Criminal Negligence

More evidence to prove the fact that sportswriters are not more knowledgeable about baseball than the people who are not paid to write about it, which I allege in an earlier post. The longer I write for this esteemed media outlet, the more convinced I am of this.

Larry Dobrow's Bottom 10 Major League Starters

Owing to a particularly treatment-resistant fractured tooth, I have spent much of the past two weeks alternately sobbing in the bathtub and bonked out of my head on painkillers. Unable to do much else, I set up shop on the couch. Armed with a remote control and the Extra Innings package that Major League Baseball so graciously allows me to purchase, I watched a whole lotta games.

So wait, only when you were incapacitated by your poor dental health did you do what was required to get the information necessary to execute your job? I'm glad you watched some baseball, but nobody gives a shit about your dental health. Also, I suppose you are introducing this as an excuse for the egregious factual error you will commit in this article.

The article continues to list bad players, and I don't really care about his selections, since they're all shitty players and arguing about the shittiest player in baseball is like sitting next to your friend in class and arguing about who the ugliest girls in the class are.

But here's my major problem with this article. While talking about DougieDoug Mientkewicz, he drops this irrelevant and criminally ignorant bomb:

Separately, there's lots of talk this week about how the Red Sox shouldn't feel too comfortable with their 10-game AL East lead, since the Yankees surmounted an even more severe deficit back in August/September 1978. I don't know how to respond to this, other than to say that such a comeback has happened exactly once in the 100-plus-year history of big league baseball.

The moment I read that, I was taken back to the halcyon dan-bob's baseball-fan childhood past. I recall reading dozens of references to the famous "Miracle of Coogan's Bluff" where the Giants caught and passed the Dodgers while being down thirteen games. How could this guy have not heard of "The Shot Heard Round the World"? Perhaps he had heard of Thomson's homer, but remained ignorant of why the situation had such drama.

Now that I was certain that this gentleman's knowledge of baseball was poor, I thought this merited investigation. Then, in doing seven seconds' worth of research thanks to my insider tool (google.com), brought me to this page, which identifies at least nine other comebacks which could be considered comparable. Now the Yankees did come back from the second-most games back (14), but the aforementioned Giants did 13 games in three weeks' less time. The point is, this sort of comeback has not happened "exactly once" in baseball's history, but something like "exactly ten" times in baseball's 100 (well, more like 138) years.

My guess is that he conveniently forgot those other comeback teams because they happened to be current teams not named "Boston" or "New York". It's sad to see that the plebe sportswriters have Yankee/Red Sox tunnel vision so bad that they ignore basic baseball history.