massive nowadays, more like a pool skimmer than a first baseman’s mitt, so maybe they can’t feel the puck in there, control it. That’s why so many pucks rattle around in a goalie’s glove and bounces free. We saw that happen to Zach Fucale in the leadup games to the World Juniors.
But jeez Louise, Jonathan Bernier, this isn’t complicated, an impenetrable mystery like who the heck did Nelson Scandella play for, and was he the cousin of Sergio Momesso?
On a ground ball, or a pitch in the dirt, any infielder or catcher knows you can’t trust to catch it with your hand, you get your whole body in front of it. You block the path with your shins as a shortstop, you get on your knees in the dirt for a catcher, you take it on the thighs or chest protector. Hopefully.
Monsieur Bernier, don’t nonchalantly try to pick off the puck with your extended glove, like you’re reaching for more TP. You’re a pro hockey goalie, act like it. Else you end up next to the Vesa Toskala video on YouTube for the rest of all eternity. Which you kind of did.
But you’d know all this if you’d have had the chance to play baseball growing up, every day all summer long, like we used to.
The dig against soccer makes no sense but I understand requiring all future goalies to play the catcher's position in baseball. In terms of pure athletics though, baseball is a joke and you can train for your upcoming MLB season eating at McDonald's.
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