Idiots Write About Sports

Not to beat this thing into the ground, but last night, putting on my Bill Plaschke cap (it pinches a little around the brain stem), I wrote:

Grady Little knows all about the dangers of nerds. He had managed the Boston Red Sox to two winning seasons. He had done everything management asked him to do.

But he was run out of town by a bunch of number-crunching bean-counters who had never played this game, all because he didn’t follow their computer-generated plans.

They had numbers saying that Pedro Martinez couldn’t be trusted after 100 pitches. Grady Little had his gut

This morning, the real Bill Plaschke wrote:

There was an ex-manager out there who was fired because he trusted instinct over statistic, people over paradigms, baseball over everything…

The baseball folks in Boston may be wincing, but baseball folks everywhere else are smiling, waxing in the rebirth of a good man wronged….

Little’s only other major league managerial experience consisted of two years with the Boston Red Sox, who fired him because of one bad decision he made when the still-cursed franchise was six outs from going to the 2003 World Series.

Going with his gut, his gut failed him, as he left a tiring Pedro Martinez on the mound to face the New York Yankees in the eighth inning with a 5-2 lead. Martinez gave up three runs before the Yankees won it on Aaron Boone’s home run in the 11th.

Of course, I was mocking this bizarre line of thought. Plaschke actually believes this nonsense. So, advantage — me.

One other gem from the real Plaschke’s column:

leaving the Red Sox is generally a good and fortunate thing.

It happened to Babe Ruth. It happened to Roger Clemens. Heck, it has made a saint out of that lucky kid Theo Epstein.

Yup: Theo Epstein — lucky. Man, aren’t we all? Oh, and he’s a kid. You know how Bill Plaschke hates kids. Lousy no-good kids, with their computers and their World Series rings. Get out of here, you kids!

I can't decide what I'm more impressed by -- your stunning predictive abilities, or the fact that you managed to read an entire (real) Bill Plaschke column without committing a homicide afterward.

"you managed to read an entire (real) Bill Plaschke column without committing a homicide afterward."

Who's to say I didn't?

Perhaps I've let slip too much.

Uncanny, that's a special kind of hatred you got for Plaschke. But then and again it wasn't the content, even a nor-cal guy like me could guess the content, you got his writing style down.

Every time I want to bitch about local columnists I stop and say to myself; "Well, it could have been Plaschke."

Wow. One more reason to remove all writing instruments from Plaschke's reach. What a freakin' maroon.

In reverse order: leaving the Red Sox isn't what turned Epstein into a saint; winning a World Series is what did that. Clemens and Ruth were great players with the Sox and continued to be great players elsewhere. What does this have to do with anything?

The baseball folks in Boston aren't wincing. They don't give a damn! If the Dodgers (who have turned into a "sorry, no-account franchise" (tm Mike Wilbon) want Grady Little, they can have him. Nothing in his time in Boston proved he was any great shakes as a manager.

This is just Plaschke's usual uninformed rant against anyone who "didn't play the game" and dare to tell real "baseball men" how to do anything. The Red Sox have had great success following a similar techniques to the A's, only with more money.

I'd say I was amazed at the similarity between the hypothetical Plaschke column and the reality, but considering how pathetic and predictable that fat fool is, I'm just not there. What's more remarkable is that Phil managed to turn off that many brain cells at once to write that thing, and still managed to re-start his mind...

I had to go into a deep dark place, let me tell you that.

I've surfed for a while and the stuff written about Plaschke has been interesting. What I'd like to know is how can you keep writing it? I had a small baseball league blog site I was demo'ing and the upper echoleons had me take it down otherwise they wouldn't approve our yearly charter to operate.

Your upper echelons clearly aren't as benevolent as our upper echelons.

Posted by Jason at December 20, 2005 05:07 PM

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