If you want to see a fine example of a top-notch blogger taking an old-school newspaper hack to the woodshed, check out Aaron Gleeman’s dismantling of L.A. Times hack Bill Plaschke’s anti-DePodesta screed*. Plaschke attacks the new Dodger GM for his youthful appearance instead of his advanced ideas (for which he subsitutes derisive terms which reference ten-year old computers — floppy disk?), drags out age jokes which are older and no more witty than the hot dogs he mentions, and misses the boat entirely when he brings Branch Rickey into the equation. He fails to recognize that long before Billy Beane was a twinkle in his mother’s eye, Rickey was the proto-sabermetric GM; the Life Magazine article “Goodbye to Some Old Baseball Ideas” is a touchstone which I’ve discussed before, and it should be required reading to anybody who thinks that Moneyball or even Bill James materialized out of thin air. Gleeman picks up on this, discusses the Rickey article at length, and then tears Plaschke’s lazy, ignorant diatribe apart.

As for Plaschke, it doesn’t help his case any that he writes in what I call “autohack mode,” the tendency of a certain segment of the sports punditocracy to rely almost solely on single-sentence paragraphs as a method for proclaiming that one’s thoughts are so weighty and complex that they require extra space to be absorbed.

It’s the mark of a lazy, condescending writer.

Annoying, innit?

I know Plaschke’s editors, and sports-page editors in general are at least partly to blame for the proliferation of that style, but really, I don’t want to hear the Lupicas of the world railing about how entire college basketball teams can’t read and write when from the looks of their Sunday columns, neither can they. Somebody please shoot me if I ever make that a habit.

*the pinch hinter reminds you that bselig/bselig will work there.