Idiots Write About Sports

So Jim Baker is writing the occasional piece for ESPN again. And that’s good. Since I’m a paying customer over at Baseball Prospectus, I get to read his stuff fairly regularly. But it’s always nice when there’s another avenue for finding a writer whose work you enjoy.
Today’s column — which takes the recent kerfluffle over Keith Hernandez’s musings on traditional gender roles and posits that while Hernandez may be something of a mule, it’s far more interesting and entertaining when baseball commentators do not saturate the airwaves with a string of blandly inoffensive clichés — made me chuckle, particularly the stage-setting opener:

According to an informal poll I conducted recently, the three most desirable jobs for men ages 18 to 54 are:
i Fried food taste tester
i Exotic dancer coach
i Sportscaster
If you are one of the lucky few who has one of these jobs, chances are you would do everything in your power to hold onto that position. If you were a fried food taste tester, you wouldn’t blow your gig by showing up to work already too full to eat. If you were an exotic dancer coach, you wouldn’t screw up a good thing by going all Alvin Ailey on the routines you’re teaching your protégés. And, if you were a sportscaster, you wouldn’t go jeopardizing your job by saying anything too controversial.

I think that’s a solid opening. Without getting into the whole analyzing-humor-is-not-unlike-dissecting-a-frog thing, that one little section lays out the entire premise of the piece succinctly and wittily. The Alvin Ailey reference, I think, is a particularly nice touch as it assumes a certain amount of cultural literacy on the part of you, the reader — it’s a smart allusion without being esoteric or pretentious.
Of course, if you were to click on the link provided above to Baker’s column, you would not find any sort of reference to Alivn Ailey, as I discovered when I tried showing my wife the article this evening. Instead, the sentence now reads:

If you were an exotic dancer coach, you wouldn’t screw up a good thing by going all Fred Astaire on the routines you’re teaching your protégés.

Now, how to explain that sudden and otherwise unnoted change? Since I can’t possibly fathom how the original write-up might have offended someone — How dare you suggest that the work of one of the pre-eminent modern dancers and choreographers of the latter half of the 20th century would be inappropriate to teach to strippers! — I can only conclude the following: some ESPN.com editor probably changed the reference because he or she figured that not enough people know who Alvin Ailey is.
If that is, in fact, the case: boo, nameless ESPN.com editor. Boooooooooooo!
This rankles, and not just because it’s just the latest manifestation of the carefree aw-what-the-hell-it’s-not-like-Web-writing-is-permanent approach to editing on the Web. More troubling is that it seems to suggest the dum-assification of America continues apace. How else to explain how a slightly obscure reference gets changed to something so staggeringly obvious anyone with a functioning brain stem should be able to follow along at home?
I know, I know — this is ESPN we’re talking about. What else should I expect but appealing to the lowest common denominator? This is the network, after all, that took the activity of discussing sports news and headlines — not exactly a recreation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates — and reduced it to Tony Reali pressing a button to register his pleasure any time Woody Paige fires off a zinger at Jay Mariotti’s expense. The target demographic is not exactly MENSA.
Still, if you’re going to dumb things down, nameless ESPN.com editor, I suggest you go the distance. Change the sentence to read: “you wouldn’t screw up a good thing by acting like Fred Astaire, a popular male dancer in movies from the 1930s and 1940s whose footwork would be entirely out of place in today’s world of bump-and-grind strip bars.” Because I think there’s probably some mouth-breathing fratboy stopping by Page 2 in between visits at NearlyNakedMoms.com who isn’t quite grasping the subtle intricacies of your velvety editing style — you wouldn’t want that guy to think you’re going all artsy-fartsy on him, would you?