Just to continue the Chase Utley dirty-slide, no-dirty-slide discussion a bit longer before Game 3 of Dodgers-Mets tonight, here’s an interesting counterpoint from SportsIllustrated.com to my thought that the Dodgers’ Utley did what players have done in baseball forever — with baseball’s tacit endorsement, despite take-out slides actually being contrary to the letter of the law.

MLB right to suspend Utley, now must ensure play never happens again

The umpires got it wrong on Saturday night. On Sunday, Major League Baseball got it right.

With its precedent-setting suspension of Dodgers second baseman Chase Utley for Games 3 and 4 of the NLDS against the Mets, the commissioner’s office all but admitted that the umps erred by not ruling Utley out for his overly aggressive takeout slide in NLDS Game 2 that ultimately resulted in the tying run scoring and left New York shortstop Ruben Tejada with a broken right fibula.

In the very first words of its statement announcing the suspension, MLB calls Utley’s slide “illegal.” Joe Torre, MLB’s Chief Baseball Officer said, “After thoroughly reviewing the play from all conceivable angles, I have concluded that Mr. Utley’s action warrants discipline. While I sincerely believe that Mr. Utley had no intention of injuring Ruben Tejada, and was attempting to help his club in a critical situation, I believe his slide was in violation of Official Baseball Rule 5.09 (a)(13), which is designed to protect fielders from precisely this type of rolling block that occurs away from the base.”

Read the rest here.

What happened to Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada via a hard, late takeout slide by the Dodgers Chase Utley in Saturday’s National League playoff game is every middle infielder’s greatest fear.

Catching a throw at second base, touching the base, gripping and throwing the ball to first and jumping up or out of the way before an elite, 200-pound athlete with a running start, metal cleats on his shoes and angry intent on his mind barrels into your lower body and knocks you into left field, as they say, is not easy nor for the faint of body or will.

Tejada was lined up, vulnerable — and wiped out.

Utley, a second baseman, slid straight into Tejada’s legs as the shortstop, after catching a flip from his second baseman at an awkward angle, tried to jump-spin at the bag and throw to first. Instead, Utley flipped Tejada up and over, breaking the shortstop’s fibula.

He was carted off, his leg in an air cast, Utley was ruled safe via a replay challenge, and the Dodgers rallied past the Mets to even their five-game series at 1-1.

You can find ample pages out there dissecting the play, focused on whether Utley was “dirty” or within the rules drilling Tejada as he did. I didn’t see the play live, but I’ve watched it numerous times this morning.

My humble take:

Utley was not dirty. Hyper-aggressive, yes, dirty, no. He employed a legal tactic, albeit from baseball’s Neanderthal days.

Tejada was unfortunate.

And it is all Major League Baseball’s fault.

Like it or not, Utley did what baseball’s interpretive rules give him freedom to do, slide hard into the second-base pivot man. It is interpretive because the rules leave it to the umpires to judge whether or not a runner clearly goes out of his way to interfere with a fielder making a play.

In this case, the issue is whether Utley abandoned all thought of reaching second safely and went directly for Tejada.

Of course, he went after Tejada — because baseball has allowed runners to go after middle infielders for more than a century.

Almost even with the bag, i.e. dangerously late, Utley slid to the right, never touching the base as he undercut Tejada. The irony is Tejada also never touched the bag after he caught the flip.

And it was all made worse for the Mets when Tejada’s failure to touch second was detected on replay and Utley was ruled safe — even though he left the field still without having touched second. And even though umps — wink, wink — routinely allow fielders to simply be “in the neighborhood” of second base, rather than actually touching the base, to record an out before throwing.

It is a mash-up of anger, hypocrisy, bruised egos and bodies that will reach through the rest of this series – that is, beanballs and one or more bench-clearing “brawls” are coming.

And it is one that I believe, thanks to the postseason spotlight thrown on this play and the severity of Tejada’s injury, will resonate through baseball with an overdue rules change.

I believe Utley when he says he didn’t mean to hurt Tejada, only to prevent him from turning a key double play. But I also believe the collision proves the arcane folly of keeping a play like this tacitly within the rules.

The takeout slide has been legislated out of high school and college baseball, to no loss of competitive intensity. As well, MLB a couple years ago banned the ability of base-runners charging to home plate — a la Pete Rose decades ago in the all-star game — to drop their head and shoulders like a linebacker and blast a catcher to prevent a tag or dislodge the ball.

The impetus was the knee that Giants’ star catcher Buster Posey had shredded on such a play. MLB adopted the high school/college rule; catchers can’t block the plate without the ball, and runners must slide into home.

That rule has saved needless injuries at the plate, just as the amateur rule that makes runners slide directly into second — and not detour to either side as Utley did — has prevented broken fibulas throughout the game. It’s also made the controversial “neighborhood” judgment no longer necessary.

It seems to me all that is good, and an obvious overdue adjustment needed at the top level of a sport where seven-, eight- and nine-figure athletes are the brilliant lifeblood.

Gamblin’ Pete Rose won’t understand. That is something we’ll just have to live with.

I get to do all sorts of stories now as a writer for Old Dominion, stories I would have never thought of doing or believed I could do with any degree of competency back in the day.

Stuff on nuclear physics, I kid you not. Biologists working with bees and spiny lobsters, photographers headlining exhibits at the Chrysler Museum, filmmakers, novelists and musicians creating their next ambitious piece of work.

Sometimes, though, sports will cross my path, which is a treat, considering my professional background. ODU has its own sports information office that distributes news and features mostly on current athletes, so the stuff handed to me usually involves alumni.

A story got passed my way recently and I finally got to write it amid all the semester-opening writerly demands. It’s about a former ODU women’s soccer player, who transferred in from community college but wound up playing only one season, who despite raising her young son as a single mother, graduated in computer science, works in hush-hush information security, and has labored nine years in the women’s tackle football league you didn’t know existed, the Women’s Football Alliance.

Two broken legs later, and one gold medal playing for a Team USA you also didn’t know exists, Okiima “Sweet Feet” Pickett soldiers on as a fullback for the league-champion Washington, D.C. Divas.

Soccer was her life growing up in Charlottesville, but then other parts of life started happening. We talked about it all for an hour on the phone one day. We laughed a lot. Okiima is delightful. And then I got to revisit, in a way, the featury sports column I used to like to write so much that maybe could draw in non-sports readers. Those were always my favorites.

It’s a short story (posted at ODU news and minimally tweaked here), but I like it.

Meet Okiima Pickett.

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After Okiima Pickett broke her right leg twice in nine months playing tackle football, she had one thought: how soon till I can play again?

“It was a very traumatizing experience,” said Pickett, a 2003 graduate of Old Dominion University in computer science. “But I didn’t want to be known as the player who broke her leg and quit.”

Pickett, who played women’s soccer at ODU, is far from quitting the Washington D.C. Divas of the Women’s Football Alliance, even though she is 35 years old, has a titanium rod in her shin and screws in her knee and ankle.

A running back nicknamed “Sweet Feet,” Pickett is one of the Divas’ most experienced veterans with nine seasons under her shoulder pads. And in August, she captured her first championship of the 41-team league when the Divas defeated the Dallas Elite 30-26 in the title game in Los Angeles.

Her presence on the roster in 2015 seemed doubtful when Pickett’s leg was broken by a tackle during a game late in the ‘12 season, and then broken again in the first game of ’13, by the same opponents from Boston.

“Coming back from injuries like that, you have no idea what to expect,” said Pickett, who works as an information security engineer. “I was thinking my career might be over, wondering if I’d ever have my game back. So for me to be able to play again and contribute to a championship is an awesome feeling.”

Pickett did quit once; she stopped playing co-ed soccer near her Maryland home when teammates suggested she take her on-the-pitch aggressiveness to the Divas.

The idea intrigued Pickett, who said she asked to try out for her high school football team in Charlottesville but was denied by the coach, a family friend who worried about her.

“He said he didn’t want me to get hurt,” Pickett said. “I said, ‘But they won’t be able to catch me.”’

Pickett got pregnant and couldn’t accept the soccer scholarship she said ODU offered her out of high school. She wound up attending community college for two years and was recruited again for ODU’s soccer team. But with a challenging academic load, as well as her young son to care for, Pickett played just one season before she graduated in the summer of 2003.

Her son is 16 now, and Pickett said she is gratified he’s been able to witness the sweat and dedication she’s put into her comeback.

“Okiima is the ultimate D.C. Diva,” said teammate Kenyetta Grigsby, the team’s tailback who runs behind Pickett, a 5-foot-4, 140-pound fullback. “I didn’t think she’d let the leg injury stop her. She loves football and she loves the Divas, so I knew she’d be back.”

Pickett played for Team USA five years ago in the first International Federation of American Football women’s world championship – the U.S. won the gold — and said she hopes to make the 2017 national team at age 37, so retirement isn’t yet in the conversation.

“My leg can predict the weather,” she joked. “It still aches and stuff, and I also had mental hurdles to overcome this year. I needed to get my confidence back. In my mind, I feel like I limp when I run, although on film you see that I don’t.”

Grigsby said “Sweet Feet” should not fret.

“She had her leg so wrapped up at the beginning of the season, we called her ‘Peg Leg,’ ” Grigsby, a police officer in Northern Virginia, said with a laugh. “But she got her name back by the end.”

The Philadelphia Phillies of my youth stunk out loud.

From 1964, when they gagged away the National League pennant in the last couple of weeks, to 1974 – ages “little boy” to “oh my god, he has a driver’s license?” personally speaking — they had four winning records and won 47 percent of their games. And except for the Crash of ’64, they never even sniffed a championship. This fabled run of ineptitude actually included the 1972 season, when left-hander Steve Carlton, pitching for baseball’s second-worst team – thank you, Texas Rangers – somehow won 27 games for an outfit that won 59 in all.

I mention this because the Phillies (of my youth extrapolated) stink out loud again — on pace for their worst season since my late father, who died seven years ago at 84, was 1.

Back then, I didn’t know any better. It’s just how it was. Philly teams stunk. Sorry, kid, that’s how it is here. Want some ketchup for that scrapple?

But now it’s just sad, because the Phillies have not stunk recently. They won the World Series – just the franchise’s second WS title – in 2008. They lost the World Series in 2009. They won their division in 2010 and 2011. First baseman Ryan Howard, second baseman Chase Utley, catcher Carlos Ruiz and shortstop Jimmy Rollins were stalwarts on those teams.

But it is 2015. Rollins is 36 and batting .176 in the first season of his native California twilight with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Howard is 35 and batting .193 in Philly. Utley is 36 and batting .103. One-oh-three, which translates to nine hits in 25 games. Ruiz is 36 and hitting .242 with one extra-base hit. Roy Halladay retired a couple of years ago, his arm shot. Cliff Lee, on the DL again with a shot arm, is about to join him in the pasture. At 10-18, the Phillies are baseball’s second-worst team – thank you, Milwaukee Brewers – and on pace to outdo those ’72 phrauds by a country mile.

I was going to say that the dismantling of this now-threadbare franchise is disheartening, except it wasn’t dismantled. It was left by its heinous (mis)-management to simply languish, whistling past the proverbial graveyard, handcuffed by foolish contracts, failed player development and frivolous scouting. Fs all around. If there is a franchise “plan,” it is not apparent. And any promise of a fortuitous reversal any year soon is not forthcoming.

In the meantime, those left who still care about baseball in what’s totally become an Eagles town are required to avert their eyes. Shake their heads. And rue the Philly twilight of three beloved athletes who are marking fruitless time in a pitiless march toward the end of their careers, which might very well come in midstream a la another Phillie great Mike Schmidt in 1989. Hitting .203 after 42 games, Schmidt quit at age 39, tearfully aware he no longer could play.

A trail of tears has formed again in Philly. Valedictories hang in the air, cruel and unforgiving, circles of brilliant athletic lives all but closed.

If you want the best, most authoritative, most compelling sports-writer coverage of Kentucky’s quest to win two more games and complete an undefeated college basketball season with the NCAA title, riding with Kyle Tucker of the Louisville Courier-Journal is where you want to be.

No writer has been closer to coach John Calipari’s program the last few years. If it is happening in or around Kentucky’s team, my man KTuck, still known in Virginia for his exhaustive, game-changing beat work on Virginia Tech football, is all over it. Hell, he’s all over it before it happens.

You know what I mean. He’s the best there is at the day-to-day college sports grind. Nobody grinds the grind like Kyle, and that’s a badge of pride not awarded lightly. He’s just the best. He cares. He knows his stuff. And through skillful reporting and writing, he wants to you know and care, too.

Check him out all week through the title game next Monday, where Kentucky will be if it beats Wisconsin on Saturday night.

On Twitter, he’s @KyleTucker_CJ. Follow him now, sports fan. You’ll be glad you did.