All may look quiet around Futility Central, but that’s only because after a brief Xmas respite following 26 straight working days, I’m busy putting my pedal to the metal to finish this year’s JAWS series on the Hall of Fame candidates at Baseball Prospectus. In case you’re looking for a quick set of links as [...]
Kicking Chass (again)
As somebody who’s all too familiar with the senile ravings of fomer New York Times columnist and Spink Award winner Murray Chass, I tip my cap to Baseball Analysts’ Patrick Sullivan. After being singled out for attack over the issue of the Hall of Fame — and having his credibility compared to that of Boston Globe [...]
Clearing the Bases — Late Friday Dead Horse Flog Edition
• God, what a wretched week for the Yankees. As summarized in this week’s Hit List.
Big Hurts: the Yankees lose Jorge Posada, Alex Rodriguez, Brian Bruney and Philip Hughes to injuries in the same week. Both Posada and A-Rod are gone after wavering between the bench and the lineup, likely prolonging their absence, and while [...]
Hit and Run
“I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty.” – Honest Buzz Bissinger, best-selling author on “Costas Now”
That blanket statement was the opening salvo fired on behalf of Tired Old Media on Tuesday night’s “Costas Now” segment devoted to The Way Those Big Mean Bloggers Are Destroying Journalism. Actually, that’s not entirely [...]
White Out
Paul White has taken the extraordinary step of withdrawing the entire scathing post to which I responded:
I’m sorry if this screws up any links that might be out there, but I’ve decided to remove this post. While I still believe in the substance of what I was trying to say, in retrospect it was not [...]
An Open Letter to Paul White (Apparently Not the USA Today Reporter)
The following is a response to a blog entry by one Paul White, a writer I had never heard of until Tuesday afternoon but one who took no prisoners in dishing out the most scathing attack I’ve received in nearly seven years of writing about baseball. His blog entry went so far as to include [...]
Jon Heyman’s Chass-Ity Belt
Move over, Murray Chass. Ignorance has a new best friend, and his name is Jon Heyman. In a recent SI.com mailbag piece, Heyman decided to ape the senile New York Times sports columnist by parading his reactionary view of sabermetrics:
Regarding your NL MVP candidates, how about those two guys in Florida? Yes, the Marlins are [...]
Men Behaving Badly
Writing this from Las Vegas, where I’m spending a weekend of debauchery for my brother’s bachelor party. It’s the first time I’ve been here since I was 19, and likely the last for a good long time; writing about baseball doesn’t exactly yield the kind of money you can hemorrhage here without conscience (“call it [...]