Idiots Write About Sports

This just in from our We Should Have Posted Something on this a Week Ago file: Matt Welch — America’s leading libertarian Angels fan — gave despicable Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke the taste of the lash in an op-ed piece for the Times. (This links comes to you courtesy of 6-4-2, which passes it on from Baseball Think Factory — one day I dream of reference an item that contains no fewer than half-a-dozen cross links. Six Degrees of Hat Tipping, I think I’ll call it.)

I cannot summon strong enough verbiage to stress just how important it is to read Matt Welch’s outstanding article in its entirety. Nevertheless, here are some choice selections:

…In their zeal to discredit DePodesta and the management philosophy he represents, Plaschke and Co. forgot a fundamental journalistic duty: to have some idea about what they’re talking about.

In his Oct. 30 column, Plaschke asserted that DePodesta, “when with Oakland, had been the most invisible No. 2 executive in the game.”

When DePodesta was with Oakland, he was a prominent character in Michael Lewis’ controversial book, “Moneyball,” and a frequently named candidate for GM jobs.

Plaschke also snorted: “To fill shoes once worn by Branch Rickey and Al Campanis, should McCourt really have hired a 31-year-old who had never been to Dodger Stadium?”

Rickey became a manager (which back in 1913 meant general manager as well) … at age 31! Brian Cashman, the New York Yankees GM with three World Series rings and eight consecutive playoff appearances, took over the job at age … 30! Theo Epstein, also 31, just stepped down as Boston GM after three consecutive playoff appearances and a World Series victory of his own.

And perhaps my favorite passage from the article, if only because I noted the exact same thing to Jason the day the referenced Plaschke column appeared:

Plaschke apparently never bothered to learn the well-documented basics of the philosophies discussed in “Moneyball,” so he could write howlers such as this one on Oct. 4: “It’s a vision that has yet to result in a playoff series victory in the three places where it is prominently pushed — Oakland, Los Angeles and Toronto.” Every baseball beat writer in the country (including the Times’ own capable Bill Shaikin) could tell you that “Moneyball” tenets played a big role in the 2004 World Champion Red Sox, who employed the movement’s godfather, Bill James.

With these omissions and errata laid out, the reader can not help coming to one of two conclusions, neither of which speaks very well of Plashcke. Either he didn’t know all these things, in which case you have to wonder why he’s even a columnist in the first place, let alone employed by the Times in any position higher than a paper route. Or he did know these things and just opted to exclude them, lest the facts and the mitigating factors get in the way of a good screed.

I tend toward the latter view. Having lived in Los Angeles for nearly the same period as Paul DePodesta’s tenure — I skipped town about a month-and-a-half before the McCourts showed him the door at Plaschke’s uring — I can say, without fear of contradiction, that Plaschke had it in for DePodesta from the get-go. You couldn’t get halfway through one of Plaschke single-sentence paragraph columns about the Dodgers without stumbling across a snide reference to DePodesta the Stats Geek doing whatever his computer told him to, presumably while sage old baseball minds like Plaschke shook their heads sadly at this kid who was clearly out of his depth. (Which is a weird way of looking at things, Welch notes, since DePodesta actually played the sport collegiately while Plaschke did not.) The insults hurled by Plaschke were so constant, so personal, and so nasty, it became clear to even the densest Times reader that the reason for this antipathy clearly went beyond the win-loss column. And it is to Plaschke’s ever-lasting discredit that he did not simply come clean and explain why he had it in for DePodesta.

As encouraging as it is to read an honest and frank critique of Plaschke’s hack work in the very paper that employs him, it would be foolish to expect the Times to do anything about it. Once you land a sports column at the Times, unless it’s discovered that you make frequent use of the Copy-and-Paste commands in Word or that your expense reports are filled with unauthorized purchases made on the Bangkok sex trade, you’ve got the gig for life. And a quick scan of sports pages around the country indicates that columnists are not being held to an exacting standard other than the ability to fill a set number of column inches.

Besides, from the Times’ point of view, Plaschke does two things very well — write mawkish columns about down-on-their-luck athletes pulling themselves up by their own bootstrings and make blustery, ill-informed pronouncements about the hot-button issues of the day. The former gets you prizes from blue-ribbon panels that love a good sob story, which only increases your paper’s presige. And the latter lands you a spot on scream fests like Around the Horn, which only increases your paper’s notoriety. You’ll notice that neither talent does much to provide readers with informative or interesting commentary, but why should that be of concern to the Times and Plaschke?

I lived in LA for nearly a decade, so I've read many of Plaschke's columns. Fact is, without a whipping boy he can't fill his column inches. DePodesta just happened to be the chosen one over the past couple years.

What is it about the Times Sports section that seems to perpetually churn out guys like Plaschke, Simers, Adande, Kawakami, and so on? Guys who can't write a column unless it reads like a hired hit?

Once upon a time, the Times used to have guys like Jim Murray and Ross Newhan. No more. It's ironic that the best guys covering the LA sports scene work for papers that don't even get distribution in LA County (Jim Alexander in the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and Mark Whicker in the Orange County Register). You could also make a case for Steve Dilbeck in the Daily News, though I don't read enough of him to have complete confidence.

I realize I'm in the distinct minority, but I've never really had that much of a problem with Simers. Maybe it's because we were both in San Diego at the same time -- me as college student, him as the Chargers beat writer -- so I was exposed to his particular style at an early age. And I think there's something to be said for having one columnist who's a bit of a shit-stirrer -- that's essentially Simer's schtick and he does it well, so long as you regard it as schtick. I realize that other people disagree with me on that, which is their perogative. Anyhow, Simers amuses me more than he does annoy me. Whereas Plaschke annoys me more than he engenders any other response.

So why the animus toward Plaschke? I don't know. Maybe it's because the Guardian of Truth and Virtue cloak that he's assumed for himself rings false and phony, especially now that it's very apparent how this guy won't let anything stand in the way of his ax-grinding. Really, the tsk-tsking and lectures on character aren't all that effective coming from a guy who went out of his way to piano-wire a baseball GM who's only sins seemed to be that he was too young for Plashcke's liking.

I agree with Rob that the best sports writers in Southern California are not actually employed by the Times. In fact, I would contend that the best guys covering the LA sports scene don't even work for newspapers. But that's neither here nor there.

Post a comment