 Today must be ESPN’s corporate holiday party. The same headline – something about a Duke basketball team and a white boy that shoots well – has been sitting on their homepage for many many hours. We’ve got imaginary words in the chatrooms, Kornheiser doing a two-minute solo rendition of “Meet the Mets” on PTI (in full regalia), and SportsCenter doing a “theme night” on what happens when teammates throw each other under buses. Yeah. Slow news day. Which, in its own way, is just as fascinating.
We could sit here and pretend to talk about the pretend news. Even the Hot Stove is only running at lukewarm, mostly it’s just big names stayin’ with the ladies what brought ‘em in the first place. Paul Konerko signed back with the ChiSox, which means Frank Thomas is out but the Chicago papers seem to be okay with that. Brian Giles is staying with the Padres, which … well … maybe he just likes watching LT play.
Oh, for the glorious days of last week, when we were throwing money at relief pitchers like they were working in a mobile sex van. At least then all the baseball writers who run out of things to say during the interminable regular season get to dust off their typewriters and explain the economics of postseason spending strategies. And we learned such valuable lessons from those esteemed scribes, like:
- Just because you spend big money on a player does not make him good. That’s Michael Rosenberg at Fox, apparently paid to generate columns inspired by the Michael Lewis Moneyball Page-a-Day Calendar.
- When teams make profit, they can spend more money. That’s Sir Gammons himself, pimped out by ESPN Insider as the ultimate Hot Stove economist. Though, to be fair, the actual piece gives some good hard data on the relationship between the percentage of revenue spent on player salaries and the overall profitability of the game.
And my personal favorite:
- Perspective GM’s should be prepared for the interview before they go in. It’s not that it’s not true. It’s that a fake GM is saying it. Yeah, that’s right, this one has Steve Phillips written all over it.
Let’s back up for a second. Steve gets hired by the Mets as GM. The Mets are bad. Steve gets fired.
So far, so good. We’ve heard this one before.
Steve gets hired by ESPN. Uh oh. Pretty soon, Steve’s dressing up as a GM for Halloween, even though most of us would rather have George Clooney perform our much-needed surgery than have Mr. P. run our franchise.
And now, flush with the credibility of an extended SportsCenter segment so widely ridiculed that even CNN got in on the action, Steve’s giving career advice to the next generation of General Managers? Guys, seriously.
I’ve got much better advice. Whatever Steve tells you, run away. Just run.
Like, I’m Pretty Much Just Filling Time
One of the strangest things about this particular slow news day is that ESPN hasn’t even managed to contrive any controversy. Usually, by now, they would have at least made something up.
Instead, we get to talk about Dre Bly, the Lions’ CB who blamed Joey Harrington for Detroit’s general suckiness and Mooch’s firing. Last night’s SportsCenter was largely a one-issue show (with some more ‘Can the Colts do it?’ thrown in for fun), which is odd, because the story was already about 36 hours old at that point.
Yesterday, Bly was nowhere to be found in the morning newspapers, except in Detroit, where Mitch Albom – not exactly our hippest and most cutting-edge sportswriter – had begun quietly wondering why Bly and T.O. received such profoundly different treatment. His diagnosis, that “the only reason Bly hasn't gotten similar attention is because nobody cares about the Lions,” doesn’t really hold up when we think about how much attention Mariucci and Millen got over the weekend and Monday morning.
Instead, the conversation we were having – at least until last night’s broadcast - was about whether or not Bly was right. Think about this for a minute. Never in the national sports media did anyone ever stop and think, “what if the Eagles did have Brett Favre? Does T.O.’s argument hold water?”
But with Bly, it was our first response: instead of questioning the speaker’s integrity, we listened to the argument. Whether this is justified or the correct course of action, we can’t say, but it certainly speaks to the widespread loathing of Terrell Owens that well predated the notorious interview. We were all just looking for an excuse to run him out on a rail.
Additionally, it’s fair to assume that the Bly piece would have gotten very little attention if there were bigger sports news bouncing around the mediascape. In a lukewarm hot stove league and a not-quite home stretch NFL season, with the NBA not at full speed and college hoops nowhere near the point where we really start to care: these are the days when Kornheiser sings the Met song, and when mobile sex vans make big money. With nothing else to say, SportsCenter went back to the day before, found the Dre Bly story, and went with it 110% (though many would say that it is mathematically impossible to do so). Hopefully, please, let it come to pass that something of note happens between now and 6:00 Eastern. I can’t sit through it again.
Tomorrow: Well, Larry Brown is going to Detroit tomorrow night. So that should be fun. I hope. |
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