I used to read these every year while otherwise staring out the window waiting for baseball season to start. Then I got fairly cynical about them as tI used to read these every year while otherwise staring out the window waiting for baseball season to start. Then I got fairly cynical about them as the editorial direction drifted a little too snarky for my taste and I couldn't stop chuckling at the shamelessly disconnected snake-oil marketing that betrayed their core tenets. Well it's been a few years and the share of my sports attention consumed purely by baseball draws ever closer to 100%. The beast must be fed.
I'm pleased to say the 2024 edition felt more like the authentic vision and I enjoyed the h*ck out of it. It's like the band's major record deal petered out and now they're back to their indie origins, doing what they wanted to do all along, only now they're seasoned pros. Filled with the absolute cream of the baseball literati: Sam Miller (Pebble Hunting has the distinction of being the only email newsletter I get that I *actually read*), David Roth, Patrick Dubuque, Russel Carleton, Grant Brisbee, Michael Baumann, Ben Clemens, Lauren Theisen, Jon Tayler, Matt Sussman, Ginny Searle, wowie-zowie, and those are just the names I recognize. The other hundred contributors I didn't know are probably also super geniuses. It's an amazing and wonderful open secret that this kind of writing exists, and it's about baseball....more
I thing I say a lot is some variation of: "Sports are the best thing and stupidest thing."
Sports have always been my go-to time waster. I have favoritI thing I say a lot is some variation of: "Sports are the best thing and stupidest thing."
Sports have always been my go-to time waster. I have favorite teams, make time for games, buy merch. I used to read the sports section and subscribed to magazines, now I read websites and subscribe to podcasts. I've had fantasy teams since the league commissioner had to tally stats by hand from the newspaper. I only missed one Super Bowl since I was seven, and I don't care about the commercials.
In many ways this has all been a good thing. Everyone needs some trivial thing to absorb excess mental energy. Sports are generally a good icebreaker and relationship builder. They offer a lot of digestible life lessons, are fun, and have cool uniforms.
As long as I don't think about them too much. Because there are those unavoidable stupid aspects. (Beyond the general absurdity of being interested in watching people perform some athletic feat I've seen a thousand times already and developing an opinion about it.) Most team owners are billionaires doing everything they can to squeeze more dollars out of fan loyalty above all other causes. Blackmail a city to waste taxpayer money on a stadium that benefits pretty much only them? Check. Agree to rich TV contracts that ironically make it *harder* for fans to watch the games? Yay! More money. Burn millions paying crummy humans to play on the team, knowing enough fans will forgive any character issues as soon as they're wearing the right jersey? Done and done.
There are just so many more examples. This book came to my attention at a time when I was ready for its message. Craig Calcaterra calls it the "sports-industrial complex." Basically it's no different from almost any big business. The more money there is to be made, the more ethical concerns you can put aside, because, what are you, petty consumer, gonna do about it? When it comes to my iPhone existing through exploitation, well, there's really nothing I *can* do about it in 2022. I have to try to bank some good karma in other areas of life and hope things are a net good.
But sports are optional. Why put up with them? Part of it is resignation--not too many things are actually purely good, so why hold sports to such standards? Part of it is that loyalty, that emotional connection we idiot sports fans develop for our teams. (When we'd be much better off redirecting that energy literally almost anywhere else.) It's hard to shake that. Sports have been there for me at times I really needed them. But it's also something of an addiction, and at other times, they are a net negative. We need a support group or a self-help book, which is kinda what this is.
I don't know that his arguments are terribly compelling but it's a super breezy read (I knocked it out in a couple hours) and just good to hear the affirmation that, yes, you can opt in however you like, or opt out entirely. You don't have to stay loyal to a bad organization or league that doesn't care about fans, community, trying to win in any kind of honorable way, or even trying to win at all. And ultimately, you don't have to obey the longtime rules of sports fandom. Sports fandom has changed....more
Wasn't long into this strange experimental internet multimedia project I thought: there is no difference between this and a book other than medium. ItWasn't long into this strange experimental internet multimedia project I thought: there is no difference between this and a book other than medium. It's long enough to tell a story, and dense and metaphorical, if silly as hell sometimes. And sure enough, here it is on Goodreads.
It starts out as a peculiar exercise in removing boundary conditions from sports. Usually sports are the opposite: a competition for territory and/or who is the best at a pleasantly satisfying physical act (namely throwing, hitting, or kicking stuff), implemented within strict rules to minimize variables until you can have a mostly pure form of that competition. But what if, instead of having boundary lines, or defining the number of people on a team, or what constitutes "the ball," you removed all these constraints.
Eventually this drifts into the more existential, like, what if the players aren't subject to physical or temporal limitations. What happens when people have infinite time, no one dies, and no one is born? Leisured pursuits continue but after thousands of years that gets boring. So they play years-long cross country football games involving thousands of players spread across multiple states. Or they fire something out of a cannon in Alaska that could land anywhere in the contiguous United States and the first one to get to it scores points. Or a bunch of people get together and hike through a specific latitudinal second of arc, about 100 feet wide, 2500 miles long, trying to explore literally every inch of the U.S. and also to make friends with everyone they encounter.
Bois' appeal comes in how he finds (invents?) a magical space just this side of zany where we understand more about why people do what they do and why anyone can and does care about anything....more
Good foundational read on football analytics and mythbusting conventional wisdom, not unlike The Book for baseball. Also pretty funny, though prepare Good foundational read on football analytics and mythbusting conventional wisdom, not unlike The Book for baseball. Also pretty funny, though prepare to be absolutely inundated with Dad jokes.
It's a bit dated now (published mid-'90s when a 3,000-yard passing season was still a big deal) but there's still a lot of good stuff here, notably on the fundamentals of EPA and what the football stats nerds are talking about when they keep harping on efficiency and win probabilities instead of like who's giving 110% or who has the momentum.
(Yeah I took a year to read it. But it was never my primary read--I was just picking it up here and there. It's not long. And the page count is pretty bloated by a bunch of stats appendices that are now mostly obsolete.)...more
Interesting deep dive into the recent innovations towards player development in baseball. It was a total surprise to me that, basically, no one in proInteresting deep dive into the recent innovations towards player development in baseball. It was a total surprise to me that, basically, no one in pro baseball knew how to utilize practice time until like 2009? Turns out it's a terribly insular world, bogged down by decades-old wisdom that was rarely questioned. Everyone just thought players "were who they were" and deep analysis or development wasn't worth doing. Recent advances in technology and analytics have now reached a level of maturity where everything from a player's swing mechanics to nutrition to attitude becomes fair game for fixes, and players who might've washed out in the past can work themselves into all-stars today.
(I understand that we know more now than we did in 1979 or 1879, or even 2009, but seriously, what have coaches even been doing for the last 150 years? Weren't players ever wondering how they might improve at their craft? Or were they all just having the same resigned Bull Durham conversations over and over about how if just one more bloop single happened to drop fair every week they'd have stayed in the pros.)
So, worthwhile info for baseball nerds, but as an overall reading experience, however, just OK. (Ben's other book remains highly recommended.) For one thing, it's about 30% too long. After a while I didn't need another chapter about a struggling player who looked at the data and/or the video and figured out a fix, or another organization who realized it would be maybe good if they helped their players do that. I feel like maybe the authors did a lot of work and talked to a lot of people and we were going to have to listen to every quote and anecdote in their notebooks. The bigger difficulty is that one of the central figures in the development revolution is the largely repulsive Trevor Bauer. Even when offset by much more likable figures, I didn't especially care to get invested in his story....more
Russel Carleton’s essays in the Baseball Prospectus annuals have often been my favorites because he's one of the few writers who doesn’t wield his anaRussel Carleton’s essays in the Baseball Prospectus annuals have often been my favorites because he's one of the few writers who doesn’t wield his analytical toolbox like the proverbial hammer seeking whatever looks roughly like a nail. He’s a psychologist by training so addressing the human element first is his primary approach, which to my thinking is the better one. He spends a fair amount of time explaining some of the roots of baseball analytics, which for baseball nerds won’t be anything new, but he takes his own unique approach because--if you can believe this--pure math arguments haven’t swayed everyone. But mostly his goal here is to expose biases and encourage more holistic thinking in both old- and new-school crowds.
One bit I liked: "Casinos are monuments to mathematical and psychological illiteracy....Expected value theory says that casinos should be empty. Expected value theory does not work on actual human beings.” Much of the book addresses this gap within various baseball things where the right tactic based on expected value just *feels* wrong because it’s counterintuitive or too non-traditional. Carleton is very good at breaking down problems and doesn’t mind admitting when there is no great answer.
Example: A notoriously difficult baseball thing to analyze is the performance of managers. Unlike all the other things that happen in baseball that we can analyze, we don’t see 95% of a manager’s job, which is internal communication. The 5% we do see, in the form of on-field tactics, (1) is a team decision and the manager has a say but mostly just serves as the public face, and (2) as it turns out, don't actually make a huge difference.
Sabermetricians shrug, analyze the data anyway, and conclude the managers are doing everything wrong. (Ironically the most tedious managerial analysis happens in the playoffs when there’s less baseball volume and every move can be scrutinized. Ironic because the analysis is almost always critical, and these teams are in the playoffs and by definition good. I mean, the manager must have been doing something right.) Most baseball fans don’t bother with the analysis and skip right to the part where they get to think their manager is an idiot. Carleton understands the psychology of the role, where doing something radical is harder in practice than theory because you need organizational buy-in, and even when you have it, if it goes wrong you have to be the one explaining to the media why you thought you were smarter than every other manager ever. But Russell is also comfortable with the data side of things, and further proves that most things the manager can control on the field wouldn’t be affected much even by wildly different approaches.
But accepting that means being comfortable not having an answer. It means accepting ambiguity and the role of chance. Here is where the book is at its best, when Carleton uses all his tools and is still willing to just admit there is no good answer. That human endeavors are fuzzy and messy and data can help you overcome biases, but only if you’re going about it the right way in the first place....more
Good mix of history, medical research, and human interest that adds up to a complete picture of how an entire sport/industry relies on a small, vaguelGood mix of history, medical research, and human interest that adds up to a complete picture of how an entire sport/industry relies on a small, vaguely understood elbow ligament....more
This is a personnel management book disguised as a sports book. The sports part sets up the premise, that a couple of baseball writers/podcasters get This is a personnel management book disguised as a sports book. The sports part sets up the premise, that a couple of baseball writers/podcasters get the opportunity to run an independent-league team. The hook is that they have never actually worked "in" baseball, except that one of the guys did a summer internship once with the Yankees. Other than that, Ben and Sam are just well-known new-school stats-minded writers who sound like they know what they are talking about.
However, once removed from the ivory tower of the baseball internet and thrown into the trenches of real-world management, Ben and Sam learn some important lessons. Like:
*If you are a nerd in a jock's world, and take a respectful and unassuming attitude, most people will ignore you. *Turns out not everyone likes math. *Don't show up to spring training wearing exactly the same business-casual outfit as your co-writer or the team will never let you hear the end of it. *Managing a low-level independent league team is definitely not like managing a major-league team, and only vaguely even like managing a minor-league team. Your budget is minuscule, and information scant. Your player pool consists of the dregs of the dregs of major league prospects. There are no five-tool players. Most have one tool, on good days. If you actually unearth someone who shows some promise, they will probably earn an opportunity to go somewhere better.
So mostly the lesson is that translating theories to real-world practical outcomes is hard. Ben and Sam's optimistic dreams are challenged, and sometimes totally derailed, by logistical or communication problems. It's a story that will be easily appreciated by anyone who has ever had a job.
I was familiar with these authors and found the book to be a satisfying extension of their usual day jobs writing about baseball and producing the daily Effectively Wild podcast, which has become my favorite podcast. They get it. They get what's fun about the sport, what's funny about the sport, and how you can understand it better by understanding how statistics work and how cognitive biases affect everyone. They write very emotionally and truthfully, but also realistically (if a little too realistically--sometimes there is extensive play-by-play of games when some narrative would do). Good process isn't always possible, and even when it is, it doesn't mean good outcome. Their stats are "right" but they also understand the limitations. This is recommended reading for all, and should be required reading for the entire population of pompous baseball twitter--anyone who has used the platform to call for a managerial firing should have to read it twice and write a reaction essay....more
Annual preseason baseball fix reading, and always worthwhile for its mixture of analysis and humor from a terrific cast of authors. Russell Carleton'sAnnual preseason baseball fix reading, and always worthwhile for its mixture of analysis and humor from a terrific cast of authors. Russell Carleton's "let's get real about what we're doing here" essay about the limitations of statistics is again a highlight.
Minor criticism this year: a bit sloppy editorially. Lots of typos, confusingly incorrect data in profiles, that sort of thing. Also a poor Kindle experience: no chapter breaks, table of contents, or index, and the profile boxes don't scale in the standard book orientation, so you have to rotate everything longways. It'd be nice if it were more e-reader friendly, because it's a bloody big book to be hauling around in print.
Also I do have a criticism on actual content. So there's a category of player whose corresponding statistical profile I'll call "The Punto," after Nick Punto. Nick enjoyed a long 14 year career in MLB, mostly with Minnesota, and six teams total. He played in 1163 games and had a career AVG/OBP/SLG of .245/.323/.323. He hit only 19 career home runs. There's no denying it, these are not good batting numbers for a starting player, plus he looks like a normal guy rather than an especially tall, muscularly imposing athletic type. As a result, most casual baseball fans thought he was terrible and his employment sort of an ongoing joke.
Analysts should dig a bit deeper to figure out how a "terrible" player stays employed for 14 seasons, and his stats profiles show that they do, at least numerically. He stole 104 bases, which boosted his value, as did the fact that he was a switch hitter (so even though he wasn't much of a hitter, he wasn't especially worse against right- or left-handed pitching). But anyway his real skill was as a good-to-excellent infielder, spread about equally at 2B, SS, and 3B over his career. His best years were at third. In 2006 one measure had him as the 5th best fielder (at any position) in the league. Baseball reference puts him at 159th all-time in defensive value, tied with Roberto Clemente.
Now, let's be careful to make it clear that Roberto Clemente also happened to be one of baseball's all-time best hitters, and the combination of skills made him one of the best players, period, ever. He's an easy Hall of Famer. (His skill and value is still exceeded by his work as a humanitarian, but I'll just worry about sports nonsense for now.)
Anyway Clemente's defensive value alone earned him 12 consecutive Gold Glove awards. For the same career defensive numbers, Nick Punto has zero*. That's a mainstream media award, though. Certainly good analysis rewarded him in discussions. Nope: in last year's Annual, after Nick's final season, in which he was yet again a plus defender who couldn't hit, he was again portrayed as a lovable good guy "playing out of [his] league". My point is, even the best analysts struggle with preconceptions. I think Nick Punto's problem is that he doesn't do the main thing non-pitchers are supposed to do, and (just my theory) his name sounds like a combination of "pinto" (a tiny bean, or a weird/defective '70s car), "punt" (to give up), and "runt." Listen, it's not a good baseball name.
OK, I was reviewing a book, yes. What I am trying to say is, I felt like there were more Punto-style "this guy's bad at baseball" lazy write-offs of fringe players than usual this year. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to them. Anyway, it says here the Annual can do without them.
Also, Nick Punto's career earnings totaled $23,272,500.
*Standard caveats: (1) Defensive metrics are not facts, and definitely things people argue about. They are taken to be true when they seem right and inconclusive when they don't. Like most sports statistics. (2) The Gold Gloves are the notable award for MLB defense but notoriously unreliable. Good reputations often win out over results, and a good hitter with pretty good defense definitely has a better reputation than a pure fielder....more
I've marked these "nonfiction" in the years I've read them but that's debatable. The marketing on the cover is littered with exaggerations and outrighI've marked these "nonfiction" in the years I've read them but that's debatable. The marketing on the cover is littered with exaggerations and outright falsehoods. I get that it's marketing, which definitively takes the "this book predicts the future with deadly accuracy, and that's its whole purpose" angle, despite the actual content professing to do no such thing. I'm especially miffed this year on account of the 2014 edition's horrendous Corey Kluber whiff, which I trusted, and which gave me ammunition to commit the particularly disastrous fantasy baseball decision to release him after a bad first month. Only then did he reel off five months of Cy Young pitching to rub it in the face of me and the much-lauded PECOTA system. Which, of course that kind of thing happens, but then the 2015 cover dares to greet me with "Baseball Prospectus 2014 correctly predicted breakouts by Corey Kluber" etc. and I wondered why I read these things.
But it's not actually the predictions that matter.
It's still the best preseason baseball fix out there and I am a junkie and need it. The writing is smart and funny, featuring an all-star cast of the baseball writing universe. Russell Carleton's essay on the overlooked reality of analytics is outstanding and a long overdue admission in baseball nerd thinking that, yes, baseball players are humans and what's correct on paper doesn't always work in the wild.
So as to those predictions, I'll heed the lesson of Carleton's essay. What's correct on paper, that these are statistical mean predictions (no strikingly good or bad lines to be found), doesn't match the sensational marketing and player performance reality of the wild. Enjoy it for what it is, a fun, in-depth season preview and a much-needed February and March baseball fix, and not for what it isn't, which is a magical book of secrets about the future....more
Baseball has had a long time to build up a substantial encyclopedia of conventional wisdom about strategy and player analysis: when to bunt, for exampBaseball has had a long time to build up a substantial encyclopedia of conventional wisdom about strategy and player analysis: when to bunt, for example, or what to make of a player on a hot streak, or how to set a lineup. Sit through any broadcast for a (usually overbearing) sample of it. But most of this stuff is just anecdotal. Managers or influential writers in the past felt like they'd gained some insight, and it stuck. But the brain plays tricks on your perceptions. Maybe you saw a player only once, and he made a great play. So is he awesome or did you catch him on a good day? That's why we keep statistics. So you can look back and see what he did over time, even when you weren't watching, to remove your biases. But with enough data, you can also tease out broader trends and actually prove or disprove all that conventional wisdom. That's what The Book is all about. It's a huge deep dive into the data to see what pops out.
I loved it. I learned a ton. Some of the data is a little dry, but not usually, and anyway when you get to feeling that way, skim to that section's conclusion, helpfully set apart in a box to illustrate in plain English what The Book Says.
Absolutely required reading for baseball nerds. Highly recommended for all baseball fans, though....more
Either this holds no interest for you, in which case I bid you a good day, or you're intrigued by it, which means it may already be too late for you tEither this holds no interest for you, in which case I bid you a good day, or you're intrigued by it, which means it may already be too late for you to lead a normal life. Anyway, I enjoyed my annual preseason baseball geek fix....more
Maybe the best sports book I've ever read. It's not about glory and historical achievement, it's life as cannon fodder, in the genre of autobiographicMaybe the best sports book I've ever read. It's not about glory and historical achievement, it's life as cannon fodder, in the genre of autobiographical account of an American dream not being at all what it's cracked up to be. Kids dream about catching a Super Bowl winning touchdown, not tearing a hamstring and contemplating painkilling injections for a chance to eke onto a roster as a special teamer.
Not sure why this one isn’t more well-known. Possibly because it’s not a sensational tell-all. Nate Jackson has largely positive things to say about his coaches and teammates, except for his brief stint with the Cleveland Browns, and the sports media, and who can blame him about either of those. More likely it just never got the hype, not unlike Nate Jackson as a player, a replacement-level NFL receiver/tight end who sometimes caught passes but mostly played special teams in between stints rehabbing from injuries. But he hung on, finding enough of a niche to eventually appear in 41 games over six years.
Jackson has a sparse, nakedly honest (sometimes literally) writing style that's perfectly suited to describing life on the NFL fringe, with the right amount of optimism, pessimism, and black humor. I can only imagine the details he left out that would get people in trouble, but this also isn't a blissfully clean-cut, consequence-free episode of A Football Life either. He presents football in its accurately dissonant form: a highly fun and entertaining sport that has a truly brutal side. It's an activity that physically wrecks its participants, though for Nate and others who sign up for it, if they didn't have this particular form of sanctioned competitive violence available, they'd probably just find another one.
More sinister are the consequences of an enjoyable pastime being corrupted by unmitigated capitalism. I’d contend that 90% of football's problems derive from it, and mostly in the category of detached ownership valuing profit over people. (Like…just about everything else in modern life? Which is why, though I can’t disagree with people who have stopped supporting the NFL, I find it a strange place to draw a line in the sand. Laborers all over the world are exploited, most with much worse prospects than NFL players.) As just one example, concussions became a chronic problem because league ownership ignored them and covered up data instead of going all-in on player safety. Given all the money in the sport, there’s no reason why every person who signs an NFL contract shouldn't have it guaranteed, with health care for life attached, and with more money for the Nate Jacksons that keep the machine churning.
Not that Jackson isn’t immune to frustration about being a piece of meat in the machine, or that the TV spectacle reduces players to uniformed avatars to be carted off, traded, and forgotten. He realizes this is a dehumanizing situation and all, it’s just that it’s ultimately worth it to him to be one of the meat avatars. He’ll work his way through injury rehab, wondering why he’s bothering, then get back on the field, and talk lovingly about the deep satisfaction of hurling himself into his professional colleagues. Plus it pays well. Also there are perks. Lots and lots of perks, especially for the young American male. Including, but not limited to, epic Vegas trips, various intoxicants, team parties, and succumbing to the jersey chasers.
So it’s a very successful book in that it portrays a very ambiguous situation ambiguously. Similarly, I’m still more or less a football fan, which means accepting the good and the bad simultaneously. I wanted him to succeed, and I also wanted him to quit. Especially as he got increasingly beat up and had to face ever-worsening options about accepting short-term treatments (even flirting with HGH) that would prolong his career but with unclear long-term consequences, or agreeing to sketchier gigs on poorly-run teams or even secondary and tertiary football leagues. But he always opts in, until he can’t.
As Jackson summarizes, “Football players are smart and all, but it's not our main thing.”
Originally read 2018, re-read 2022, review lightly edited....more
Most sports figures don't have revealing works about them, because they'd only reveal that there's not much to reveal. Relatively few humans are eliteMost sports figures don't have revealing works about them, because they'd only reveal that there's not much to reveal. Relatively few humans are elite athletes and relatively few humans have interesting personalities, and there is no correlation between the two. But these qualities aren't mutually exclusive either, and some people are both.
Dick Allen was a fantastic baseball player. AND he was also smart, ornery, funny, opinionated, stubborn, moody, obsessed with his craft, and contingent on whether you gave him room to be himself, the best teammate one could have. He was all of those things and also a black baseball player, still a new concept in the 1960s and '70s, and some fans were decidedly not interested in a black player with a personality (or any black player, probably). He was also an on-again/off-again alcoholic. If he was too hungover, or just not in the mood, he might not show up to batting practice. Some of his managers weren't fans.
It's hard to know the whole truth about him, though this book makes a valiant attempt. Allen has co-authorship credit, as it's semi-autobiographical, but Tim Whitaker talked to numerous other people on his own to round out the story. What makes it an interesting read is that Allen isn't an especially reliable narrator. So it's hard to know how to interpret some of his more notorious incidents, but it's undeniably true he was frequently treated unfairly, particularly by the press. (It turns out sportswriters sometimes sacrifice nuance for sensationalism.)
PS On the whole I really like Dick Allen and am therefore willing to forgive his snotty comments about the American League's inferiority....more
A nice grounding on popular offensive and defensive schemes and their histories. Enjoyable and informative for football watchers interested in learninA nice grounding on popular offensive and defensive schemes and their histories. Enjoyable and informative for football watchers interested in learning a bit more about Xs and Os. I got a lot out of this, and it's a nice short read....more
I bought this thinking it was a baseball book, and one could use it to gain a deeper understanding of the game's statistics. But the advanced stats itI bought this thinking it was a baseball book, and one could use it to gain a deeper understanding of the game's statistics. But the advanced stats it discussed weren't all that new to me, and several good sites like Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, and FanGraphs already fulfill the niche of advanced stats databases. So I didn't really know what to do with the book. It sat my shelf for a few years.
Then one day I paged through it again and it clicked. This isn't a baseball book: it's an applied programming book, using baseball as an interesting and convenient content source. Now I'm enjoying the book a lot. It's giving me an excuse for refreshing my SQL and learning R and Perl.
A few warnings: you will encounter some sloppiness and aging problems. I found a number of typos, and some instructions that were flatly incorrect. It's unfortunate to see those kinds of editing problems in an O'Reilly book. Age will be a more serious issue. In 2011 it's still quite usable but some of the things you are told to download have updated or changed formats since publication. Just don't take the instructions 100% literally and it will still be an effective guide.
At this point I've worked through a good chunk but setting it aside for a bit. I'm marking it "done" even though I am no such thing. I'll be revisiting it as I can to work on these projects more over time....more
Mixed feelings. For every hilariously astute observation on the absurdity of being a sports fan, there are a dozen cheap jokes that could be pulled riMixed feelings. For every hilariously astute observation on the absurdity of being a sports fan, there are a dozen cheap jokes that could be pulled right out of the Deadspin comments Will Leitch makes every effort to disown. From his writing and his appearance on Costas Now, I feel like Will Leitch has two sides as a writer. First: the clever, humble, self-effacing Cardinals (baseball, and, inexplicably, football) fan who accepts his lot as a sports addict and knows he ought to quit caring about the hype machine but just can't. Second: lover of TMZ-style celebrity gossip reporting about bad athlete behavior that can't quite get over the fact that he can totally curse on the internet. The First side hates the very culture that made him popular on Deadspin, the Second embraces it. Leitch doesn't try to reconcile the two sides, nor does he have to. But for my interest, I can relate to the First and not the Second. As much as I dislike the mainstream sports media and love hearing Leitch burn them down (particularly during his attempt to watch 24 consecutive hours of ESPN), I got tired of Deadspin a lot faster....more
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