Fine. I'll Do This Myself

So I'm pretty tired and my brain's fried and I want to go to bed, and I'm sure you really really care about my personal state of mind. But anyway, I tried to get Larry to do this article, but he wouldn't respond to my g-chat. However, this article must be done (to the extent, of course, that it can be considered essential for us knuckleheads to entertain one another). So I'll do it myself, I suppose.

Anyway, Ray Ratto--a man who looks like a walrus--wrote an article about the California Angels.

Hark! The not-so-heralded Angels swing, pitch, win in obscurity

So earlier today, I posted what I thought was the absolute nadir of bad sports journalism headline puns when some copy editor, titling a brief on Amani Toomer showing up late for camp, referenced Arnold Schwarzenegger and tired obvious homonyms all in one brisk swoop with the bon mot "Not a Toomer."

That, my friends, was delightfully, tragically, preposterously bad.

This is just retarded. It gets worse:

It must be galling for the kids back east to discover that the best team in baseball isn't the Yankees, Red Sox, White Sox, Cubs, Mets or Nationals.

Fortunately, through the powers of rationalization, the fans of those teams can always say, "Well, we'll see how they do in October," or "Well, who has the World Series trophy now?" or "Yeah, well, where's your NFL team?"

There's a million things that can be said about the first paragraph but I'd like to focus on the casual dismissal of these extremely relevant questions Ratto discards in the latter paragraph here.

--"Well, we'll see how they do in October"

Totally ridiculous retort. I mean, the team with the best regular season record is more or less guaranteed to win the world series. And of all teams, the Angels are a slam dunk. I mean, they've never looked bad in the postseason before, right?

--"Well, who has the World Series trophy now?"

Presumably this comes from Red Sox fans, otherwise it JUST PLAIN DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Can you imagine a Yankees fan taunting an Angels fan like this?

Angels fan: "Hey Tony, guess who's got the best record in baseball?"
Yanks fan: "Oh yeah, Cody-Jonathan, well WHO HAS THE WORLD SERIES TROPHY NOW?"
Cody-Jonathan (Angels fans have silly names): "....Boston?"

*Tony the Yankees fan is sad*

At any rate who DOES have the trophy now? Certainly not the Angels. And until they start giving out WS trophies in August to the team with the best record in baseball, I wouldn't fault any Red Sox fan who gives this retort.

--"Yeah? Where's your NFL team?"

Well...where is it, LA? There's really no excuse for a major city to be unable to sustain an NFL team...but that's another story.


More from Ratto:

Truth is, though, The The Angels Angels of Anaheim -- as their name is translated from the Spanish "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" -- have been stealthing their way to the top for some time now, despite not having the kind of glittering peripheral statistics that blind mathematicians, the kind of helpful geography that the earth's rotation defeats with every fresh spin, or even the glamour of fans who beat up other fans for having the wrong license plates.

I feel lame picking this shit apart. Really. I mean I could point out all this crap like "translating the name of a city is stupid" or "expecting people to be impressed by your ability to speak rudimentary Spanish is pathetic" or point out how the LAA are really fucking lucky this year, or point out that heralding LAA fans for not beating each other up ignores the fact that LA fans are the worst fans in sports....

but really it's ridiculous. This is one of those articles that's just plain retarded and I really am too fucking exhausted to deal with this. Here are some choice selections SIC. Imagine I'm saying something really bitter after every one of them. The "jokes" kind of write themselves, I suppose.

The Angels don't have the pure insanity of Red Sox Nation, the hypercritical narcissism of Steinbrenner Nation, the gift for self-absorption of Mets Nation, the "It's Our Turn To Win Because Everyone Loves Us" delusion of Cubs Nation, the Ozzie Guillen-ness of Guillen Nation, or the staggering historical incompetence of Nationals ... er, Nation.

Ok...one last editorial--what is up with this guy and the Nationals. He mentioned them in the first sentence of the paragraph as a team that the East Coast wanted to win. Now he mentions them among the other formidable franchises most likely because he was amused with some gay ass pun he made up.

I guess I just answered my own question...but it was rhetorical anyway. The fucking Nationals. Seriously. This is a major fucking sports website, not the fucking Washington Courier Sentinal Shopper Quarterly.

Of course, it could all go hideously south, which given the current state of the Padres probably isn't all that apt an analogy. Frankie Rodriguez, who has 138 saves this year, could break down. Teixeira could come just in time for Vladimir Guerrero to go into a slump. One of their starting pitchers could come up arm-lame. Manager Mike Scioscia could decide to retire and learn the accordion

.

One last note. I promise. I think he meant "Angels" not Padres. Although, maybe he meant Padres. I don't know.

Man....I just can't avoid commenting on these...they're so bad they go beyond bad.

But the realization that 2T3A -- oh, hell, they're just the Angels, no matter what we try to do for them -- were better positioned for glory than the more glamorous teams force-fed to us on a daily basis was, in and of itself, a triumph, because one of the great faults of the 24/7 sports news cycle is that it fills itself not with more coverage of everyone, but with too much coverage of the same old stuff.

See Favre, Brett. See Ramirez, Manny.

Tuesday, Favre learned to use a fax machine, and Ramirez didn't run out a couple of balls. This was the big-deal news of the day, at least for anyone not emotionally invested in Tim Donaghy's new summer job.

The Angels, who have only won two of every three games since May 17, had to come to Boston, trade for Teixeira and nearly get a no-hitter from John Lackey to get people to say, "Hey, look what I found!"

(a) The Angels are blessed with their facelessness;
(b) You cannot teach old dogs to sniff out new dogs, media-wise;

They're just not having to deal with the same levels of daily idiocy, and anyone who thinks that doesn't improve your day is, well, an idiot.

They don't have anyone coining phrases like, "That's just Izturis being Izturis." They don't have Arte Moreno coming out every week or so saying things like, "If we don't start winning, I will see to it that my starting outfield is flayed alive on Old-Timers Day," like H. Piehole Steinbrenner. They don't have a cult of Scioscia the way there are cults of Piniella or Guillen. They don't have the Mets' desperate need to be noticed.

And they don't have whatever it is the Nationals have, to their great relief.

They are just a very good baseball team that is too nondescript to hold the attention of the ravenous obsessives for too long -- once they get out of Yankee Stadium this Sunday, they can go back to their lives, while Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez torture you with theirs.

See? Everyone wins in the end. Except, of course, the Nationals. There are some things not even nature can overcome.

I'm sorry about the haphazard, scattered nature of this post. I'm absolutely exhausted and I knew if I didn't post this I would forget to tomorrow.

But seriously, I know this is probably a phrase bandied about a lot here* but this is legitimately the worst article I've ever read. I've seen articles that were poorly written. And I've seen articles with worse analysis than this. But this is like the ultimate hodgepodge of crappery I've ever seen--awful writing, nightmarishly bad structure, a stupid nonentity of the topic ("der...da angelz is good even do they is not da yankees"), absolutely lame jokes.

I know. I know. That's the worst article I've ever read and this is the worst post YOU'VE ever read.

Fair enough. But Ratto's article still sucks.




*phrase not bandied about nearly enough here: "bandied about"