Idiots Write About Sports

All right — here’s the deal. When it comes to Page 2 at ESPN.com, here’s who I’ll make an effort to read:

• The Sports Guy
• Tim Keown
• Brian Murphy
• Maybe Jason Whitlock or Jay Lovinger. Or this UniWatch feature that looks promising.

And that is all.

Everything else on that page? Not worth my time. It’s not very funny or entertaining or even enlightening, and it leaves me irritated every time I click on a potentially interesting link only to have to wade through Amateur Hour. I’m tired of chronicling my irritation, you’re tired of me chronicling my irritation, and if ESPN gave a good goddamn, they’d be trying to get better, not worse.

The final straw for me was today’s item on the 10th anniversary of the 1994 baseball strike, which speculated on what might have happened had the labor stoppage not wiped out the remainder of the season. That’s a pretty interesting idea, right? I mean, when the strike began 10 years ago, both Matt Williams and Ken Griffey Jr. were threatening the single-season home run record, Tony Gwynn was flirting with .400, and — Mon Dieu! — the Montreal Expos had the best record in baseball. (And over in the Department of Futility, the Texas Rangers had a one-game lead over the Oakland Athletics in the AL West despite having a losing record.) Wouldn’t it be fun to see a simulation of how things might have wound up?

Yes, it would. Sadly, the article doesn’t do that — it’s just a collection of punchlines that are equal parts non-sensical, punchless, or warmed-over retreads you’ve read a dozen times before.

First, the non-sensical:

The Mariners’ hopes were dashed when star center fielder Ken Griffey, Jr. pulled 62 muscles over the season’s final 50 days.

Yeah, it’s funny how injury-prone Ken Griffey Jr. is. Only in 1994, he wasn’t. He played in 111 of Seattle’s 112 games that season — more than any other Mariner. And apart from his 1989 rookie year and an injury in 1995 — the result of a human body colliding with a wall, if memory serves — he never played fewer than 140 games as a Mariner. It wasn’t until he arrived in Cincinnati that he earned his reputation for fragility.

I realize it’s supposed to be a joke — Ken Griffey is gimpy! Just like now — but the facts from way back when just don’t support the punchline. And a joke without some basis in fact is just a non-sensical assemblage of words.

Thus ends today’s lesson on joke-writing. Moving on…

In the A.L. Central, the White Sox and Indians were separated by only a single game at the time of the work stoppage, and appeared primed to go down to the wire. But fate dealt the White Sox a cruel blow. Leading the Indians 3-0 in the eighth inning of a crucial September match-up, things unraveled quickly for Chicago when a teenager named Steve Bartman, sitting along the left-field foul line, interfered with a foul ball hit within reach of leftfielder Tim Raines. Cleveland went on to win the game and the division.

Yes, it’s another in a long line of Steve Bartman jokes. The author, by the way, is D.J. Gallo and not, as you might suspect, Jim Caple.

[Montreal] hit some stumbling blocks along the way. [Moises] Alou was lost for the season in late August after he sustained a severe, urine-related infection in his hand.

Seriously, D.J., you’re stealing all of Caple’s bits. Keep that up, and you’re going to force him to come up with new material.

Oh, who am I kidding — that’s impossible.

[Cal] Ripken’s 1994 season, in fact, didn’t reach its conclusion. A freak injury on Sept. 1 ended it for him. Sitting in front of his locker before a game, baseball’s Iron Man was struck in the head by a bat thrown across the team’s locker room by fellow Oriole Rafael Palmeiro, who was enraged about his seemingly-incurable impotency.

Ah, there’s nothing like a good Viagra joke. Back in 2002.

I wouldn’t have a problem with a wacky “Let’s imagine the funny things that might have happened in 1994!” piece (provided it met that all-important “funny” benchmark), but like I suggested toward the beginning of this post, I’d be a lot more interested in an article that actually played out the remainder of the 1994 season and the playoffs and reported on what happened. I’m sure that somebody somewhere has done this — I just can’t seem to find a link to it.

Back in 1994, I was living in the wilds of Riverside County, and the local paper ran daily simulations of the playoffs using the teams that were in first on the day the players went out on strike (the Yankees, White Sox, Rangers and Indians [wild card] in the A.L. and the Expos, Reds, Dodgers and Braves [wildcard] in the N.L.]. The paper selected readers to manage each team and ran game stories and box scores right there in the sports section. If memory serves, the Reds bested the Indians (or possibly the White Sox), but I couldn’t say for certain.

Anyhow, if someone could point me to something similar on the Web today, I would be most appreciative. It may not be the most productive use of my time, but it will certainly be more entertaining than a lot of what ESPN is serving up these days.