Chuck Klosterman, I Cannot Let This Stand

Not to digress too far from baseball-specific criticism criticism, but I simply could not allow this to pass without comment.

I should begin by saying that I've been the opposite of a Chuck Klosterman fan for a while now. He's pretty much the rock equivalent of Bill Simmons (Holy shit! You know who Pavement is AND you know who L.C. Greenwood is AND you dropped a Boba Fett reference on us all at once! DAMN!). And Christ, at least Bill Simmons more or less sticks to sports. I've got Klosterman coming at me in Esquire, on VH1, Spin (if I were to read Spin), and now Page 2. That's so many outlets to let people know how much you know who the Arcade Fire is!

This is the kind of shit I'm talking about:

"Aging American white people have been waiting for another Larry Bird in the same way aging hippies have been waiting for another Bob Dylan, but nobody ever gets what he or she wants: Tom Gugliotta ended up being Beck; Keith Van Horn turned out to be Conor Oberst; Mike Dunleavy is probably Ryan Adams. But Adam Morrison -- at least on the collegiate level -- is closer to Larry than Robert Zimmerman was to the Wallflowers."

If I ever seriously wrote something like that, my next move would be to throw on my favorite Sunny Day Real Estate B-Side (I don't know, maybe "Spade and Parade") and promptly blow my brains out.

This passage has, however, inspired my new favorite game. Play along at home!

Christian Laettner ended up being Doug Martsch. Bob Sura turned out to be Sam Prekop. Troy Murphy looks like a male version of Carrie Brownstein. Wally Szcerbiak is pretty much what would happen if Pedro the Lion all formed into one Voltron-like basketball player. Cherokee Parks literally IS Yo La Tengo.

See? It's fun!