Jul 1, 2017 5 min read

What I know about tennis you could write on the head of a pin.

I can honestly tell you that, if you added up the time I have spent in the last 10 years watching either or both of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, it wouldn’t total a minute.

I know that they’re both great players because they’ve been so great that even people who know nothing about tennis know who they are.

John McEnroe knows a lot about tennis. He has 155 ATP wins (more than any other man), including 77 singles and seven grand slam events, and he’s paid a lot of money to be an analyst on TV.

He took a lot of heat this week for giving an honest answer to one of the dumbest questions in history.

In an interview with National Public Radio, McEnroe said that Serena Williams was the best female player in the world. The interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, wanted to know why he had to qualify it. She did a really good job of showing why she should never interview a pro tennis player when she asked, “You know, why say female player?”

Garcia-Navarro should be happy to know that it wasn’t one of the dumbest questions ever asked by a female. Just one of the dumbest questions ever asked.

McEnroe said, more politely than Garcia-Navarro deserved, “Well, because if she played the men’s circuit, she’d be like 700 in the world.”

There is no better example of the widespread hysterical demand for political correctness than the reaction to McEnroe’s answer.

His comments were referred to far and wide as sexist.

He was asked a stupid followup question and gave an honest, and what he considered to be a truthful answer. I don’t know where he came up with the number 700 and I don’t know if that’s too low or too high.

I don’t know or care who’s ranked 7th on the men’s tour, much less 700th. Do you?

I do know that Serena Williams isn’t the best tennis player in the world. And the stupidity of the question hasn’t received nearly enough attention. It was 100 times worse than McEnroe’s answer.

• There must be something about touching that Mendoza Line. Andrew McCutchen touched it when his averaged dropped to .200 on May 23. Since that time, he’s 46-for-114. That’s a .403 batting average. He hit .411 in June and has hits in 27 of his last 33 games. McCutchen was never going to stay around .200 and he’s probably not going to hit .400 in July. He is right around a .260 hitter since the end of the 2015 season, mostly because of big swings in his production from month to month. He hit .202 last June.

The issue isn’t if he’s going to cool off, it’s by how much. The Pirates played .500 ball with his .411 batting average in June.

• Gerrit Cole’s ERA is going up almost as fast as McCutchen’s batting average. While most of the attention has been on the absence of offense because of the stupidity of Jung Ho Kang and Starling Marte and the ineptitude of Gregory Polanco, Cole has been working on a terrible year. By now, he was supposed to not only be an ace, but a contender for the Cy Young award.

His ERA in June was 6.17.

• It’s obvious that the Pirates are going nowhere, even in the National League Central, where only one team was above .500 entering July. It’s stupid but not surprising to hear people starting to blame the manager, but Clint Hurdle deserves Manager of the Year consideration for winning 37 of his first 80 games. He’d look a lot smarter if Kang and Marte hadn’t been so stupid and Cole and Gregory Polanco were playing somewhere near the level they’re expected to be.

While McCutchen was hitting .411 in June, Polanco put up a .183 average. Why would anybody even suggest that it could be the manager’s fault when so many stars have been so useless?

And did I mention that Tony Watson, the guy Hurdle was counting on to be his closer, has an ERA over 5.00 for the last two months? Hitters aren’t hitting and pitchers aren’t getting hitters out. That’s usually a tough combination for a manager to overcome.

• The Tampa Bay Rays’ average attendance is lower than the Penguins and 25 other NHL teams, including the Lightning. That’s either a really bad baseball town or a really, really ugly ballpark.

• Penguins fans are seeing the downside of having their favorite team playing in a league with a salary cap. The upside, of course is that a team from Pittsburgh has won back-to-back championships and beat teams from Columbus and Nashville to win the second one. Columbus and Nashville would have as much chance – zero – of getting a Major League Baseball franchise as Pittsburgh if the league were starting today under current economics.

• I don’t care if Jaromir Jagr would be a bad fit for the Penguins. I’d be for signing him purely for the entertainment value.

• Tim Tebow has more professional home runs than Michael Jordan.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.