The Jump To Conclusions Mat Has Way Too Many Footprints On It

Look, I’m not going to state that the facts out there surrounding Plaxico Burress’ shooting himself in the thigh aren’t there. It’s monumentally stupid of him to be carrying a gun illegally, only having a permit that had expired in Florida and at the very least, not applying for one in either New York or New Jersey. The fact that it went off in his pants suggests he has no clue about how to operate the safety on a gun, which is even more disturbing.

But I can’t help but sit back and want to smack the usual suspects like Bob Costas, Mike Ditka, and the rest of the NFL studio show crews make the usual suggestions about how players shouldn’t be allowed to own guns, and that they shouldn’t be out late after certain hours. Witness Ditka on the guns bit:

“This is all about priorities. When you get stature in life, you get the kind of contract, you have an obligation and responsibility to your teammates, to the organization, to the National Football League and to the fans. He just flaunted this money in their face. He has no respect for anybody but himself. I feel sorry for him, in the sense that, I don’t understand the league, why can anybody have a gun? I will have a policy, no guns, any NFL players we find out, period, you’re suspended.”

Lucky for us he never ran as the GOP candidate for Senate from Illinois. Jesus, who thought this guy would make a good senatorial candidate?  As long as he has the permits (which he apparently didn’t), it shouldn’t have mattered, period. The NFL is not big enough to where it should decide to take away people’s individual rights.

When I witnessesd Costas’ outrage on Football Night in America, I thought, “Spoken like a man who has never understood what it’s like to have to fear for your life.” It took Tiki Barber to correct Costas, by saying that many black athletes grow up in tough situations with gangs where they are protected because of their athletic abilities, and are used to a world where you have to protect yourself — you do not trust security people or the police. I don’t know if this is reflective of Burress’ background, but if you are a black man with millionaire money, you’re going to be wary inside and outside your home.

The situations are not comparable, as Burress was out on the town with teammates Antonio Pierce and either Derrick Ward or Ahmad Bradshaw (depending on who you read or hear)( but it’s silly not to think of how Sean Taylor was killed in his home and Antoine Walker was robbed near his home in Chicago.  Again — those are at home, but don’t you think you would protect yourself even more when you were out of you think you are a target? Yet this impulse seems to elude everyone commenting on the stubject before everything is known.

It is merely another string in Burress being a bad actor; it is part of a narrative to take missed meetings and fines and conflate them into something larger and more insidious. But the cycle hasn’t played itself out yet. Burress still has to be charged, and we have to find out his side of the story, too.  It’s asking too much to back off for a little bit though — there is blood in the water.

Pushing The Narratives

The benefit of my current work schedule is the ability to watch Pardon the Interruption, which remains the only ESPN piece of programming worth investing too much time in.  SportsCenter is not as essential as it used to be; much of the analyst shows focused on individual sports are background fodder. Outside The Lines can be very hit or miss, and is subject to the typical ESPN/mainstream blinders on much of its subject matter. Anyway, back to it.

The Four-Letter’s $3 million a year poaching, Rick Reilly, subbed for Tony Kornheiser on PTI yesterday, via satellite from Denver with Michael Wilbon in-studio in D.C., and parroted what I’m fairly sure may be a common impulse among a certain segment of sportswriters regarding the current state of the baseball playoffs: he stated his preference for a Red Sox-Dodgers World Series, proclaiming the Tampa Bay Rays “bad for baseball.”

We probably need to separate that “bad for baseball” comment into two categories: bad for the sport and bad for the business of the sport. There is a vast difference: any die-hard baseball fan or one who merely follows the sport regularly would say a worst-to-first story is not only good for the sport, but also compelling and justifying smart moves by a front office.  Tampa’s entry into the playoffs already yielded more attention to manager Joe Maddon in SI, a likely Rookie of the Year award for third baseman Evan Longoria, and a front office that assembled a solid starting line-up and a roster of budding stars. That’s good for the sport; it gives some leverage behind the idea that baseball’s uncapped salary structure can still yield good things for teams who use their money wisely.

However, if you look at Reilly’s comment in the business sense, it fits. Tampa was 12th out of 14 AL teams in attendance this year, not helped by the reported shittiness of Tropicana Field, and locals are right to ignore a lousy team in a bad park for a while. That doesn’t change overnight, and it’s also part of the trend of questioning whether Florida is really interested in regular-season baseball. (We really won’t have an idea until both the Rays and Marlins’ new facilities open.)  The Dodgers and Red Sox are two of several “glamour teams”; ones that matter to people outside their home markets (the others, in my eyes, are the Cubs, Yankees, Cardinals, and Braves*.) Those are teams that have bandwagons, intense home fans, and ones who don’t drop loyalties when they move in the age of the Internet and MLB.tv.

Dodgers-Red Sox is an easier World Series to sell, and I’m sure it’s the one Fox is clamoring or as we speak.  The Rays aren’t, although everyone loves an underdog story — because there’s not enough to sell. The lore bheind L.A.-Boston is too much, two big cities, Manny Ramirez back in Betantown, the Sox seeking back-to-back titles, etc.  That’s a narrative that writes columns; that’s how Reilly kind of thinks., and it’s what Bud Selig would love to see. (Philadelphia doesn’t have the same pull as Dodgers-Sox, but it’s better to MLB than the other AL choice.)

The Tampa Bay Rays going from worst to first and capping it with a world championship is just another Marlins team beating Cleveland or the Yankees, or a Diamondbacks bloop single. It’s a blip, and won’t register outside of those of us who pay attention. Of course, you know what happens when the narrative gets openly expressed: the underdog shocks us all, and considering my loathing of both the Dodgers nad Phils, along with a need for Boston teams to cool off, I’m riding the Rays right now.

Fuck the cheap narratives, though. Let ’em do some work. Tampa is full of new stories, and that’s good for the sport.

(*I include the Braves because of their near stranglehold on the South until recently thanks to TBS and the lack of pro baseball anywhere else in that region.)

You Don’t Usually Debunk A Rumor This Way

(Again, please pardon my politics, so skip it if you don’t care.)

It’s as if I woke up in a dream world this afternoon after working overnight, when we were all Gustav-obsessed (and rightfully so, it doesn’t look as bad as Katrina, but it still sucks; my sympathies to the Gulf residents) and when I read my usual web sites, I had to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

In that picture of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, you see her daughter Bristol holding Palin’s youngest son, Trig. There had been a series of rumors (I first read about them at Sports on My Mind) that Trig might be Bristol’s child, and in order to rebut those particular things, John McCain’s campaign decided to release the information that Bristol is currently five months pregnant.

(I wasn’t quite convinced on the “Trig is Bristol’s baby” rumors, even though the signs were very, very fishy. Who flies from Dallias to Anchorage, with a stop in Seattle, and then drives way out to Wasilla to have a child?)

Asked if Ms. Palin will be able to judge the demands of the vice-presidency with her complicated family life, [McCain strategist Steve] Schmidt said, “She’s been a very effective governor and again I can’t imagine that question being asked of a man.”

The McCain campaign says it was aware of her daughter’s pregnancy before it named her as the running mate on Friday.

Mrs. Palin’s statement identified the father only by a first name, Levi. “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” the statement said. “We ask the media, respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.”

Schmidt is only now using the whole sexism angle in playing damage control — the campaign had no problem with tokenism on a very light vice presidential candidate whom they didn’t vet properly. He’s being very savvy by letting this out during Gustav and on Labor Day — very few people are going to notice.  When asked about it, Barack Obama took the smart way out of this, at least on his end.

Mr. Obama said the pregnancy “has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president.” He added that, “my mother had me when she was 18. How family deals with issues and teen-age children – that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics.”

Although this is the politically smart thing to say, it’s wrong.

Rid Of Him

Normally, I don’t write a whole lot of posts about media folk leaving their outlets, particularly when it’s people I loathe both reading and seeing on TV — like former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti — because everyone else and their mother will have written something about it online before I figure out something coherent, if not interesting, to say about it.

But when the departure of such a figure is being celebrated and used as a subscription sales tactic, that’s gone well beyond the usual parameters of a high-profile departure.

The paper is running a semi-article/column on the White Sox commenting about his leaving. There are reader letters being published. The web editor for the sports section is explaining that a tiff over who got to write an Obama/Cubs column that went in Rick Telander’s favor may be why Mariotti offered his resignation. Hell, one of the letters from a Deadspin commenter and his picture are featured on the rag’s front page. Even his former editor, Michael Cooke, is writing announcements like this one (boldface emphasis mine):

The Chicago Sun-Times had the best sports section in the city before Jay Mariotti came to town — that’s why he signed up with us — and his departure does not change that.

We still have the stars — respected veterans such as Rick Telander, fiery newcomers such as Greg Couch, quirky voices like Carol Slezak, not to mention seasoned beat reporters tracking the Cubs and White Sox toward their eventual collision in the World Series, plus the Bears, the Bulls, the Blackhawks, and all the other teams that make Chicago the sports center of the nation. We could have a World Series in Chicago in a couple of months … talk about excitement!

The Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com will continue to have the scores and the stories before anyone else, anywhere, and the deepest and most comprehensive stats and standings. We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days.

A paper, like a sports franchise, is something that moves into the future. Stars come and stars go, but the Sun-Times sports section was, is and will continue to be the best in the city.

I wonder if the Sun-Times and its staff would like to tell us how they all really feel about the man. That is colder than a witch’s teat, and rival Telander isn’t holding back either, talking to the Chicago Reader about it:

“Because the damage a ‘humorless loner,’ as you described him [I did], can do to an overstressed sports department is incalculable.” He said the sports department lost its cohesion and  became “sinister and secretive and fuck your buddy. It was the worst possible teamwork conditions.”

Yikes. Look, this is hellishly amusing to me, watching a media meltdown and human nature in an embattled industry lash out against what appears to be a singularly loathsome figure among the ranks of newspaper columnists — so much so that rumors of him heading to Boston are causing angst among that city’s sports fan — but let’s face it, it’s also brutally unprofessional.

You’re likely to respond, “well, so was Mariotti,” and you’d likely be right. However, there’s got to be some semblance of decorum regarding the departure of a hated figure — the enmity in the pages of the paper and the airing of dirty laundry tells me a lot more about the staffers still on the masthead of the Sun-Times’ sports section that it does about Mariotti. We already knew a sizable contingent (if not the majority) of Chicago sports fans disliked his Lupica-style attitude about not visiting the locker room and tendency to stir shit up for kicks (nothing is more annoying in a columnist than a reflexive contrarian.)

But the dirt-dishing about Mariotti’s tantrums seems, well, beneath a professional journalist.  I was a solid reader of the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune in college (my small little school had this newspaper program where students got free copies of those two papers plus USA Today, the New York Times, and the Des Moines Register), and while the latter is certainly the more tabloid of the two, this kind of pissing match just goes further than it ought to.

Maybe this is the natural outreach of sportswriters like Mariotti inserting themselves into the news cycle via TV appearances and outsized presences online and in print — he became just as much of a media story for his ranting and raving as those he covered, so now he is a public figure and, in this realm of Chicago sports infamy, everything goes when you are universally hated.

Does Mariotti deserve it? He probably deserves every trashing his former co-workers give him and more, but you’d think his editors and the others who are happy he’s gone would be a bit quieter about it, not because they ought to be automatons, but because this isn’t the way these things should be handled internally. Release a statement without the personal digs, leave the gossip about the departure to your competitor, and move on.

Why Aren’t You Pricks More Grateful?

Hey, Peter King, lighten up. It’s a fucking pre-season game, dude: From this week’s MMQB:

4. I think I don’t want to hear what great fans the Jets have. Not for a long time. That crowd Saturday night was a disgrace. At least half the stadium was empty for Favre’s debut in a Jets’ uniform. I expressed my amazement to a few fellow scribes Saturday night — emphasizing that N.Y. traded for an all-time-great quarterback, not a broken-down one — and they gave varying reasons for the poor turnout. Like it’s the middle of vacation month for New Yorkers, and it’s a preseason game. Horsefeathers. If you really love your team, and you have season tickets, you should have been at that game unless you were in Tibet. Ridiculous.

So let me get this straight: if you are a Jets season ticket holder, you should have dropped what you were doing, braved the god-awful traffic or trains in the Tri-State area just to get there in time to see Brett Favre play two series — not a full quarter, just TWO SERIES — because you’re not really serious fans otherwise?

Considering the Jets are going the Personal Seat Licenses route for its new shared stadium with the Giants (and it’s still in Jersey), plus the fact that there[‘s no guarantee a 39-year old quarterback (despite being a living legend) will get them to the playoffs (I don’t have ’em winning a Wild Card, do you?), I’d say a half full stadium for an ultimately meaningless game is what most NFL teams should be content with until the season kicks off.

King’s just surprised that the ticket-buying public isn’t going to go down on Favre as vigorously as he does in print just because he got traded to their team.

Photo: AP/Bill Kostroun

My Prayers Were Answered

More often than not, my mental response to Bill Plaschke’s L.A. Times columns is something along the lines of, “God, this guy can go eat a dick as far as I’m concerned.”

Well, he and a Chicago Trib reporter actually did — in the name of Sino-American relations while covering the Olympics.

If you make it all the way through the video, I salute you.

The Old Man And The Internet-Based Sea

“There isn’t anything on earth as depressing as an old sportswriter.” – Ring Lardner

Generally, I like staying out of the pissing wars between print journalists and my sports blogging brothers and sisters; it’s like watching two sides scream into the ether — one yelling the usual “Get off our lawns!” and the other whining that Mom and Dad just don’t understand. However, I make an exception for the emergence of former New York Times baseball columnist Murray Chass online, complete with his “this is not a blog” manifesto in his “About” page, not to pillory him (The Big Lead and Fire Joe Morgan have already done an effective job of pointing out certain absurdities), but to offer a few thoughts as to why this obnoxiousness about the new and old media formats seems to plague baseball more than anything else.

(Side note: I’m not gonna take Chass on too much on nomenclature. Like I’ve written before, Bissinger has a point that got obscured in, ironically, vulgarity — and others have written that if the big sports bloggers were really completely committed to the journalistic end, hiding behind the “we’re just bloggers” defense doesn’t wash; internet sites covering politics frequently refer to themselves as “independent media,” with all the traditional ethics and standards implied.)

Let me preface that the comments below are not necessarily about Chass’ writings in and of themselves; he’s written good, mediocre, and bad columns, just like everyone else. They’re just generic trends I’ve noticed, reading columns about baseball over the years.

The Old Guard’s resistance against the Invasion of the Geeks and their statistical analysis has always struck me as perfectly ironic: no sport vehemently defends the sanctity of its statistical records like baseball, with the aid of said Old Guard, who is nothing if not fervent about protecting the old records from the ravages of both proven drug cheats and pillorying those not proven with suspicion or poorly sourced material without a second thought of innocence or guilt. (This defense of the old, hallowed records is also done with a slight bit of sleight-of-keyboard regarding the official discrimination policies of MLB, but don’t let that fuck you up. Whoops, I swore; Chass ain’t gonna like that. Anyway.)

Navel-Gazing At A Bad Time

I’ve spent about two to three days trying to figure out how to articulate this properly without coming off as dismissive of the late Tim Russert of NBC News: looking at his resume and reading obits (and even writing some off info for a newscast) has been a fascinating look at his career, and despite personal quibbles about certain aspects of his work, he still appeared to give a shit about his job and cared to do the work, often appearing on TV six or seven days a week while serving as NBC’s Washington bureau chief.  There’s a ton that has to go into that, and I respect that. May you rest in peace, Mr. Russert.

But there is a such a thing is overkill, and I have the feeling that NBC crossed a line, starting with Tom Brokaw’s announcement of the news on Friday afternoon, both MSNBC and the NBC news programs that aired on the broadcast network (Nightly News and Dateline) were both completely dedicated to Russert, as if nothing else had happened during the day that ought to get in the way of mourning a respected journalist, colleague, and friend.

The problem is that there was, and still is something that supersedes Russert’s unfortunate passing — damn near an entire state is underwater.  Not that they haven’t been covering it before and didn’t cover it afterwards, but just look at the pictures from the Des Moines Register and tell me dedicating all your news programming to one man is the right editorial decision to make.

Maybe it’s because I went to college in Iowa, not too far from some of the really flooded areas (thankfully, the campus and everyone around it is only suffering from the storms and flooded basements), but NBC’s decision seems awfully short-sighted and myopic. There is a reason people express such dissatisfaction with the media on a regular basis, and I can’t help but believe that decisions like this are why people are turning their TVs off, claiming those of us in the industry are out of touch.

Jason Whitlock Wants To Put Allen Iverson In A Burqa

I’ve read some dumb, lazy excuses for columns before, but I’m pretty damn sure this might take the cake. Jason Whitlock essentially says a factor in the increased ratings for the NBA playoffs is the lack of tattoos on the Lakers, Spurs, Pistons, and Celtics, at least compared to Allen Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, et al. Never mind the fact that you really can’t prove this, it’s just ridiculously moronic.

The only accurate way to describe Garnett, Pierce, Duncan, Allen, Manu, Parker and even Kobe is “clean cut.” Yeah, there are a couple of tattoos in that group — Duncan has something on his back, Kobe still has his post-rape-allegation tat — but the Lakers, Spurs and Celtics have far less ink on average than your typical NBA franchise.

Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony have more tats on their hands than the entire Spurs roster.

I know many of you probably think the number of tattoos doesn’t influence viewing habits. You’re wrong. Like everything else televised, appearances matter. There’s a reason you don’t see nude scenes in movies with fat people. Trust me, fat people have sex. It’s just no one wants to see it. Not even fat people.

Wait. So tattoos on athletes are as ugly and repulsive as fat people having sex on TV? Someone tell Sports Illustrated — their cover story is on a guy who’s got 26 tattoos all over his body. His name just happens to be Josh Hamilton, and he’s the dynamite CF for the Texas Rangers. Guess that’ll hurt magazine sales.

No one wants to watch Delonte West or Larry Hughes play basketball. It’s uncomfortable and disconcerting. You don’t want your kids to see it. You don’t want your kids to think they should decorate their neck, arms, hands, chest and legs in paint. You don’t want to waste time explaining to your kids that some millionaire athletes have so little genuine self-confidence that they find it necessary to cover themselves in tattoos as a way to mask their insecurities.

No one wants to watch Delonte West or Larry Hughes play basketball because they are often very bad at it. They are pro hoops players, which means they are much better than the rest of us, but compared to some of their peers, they have flashes of total suck often when they play.  No one wants to watch West or Hughes jack up ill-advised shots everyone knows they’re not going to make.

It’s not because of the tattoos on their arms. It’s because of the bad plays they make more frequently than their peers.

It’s a television show. Pleasant smiles, non-threatening people sell products better than menacing, tattooed brutes.

If I was David Stern, I’d commission Nike and/or Under Armor to create a basketball jersey with long sleeves, all the way down to the wrists. I’d make Iverson wear a turtleneck jersey with sleeves. I’d cover the tats.

Jason Whitlock, our own one-man American Sporting Taliban.  Cover his legs too. Give Iverson, Anthony, West, and Hughes a burqa when they report next season. Make Chris Douglas-Roberts know he’s got to put one on when he signs his rookie deal. It’s the only way to not offend a constituency that we’re not sure exists!  Ayatollah Whitlock has decreed this fatwa, effective this 29th of May, in the year 2008.

Do you think Sports Illustrated would let its swimsuit models cover themselves in tattoos? Models are paid to look good. Athletes are no different from models. Everyone accepts that female basketball players — when possible — are pushed to showcase their feminine beauty.

Athletes are no different than models. Nice. Just because we accept it doesn’t mean it’s right, Jason. Also, SI has no problem with tattoos on athletes now — please see Josh Hamilton again.

It’s unfortunate that too many young athletes are too unenlightened to approach the game like a business. They resist almost all ideas that would put more money in their pockets. They have to be forced to do the little things that would help them make more money.

Growing NBA ratings is what’s best for the players in the long term. Adopting a non-prison-ready appearance would help everyone in the league earn more money. But no one will talk about it.

Yeah, because no one wants to come off looking like an unenlightened, 19th century-living moron who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. And let’s not mistake the construction of this: They have to be forced to do the little things that would help them make more money. It’s more than a little fascist sounding, isn’t it?  At the very least, it’s horrifically condescending to treat grown men like this. I know what’s best for you and will make you more money.

Whitlock is happy to judge a book by its cover and say that because someone else does it, the book has to be completely re-written.

Gee, I Wonder Why Players Don’t Open Up More

In the past week or so, I’ve noticed a few pieces lamenting the closed-off world that today’s athlete now inhabits; one complete with public relations people, agents, ertc.  Pat Jordan wrote about that downfall in Slate, the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy whined about it recently in a column, and now, ESPN’s Scott Burnside is getting testy about how Penguins owner Mario Lemieux isn’t making himself available for sidebar or halftime show pieces, even implying that Lemieux only is accessible to the press when he has something to promote or his ego to stroke.

Considering the way the press has changed in how it treats athletes over the years, I fully support every athlete’s attempt to control his or her own image as much as possible — and that even extends to Lemieux, who is now an owner, but is being sought out because of his situation as a former legend of the club he owns.  Shaughnessy and Jordan even admit as much.  Jordan writes:

In those days, there was no big disparity between the income of a writer and that of an athlete. Catfish was probably making about 20 G’s a year, and I was making 25 G’s a year from SI. That’s why Catfish was so accessible—those free dinners, and, maybe, when my story came out, some employee for Skoal or Red Man tobacco would call up Catfish and ask him to endorse their products for a sum of money almost equal to his salary.

This is crucial to me — because so many writers seem to have this sheen of resentment about covering athletes who make much more now than they will ever hope to see in their lives; it slants their views on whether a player is producing (notice how just about every player in a slump will come with a reminder of his contract in baseball, for example), and players don’t need that extra bit in a 24/7 sports news cycle that’s already designed to chew them up and spit them out.

Is it any wonder Andruw Jones, slumping fellow that he is and overpaid, was telling T.J. Simers of the L.A. Times that he didn’t care. Simers went up there and mocked him, and what did he expect? I certainly don’t expect journalists to fawn over their subjects (they don’t work for MLB), but given the way journalism as a whole has gone over the past couple of decades, with every bit of police blotter fare and public slip-up being there for scrutiny, every pro athlete better have a crack PR staff to vet interview requests. Due diligence requires it.