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.
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.
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.
A: It's still a blog. Its author is just in denial.
I felt a lot better about giving the Flooky and the Beansguy a boost in traffic, but I feel like it's our duty to report the following news: Murray Chass has started a blog. It's about shodo, the ancient Japanese art of calligraphy. Well, not really. Primarily, so far it seems to be a blog about hating blogs. At least that's what the very first words of its mission statement proclaim:
This is a site for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the site is not a fan of blogs.
Let me translate that into confusing ChassOrwellian-speak:
This is a blog for baseball columns, not for baseball blogs. The proprietor of the blog is not a fan of blogs.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. This blog is not a blog. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
He made that abundantly clear on a radio show with Charlie Steiner when Steiner asked him what he thought of blogs and he replied, “I hate blogs.”
[shaking fist] You hear that, James Fallows, Malcolm Gladwell, and Murray Chass? I hate what you do. I hate it because of what it's called. It sounds funny. I hate it because there are some bad blogs. Meanwhile, there has never been a bad newspaper column, book, magazine, painting, mobile, or stele. Those forms of expression are fine.
He later heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show.
He was alone, watching in his living room, but he remained convinced that the television machine had an applause input microphone (A.I.M.) that would allow Mr. Bissinger to hear his ovation. No amount of research on the nonexistence of the A.I.M. would convince him otherwise.
Bloggers, however, are welcome to visit this site; so are stats freaks, fantasy leaguers and Red Sox fans. How else will they know what is being said about them by a columnist they love to hate?
I, for one, am sick of wrongheaded writers telling me I love to hate them when in fact I hate to hate them. A note to Baylessian contrarians: you should take no joy in being so wrong about something that throngs of people rise up as one to denounce you. This should not be what it means to be a writer. When thousands of people write you angry emails about something you said or wrote that was wrong, you should not shrug your shoulders and say, "I must be doing something right if I got so many people interested!" No, sir. Sir, no. You were wrong. That is the end of the story. You were so wrong you made people angry. There is no glory in your profound wrongitude. Please stop doing this.
Otherwise, this site will most likely appeal primarily to older fans whose interest in good old baseball is largely ignored in this day of young bloggers who know it all,
Ignored? I would argue that no matter what kind of baseball fan you are, there is more baseball writing, research, opinion, and debate than there ever has been in the sport's history. Verducci is still writing some excellent, longer pieces for Sports Illustrated. Gammons writes a thing or three every week. Your man Buzz is still kicking around. Reilly, if you like his sort of thing, just signed an 18-year, $400-million deal, mainly (we hope) for writing. Every time I write a post, a Roger Angell column does not disappear from this plane of reality.
and new- fangled statistics (VORP, for one excuse-me example),
May I remind people that in this fateful piece for the New York Times, Murray Chass wrote "To me, VORP epitomized the new-age nonsense" and "For the longest time, I had no idea what VORP meant and didn’t care enough to go to any great lengths to find out." and "Finally, not long ago, I came across VORP spelled out. It stands for value over replacement player. How thrilling. How absurd. Value over replacement player. Don’t ask what it means. I don’t know."
So it is possible -- no, probable -- no, certain -- that Murray Chass still does not know what VORP means, and yet hates it with every fiber of his wizened being. This is the equivalent of a person who's lived in Muncie, Indiana his whole life hating a specific dish in a restaurant in Doha, Qatar. which are drowning the game in numbers and making people forget that human beings, not numbers, play the games.
February 27, 2007, New York Times: "People play baseball. Numbers don’t."
Maybe Murray Chass just doesn't have that much more to say. That's okay. He's had a long, storied career. He's won awards. He was inducted, as he tells us in his biography, "into the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Pittsburgh." But there's no need, Murray, to spit such vitriol at new ways of enjoying sports simply because you aren't interested in them.
E-mail comments are also invited, but visitors to the site are asked to omit the obscenities.
Remember, this is a man who several paragraphs earlier informed us that he "heartily applauded Buzz Bissinger when the best-selling author denounced bloggers on a Bob Costas HBO show." Bissinger began his applause-worthy, highly informed, well-reasoned, level-headed argument by telling the gentleman next to him "I really think you're full of shit." “I have spent my professional life in the print world, where obscenities don’t see the light of day,” Chass said. “They will remain in the dark here as well. It will be a good test for bloggers and Red Sox fans to see if they can control themselves.”
"The time for obscenities is on national pay cable television, where a grown man and father of three can ambush an unsuspecting young writer with a torrent of spittle-accompanied expletives, thoughtlessly and carelessly excoriating an entire medium without retribution or moderation from the host. That is where obscenities belong, and that is where I applaud them. Shouted at other people, on television."
Mr. Chass: you're angry at nomenclature. Really. Ideas are ideas. Writing is writing. By starting this blog, you're acknowledging as much. Welcome to the blogosphere.
I will appear on a segment of HBO's "Costas Now" tonight. Subject matter: Is Miley Cyrus too young for that Vanity Fair picture? Or "Bloggers and Sports Media." They interviewed me for both and haven't told me which one I'm in.
There is also a live panel (of which I am not a part) with Will Leitch, Buzz Bissinger, and of course Braylon Edwards.
