FJM has gone dark for the foreseeable future. Sorry folks. We may post once in a while, but it's pretty much over.
You can still e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach.
J.P. Ricciardi Apologizes Better Than Buzz Bissinger
Update on RicciardiDunnGate from a few posts down: J.P. Ricciardi is just now realizing that you can't single out a player from another team and verbally bash his brains in. Take it away, J.P.:
"It's my fault, I take full responsibility for it," Ricciardi, the Toronto Blue Jays' general manager, said last night. "I tried to get Adam's phone number from the Reds ... and if he wants to talk to me, I'll talk to him and apologize personally. But I apologize to him and the Reds. I need to be better than that. I let my guard down."
That's a man's apology. Here's how Bissinger would've done it:
I apologize to Adam, and I admit that there are some good Reds out there, like Ken Griffey, Jr. and Aaron Harang. For the most part, though, the Reds as a whole are a worthless team -- a baseball-playing gangbang, if you will. These kids just don't get it. If George Washington would have known that freeing the slaves would just result in guys like Corey Patterson and Joey Votto stinking up the field, he never would have signed the Emancipation Proclamation. What's that? Joey Votto's white? Whatever. I apologized. Isn't that enough, goddammit?
Hey, remember Spittly T. Yourefullofshit? He won a Pulitzer, wrote some good books, bulldozed a nice Midwestern boy on pay cable? Well, he's back. And he's sorry. Sort of.
But before you click on that link, before you do anything, in fact, let me introduce you to the funniest thing I've seen in about fifteen years (probably some peak-era episode of "Seinfeld," I don't know). The link directs you to a pretty good piece in the Boston Phoenix about the tension between old-line sportswriters (that's them!) and new-fangled bloggers (that's us!)
Accompanying the article is the best, most accurate piece of artwork on any subject ever.
Spanish Civil War : Guernica :: Sportswriter-Blogger Conflict : This Piece of Artwork
Are you ready?
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Seriously, I'm not fucking around. Prepare your eyeballs for its majesty.
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Now, I don't know if this "Rob Zammarchi" character has a camera in my fucking bedroom or what, but that is a creepily precise, photorealistic representation of exactly what I look like and exactly what I'm doing right now. How did he do that? The skateboard, the purple jeans, the Chucks, the beaded necklace, the KRAZY Red Sox cap, the waggling tongue, the psycho-killer eyes -- THIS IS WHAT I DO WHEN I BLOG!
And the depiction of the sportswriter, from what I understand of the species, is even more accurate. It appears to be John Clayton hammering away on an Underwood while pigeons shit all over him. You know -- sportswriting. Old school-style.
Ahem.
On to our friend Buzz. As you'll recall, the man exhibited a passionate, borderline psychotic contempt for the medium of blogging, and expressed this contempt via a verbal bludgeoning of Mr. Will Leitch of Deadspin on Sir Robert Costas' program CostasNow (say it real fast, like one word -- it's more fun that way). Now, he's contrite:
"Will Leitch was just treated with disrespect."
BY YOU. By you, sir. He was treated with disrespect by you, a man accusing him of treating the honorable Matt Leinart with disrespect. You were defending Matt Leinart's honor, and you yelled and screamed and I'm guessing employed every iota of your self-restraint in order not to punch this how-dare-he-malign-Matt-Leinart kid.
"You shouldn’t say to someone off the bat that they’re ‘full of shit.’”
No, you shouldn't. This is, it would seem, in the parlance of the Bloggy Uncouthosphere, "Day One Shit."
I'm happy that he actually had to say those words and mean them. He is a grown man with grown children.
“There are some very good blogs dedicated to single subjects,” he acknowledges;
"There are some very good books dedicated to Bass Fishing Instruction," he acknowledges; "the rest are pretty much crap."
"Not knocking books -- they're just a limited medium, you know?" "They’re very informational. Their goal isn’t to play a snarky game of gotcha, or to be malicious and cruel."
Or firing a nice old grandpa who happens to be one of the greatest second basemen to ever play the game of besoboru. "Snarky game of gotcha" describes this sad little corner of the Interworld pretty accurately, I suppose, but you know, why can't you be malicious and cruel and a tiny, tiny bit informational as well?
Nah. Let's just stick with being cruel. If I could use one word to describe my personality, it would definitely be "cruel."
Now pull your shorts up -- it's about to get cranky in here.
“The younger generation likes the snarky tone,” says Bissinger. “They like the gossip, they like the juice. I don’t think they really appreciate good writing and reporting, and those, to me, are precious arts. . . . It’s all some interactive gangbang.”
Can we go back and rename this site InteractiveGangbang.com? Mr. Bissinger, let's not pretend snark and gossip and juice are foreign phenomena of the 21st century digital-gangbang age.
You think if people woulda found daguerreotypes of Gentleman Jim Corbett servicing an Appaloosa, William Randolph Hearst wouldn't have published that shit in one of his yellow-ass rags, like, post-haste? (Forget for one second that daguerreotypes had long since been replaced by ambrotypes and tintypes, I just like the word daguerreotypes, okay?)
The point is, Bissinger has one last thing to say, and it's the craziest thing of all:
“You have blogs that proudly parade around saying, ‘We don’t need no stinking credibility or stinking information — it doesn’t matter what you say or do if you know how to write.’ They cover themselves under the mantle of the First Amendment. But if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had any idea what the First Amendment would have wrought, they would have canceled it.”
I am pleased -- no, ecstatic -- no, extraordinarily proud -- that the David-Eckstein-uses-a-three-inch-candy-cane-as-a-bat jokes I write at this very site would, in theory even, compel John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to rewrite the motherfucking Bill of Rights.
That was always the point of this site anyway. To destroy America.
This is beautiful. Some eight minutes after publishing this post, I get this e-mail from RudyKelly:
I'm pretty sure John Adams tried to get rid of that whole pesky 1st Amendment thing with the Alien & Sedition Acts and he got his ass rightfully handed to him.
Of course. Of course! Google it. Adams totally pushed that unconstitutional bullshit through. Jefferson contested it on First and Tenth Amendment grounds, and eventually the Sedition Act expired before it was challenged in court.
Thank you to Paul, James, and Yuri (whose text follows) for more historical fun:
Neither Thomas Jefferson nor John Adams had anything to do with the writing of or voting for the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was principally authored by James Madison and ratified in 1791 when Jefferson was Secretary of State and Adams Vice-President.
Maybe you've heard -- Buzz Bissinger is in the bloggy sports news ether today. Several people sent us Buzz's piece on Kerry Wood in the New York Times magazine Play from about a year ago. I read the article from start to finish. It's artfully written, evocative, unPlaschkely poetic -- and deliberately, wrongheadedly misleading. Buzz Bissinger, such a gifted wordsmith and storyteller, weaves a beautiful, heart-rending tale about Wood, but doesn't bother to do enough research to avoid coming to the exact wrong conclusion about Wood's generation of pitchers.
And that's where blogs come in. Bissinger writes:
The rule of thumb is that a pitcher should get some 400 innings of work in the minors before being called up. But with today’s baseball economics, La Russa knows that has become an untenable luxury.
Buzz's stance is clear: leave 'em in the minors longer! Wood, Prior, Liriano, King Felix -- they've been picked while still unripe. Big Bad Economics, Modernity, Progress -- whatever your boogeyman -- that's who's to blame.
Buzz is wrong. And had he done a modicum of research, he would have found this out immediately. I know this because people did that research for him here, here, here, here, here, and here. Good people on the Internet. Blogging. Posting on message boards. Thinking. Writing. Addding. Subtracting. Mother's basement-ing. Spreadsheeting. Checking on articles that get published in the Old Gray Lady so we don't just have to accept what's in black and white print as pure gospel.
How is this a bad thing?
Jared Park:
Pitcher, Minor League Innings (numbers courtesy of The Baseball Cube)
Steve Carlton, 306 Nolan Ryan, 287 (and quoted by Bissinger in the piece) Don Sutton, 249 Tom Seaver, 210 Jim Palmer, 129 Bert Blyleven, 123
And a few current players with no durability issues:
Johan Santana, 334 C.C. Sabathia, 232.7 Mike Mussina, 178
Joe Posnanski:
I looked up, by decade, the number of pitchers who were 21 or younger and had seasons throwing 150-plus innings in the big leagues.
Here's what I came up with:
1960s: 32 different pitchers. 1970s: 26 different pitchers. 1980s: 15 different pitchers. 1990s: 5 different pitchers. 2000s: 8 different pitchers (so far).
Clay Davenport:
I dug out a 1974 Baseball Register I have, and, far more slowly, did the same for all pitchers who made their major league debut in 1973. For the recent years the numbers were:
2004 averaged 137 minor league games and 433 innings (113 pitchers) 2005 109 games and 353 innings (100 pitchers) 2006 130 games and 434 innings (134)
Bounce to the old stuff: 1973 85 games and 420 innings (53 pitchers)
More Buzz:
Francisco Liriano, in his first full season with the Minnesota Twins in 2006, went 12 and 3 and seemed destined for greatness, but he will miss the entire 2007 season after undergoing ligament replacement surgery — the so-called Tommy John procedure — on his elbow last November. “The economic push is to bring kids up, and it’s unfortunate,” La Russa says.
Yes, so unfortunate that Liriano was called up after only 484.1 minor league innings. I looked it up. Searched for francisco liriano cube. Took 0.23 seconds.
Buzz -- Pulitzer Prize-winner, exceptional prose stylist -- arrived at the exact opposite of the truth. And thanks to an entertaining, extremely satisfying interview of Buzz by Boog Sciambi (spoiler alert: it ends with Buzz calling an unrelated radio host a "slimebucket" and Boog hanging up on Buzz), we know why Buzz did this.
It was because Tony LaRussa told him what conclusion to draw, and with maestro LaRussa conducting Buzz's train of thought, Buzz didn't care to punch a few numbers into Google ThoughtMaps to guide his thought-train into Accuracyville Station. (Is this better than the Underwater StupidTank metaphor from a few posts back? I can make it more convoluted, if that's the problem.)
Old Baseball Men told Buzz what to think and Buzz dutifully wrote what they told him. He did so beautifully, but I'll take an ugly truth over a beautiful falsehood every day of the week except those days I'm feeling really shallow. The Kerry Wood profile as a whole still has some value, of course, but how much value, considering its central tenet is based on purely anecdotal, and ultimately inaccurate, information? Why can't Buzz Bissinger see that blogs provide a valuable fact-checking service as well as a place to see athletes drink Creme de Menthe off a naked lady-shaped ice luge? And why is Buzz Bissinger in my house spitting on me, punching me, and screaming "Stop being so fucking goddamn profane, you cunt-word!" as I write this?
Next up: I tear Braylon Edwards a giant new poophole.
Man, I just rewatched the Leitch/Bissinger tête-à-tête because my girlfriend said "I want to see that crazy man again." At the end of the segment, Bissinger goes after Leitch for staying out of the press box, accusing him of ignoring the facts. Reader Thomas chimes in:
"Don't let facts get in the way of your writing," as Bissinger condescendingly asserted that Leitch (and bloggers in general) tend to do.
Rather, let cute anecdotes from Tony LaRussa and Jim Riggleman get in the way of facts.
Another crazy Buzz moment I liked was when he was all "It's amazing to me that you say 'sports news without access, favor, or discretion' when you admit to being biased for the Cardinals." Umm, dude? I don't think that's the kind of "favor" they're talking about.
Tonight, I was interviewed as part of that program's multi-part investigation of Sports and the Media. What followed the tape piece was a live discussion among Will Leitch of Deadspin, Buzz Bissinger of "Friday Night Lights" and "Being Very Angry," and of course the one guy you go to for any discussion of Sports and the Media: Braylon Edwards of the Cleveland Browns.
If you didn't see it, the discussion went like this:
Bob Costas: There are some criticisms about blogs. How do you respond?
Will Leitch: Well, I think some of them are valid--
Buzz Bissinger: I have to interrupt here. (to Leitch) Fuck you and everything you stand for.
Braylon Edwards: (to himself) I am going to kill my agent.
The argument I had tried to make in the pre-taped segment was: you can't say anything about "blogs," any more than you can say anything about any medium. There are good blogs and bad blogs. There are blogs that cover the personal lives of athletes, ones that cover only the games, ones that offer opinions, and even a few that quixotically and foolishly attempt to metacriticize the media as a whole. What Bissinger did that was so annoying to me was: he lumped all of these into one thing ("Deadspin," essentially), then took one article from one day out of a file that looked suspiciously like it'd come from Joe McCarthy's safe, and read one sentence from it aloud. And furthermore, he seemed to conflate the actual blog and the people who write for it with the silly comments people make at the bottom of every article.
It's a big dumb ignorant mistake to do this. It's a big hot wet mushy smelly bonebrained mistake to (a) use one sentence from anything as a representative sample of the thing, much less as a representative sample of all blogs everywhere, and (b) to mix blog comments and blog articles. It's an even bigger mistake, in my opinion, to disparage the level of discourse on the Internet and use blog comments as an example. (And swear a ton while doing it, while saying that the Internet is "profane.") Picking a random blog comment and wielding it as a club to bash "blogs" is like picking a random romance novel off an airport bookstore shelf and saying, "This book sucks. Fuck you, Tolstoy -- your medium is worthless!"
For what I hope is the last time, but is clearly not: the level of discourse on Athletics Nation, and Baseball Prospectus, and SoSH, and Joe Posnanski's blog, is every bit as high (if not higher) than what you can read in the best newspapers in the country. Bissinger's hare-brained attempt to prove Leitch an uneducated oaf by asking whether he had read any W.C. Heinz (which failed miserably when Leitch had, in fact, read some W. C. Heinz) was a perfect example of the old guard's attitude toward the new guard: you little shits don't get it. You don't know how to write. You have no gratitude or appreciation for those who came before you. So: fuck you. (P.S. I have never really read your blog.) (P.P.S. Fuck you, though, anyway.)
There are sports bloggers (and message-board posters) who write very well, in my opinion. There are those who love Ring Lardner and David Halberstam and Robert Creamer and Roger Angell. They try to write well, and entertain, and contribute to the universe of sports reporting. Please read them, Buzz. If you find nothing of interest, you can swear all you want. (For the record, FJM is extremely pro-swearing. We just feel you should be funny while doing it.)
If there is anything tangible and helpful to take away from Mr. Bissinger's performance -- and it takes a good deal of chaff-sorting to get anywhere near this little nugget -- I think it's this: a lot of the discourse and sub-discourse (commenting) on the internet is, in fact, pretty shitty. This is not news, though, really. A lot of newspaper writing and editorial writing and every kind of writing is shitty. It's just not as immediate and anonymous and easily-accessed as Internet writing is. Thus, the net has this reputation, now, as being a nihilistic and thoughtless meetingplace for people to spew venom. Partially deserved, partially not, whatever -- point is, the part that is deserved can be altered. We can all probably do a little better in this realm, by making sure that whatever we write has an actual point, and some thought behind it. So, there's that.
Okay. I guess that's it. As the kids would say: [/serious and unfunny discussion of Internet journalism standards]. Coming soon: more swearing!
[Just added two clauses to this post at 9:25 AM PST -- the clarification about what Bissinger actually did (taking one sentence and reading it aloud) and the subsequent (a), (b) follow-up in the next paragraph.]
Here's some information on W.C. Heinz, whose memory Buzz Bissinger attempted to use as a club with which to bludgeon Will Leitch:
One of his pieces from around this time - Death of a Racehorse - is famous for its brevity (fewer than 1000 words) and its brilliance. The story centers on a promising young two-year-old horse racing for the first time, and concludes with the horse's death less than two hours later after it broke down in its first race.
Written in double quick time on a manual typewriter as the events unfolded, Death of a Racehorse is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest sports articles ever written.
So this piece, Death of Racehorse, was brief, hastily written, and composed as the event it concerned occurred, yet Bissinger endorses this man? How dare he embrace this human pestilence?
Plus, I totally read this piece and it was accompanied by a picture of the horse drinking from a beer bong with some sexy lady horses right before it died.
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Caveat: the quoted block of text comes from Wikipedia, so there is a 60% chance it is 100% false. The internet rules!
Junior's comment about W.C. Heinz's "Death of a Racehorse" being 1,000 words (and quite good, of course) is funnier when you consider Bissinger's most recent magazine article: A 13,000 (!) word piece on Barbaro that compared him to legendary sports figures and talked about how Barbaro made the world a better place.
I blogged about it last year when the piece ran in Vanity Fair. It is, of course, becoming a movie. The best line from his article was this:
"The University of Pennsylvania itself was having a field day, handling more than 500 interview requests and perhaps the most publicity the university had ever received." Yes, tiny ol' Penn, unknown in the world until a racehorse won one race on TV then got injured in another.
"In this new wave of baseball, managers are less 'managers' than 'middle managers,' functionaries whose strategic options during a game require muzzlement, there only to effect the marching orders coldly calculated and passed down by upper management. It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn't care abut baseball. But it's not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly 'love' it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don't have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk. They don't have the bus trips or the plane trips. They don't carry along the tradition, because they couldn't care less about the tradition. They have no use for the lore of the game -- the poetry of its stories -- because it can't be broken down and crunched into a computer. Just as they have no interest in the human ingredients that make a player a player and make a game a game: heart, desire, passion, reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point are emotions if they can't be quantified?"
Of all of the stupid things I have read about baseball, and which we have discussed on this board, this makes me the angriest.
I know he's talking about managers, (although at times he seems mid-sentence to shift to talking about GMs), but extrapolating just a tiny bit, he means people like us, too.
I promise you, Buzz, I love baseball. So does Tito Francona. So does Ken Macha. So do Theo Epstein, JP Riccardi, and Billy Beane.
Saying that the "new breed" doesn't care about things like heart, desire, passion, and reactions to pressure is stupid. The entire Theo Epstein era in Boston has been about finding (a) good players who are (b) loose enough to handle the Boston press. Would Kevin Millar be on this team if Epstein didn't care at all about things like "human ingredients?"
The "new breed" loves baseball as much as the "old breed." They're just smarter about putting winning teams together. If they didn't care about baseball, they'd go to Wall Street or run a hedge fund and make about fifty times as much money.
I've read four pages of your book and already hate you.
