Idiots Write About Sports

I promise you: We are not going to make Bill Simmons our whipping boy here at the Idiot Sports Weblog (besides that position is filled). But just as his bone-headed Moneyball bashing merited comment, he wrote something in his Friday column that deserves some sort of swift and decisive response.

Remember, we are doing this because we love.

In an otherwise entertaining column about Thursday’s dramatic Red Sox-Yankees tilt, Simmons writes:

NOBODY loses games like this. Nobody. We’re the Joe Frazier to everyone else’s Ali.

You can understand his frustration. After all, in recent years, the Red Sox have:

• Lost a potentially series-clinching playoff game when one of their players forgot to touch home plate and another player stopped running between third and home to argue an obstruction call;

• Saw their ace pitcher have to leave another potentially series-clinching playoff game after just an inning of work when it turned out he might have injured himself in a barroom fight earlier in the week;

• Lost the above-mentioned in the eighth-inning when their normally lights-out closer had an ill-timed meltdown;

• Had a chance to close out a playoff series against a clearly inferior team, only to drop game four 11-2, thanks to a series of soul-crushing errors and gopher balls;

• Witnessed a pitcher completely shutdown the mighty New York Yankees on a two-hitter and still lost the game 1-0;

• Squandered a chance to tie that very same game when a runner was called out at home on a throw from right field missed the cutoff man but was handled by the shortstop, racing out of position to make the play; and, perhaps most gallingly;

• Tallied a record of 0-9 in playoff-deciding games.

Oh, wait — none of that happened to Boston. That all happened to the Oakland Athletics.

And that’s just the recent stuff I can name off the top of my head. I could go on about how the A’s lost to one of the weakest World Series opponents ever in 1990 or how they lost a World Series game in 1988 when a man who could barely walk hit a game-winning homer off the best relief pitcher of his era or how even the A’s major triumph of relatively recent memory — winning the 1989 World Series — was overshadowed by a major earthquake.

So why isn’t Bill Simmons leading my pity parade? Because Dan Shaughnessy hasn’t put his kids through college by writing a book about the curse of Shooty Babbit?

I’m not necessarily trying to argue that A’s fans have had it any worse or any better than their Boston counterparts. The point I am trying to make is that every fan of every team can bore people to tears with a litany of failures and tragedies. If Jason were here, I’m sure he could produce a list of Giant disappointments to rival the one I just concocted for Oakland — assuming that he didn’t suppress all his memories the moment Dusty Baker handed the ball over to a departing Russ Ortiz in Game Six of the ‘02 Series. And I don’t think we have enough bandwidth for Steve to chronicle all the Padre disasters he’s witnessed over the years.

Fans of the Houston Astros have never seen their team win a playoff series. There’s a generation of Kansas City fans entering their 20s who have no memory of the ‘85 World Series (and the fans old enough to remember that can probably tell you about each playoff loss to the Yankees in excruciating detail). The Philadelphia Phillies have been playing Major League Baseball for 121 years; their fans can count all of their penants on one hand (and can count all of their World Series titles on that same hand, even if they lose four fingers in an industrial accident).

With the exception of people who pull for the New York Yankees, everyone loses. Everyone suffers. Everyone has seen their team yank defeat from the jaws of victory.

So why do Red Sox fans act like they alone are the only ones to ever know the pain of losing? Even more troubling, why do they act like that’s somehow enobling?

In Brushbacks and Knockdowns, Allen Barra puts it better than I ever could:

Pick up almost any baseball anthology and you’ll find a chapter from some well-known baseball writer, a Red Sox fan, more full of self-pity than a celebrity-child memoir. If you don’t trust me on this, try stopping into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders in Charloote, North Carolina, or Nashville, Tennessee, or Tucson, Arizona, as I have recently, and look at the number of books available on the Boston Red Sox. Has any team in all of sports with so few victories generated so much ink?

No one’s misery could ever be so deep as a Red Sox fan’s. It never seems to occur to sportswriters outside a handful of Northeastern states that fans in Kansas City or Houston or Oakland or Philadelphia or possibly even Anaheim — which, lest we forget, had never won a postseasons series before 2002 — could have as much “warm sentiment” for their team as Red Sox fans have for theirs. (One might question whether any sentiment a Red Sox fan had was warm, but let that pass.)

To me, there is no stranger phenomenon in the field of sportwriting than the amount of gushy nonsense that gets written about the Boston Red Sox.

And, given the way the Sox have played in June, expect that gushy nonsense to continue for at least another season.

Which leads a Cubs fan to ask how you feel about us.

Exactly. When it comes to abject misery, Boston's got nothing on Cubs fans.

If we were to do a list of snakebitten baseball franchises, I think the top five would probably shake down this way.

1. Philadelphia Phillies
2. Chicago Cubs
3. Chicago White Sox
4. Boston Red Sox
5. Cleveland Indians