When Mariotti attacks Simmons, everybody loses, part 1

I mean, not us, the sports-following public.  We all win in the sense that we get to laugh and one stupid asshole with "credentials" picking on another, more popular, stupid asshole without credentials.  But Bill and Jay most definitely both lose.

The Internet has perpetrated too much disarray in the world, 

Could have ended the article right here and actually made a decent point.  Also, get off his lawn and pull your pants up.

giving semi-lives to people with no lives 

Hopefully this is (besides being an obvious critique of YouTube celebrities, etc.) a veiled shot at the people who have exposed Jay as a violent, woman-hitting asshole.

and adding too many reckless, unqualified voices to the daily churn. 

First use of "qualified" or a synonym or related term: 23 words in.  Pay out the winner of your office pool accordingly.

The sports media business is no different. 

Different from what?  The internet?  The sports media business takes place almost entirely on the internet.  Jay of all people should know this, given that his own personal website was the only "outlet" that would hire him for about a six year period there.

A new century gave rise to sports websites that had to compete against legitimate journalists 

Buckle up!  Here we go!  This sentence is like getting pummeled in the face by a boxer whose gloves say OLD and MEDIA on them.

who actually broke news responsibly, 

I'm so tired of these unprofessional bloggers always breaking news irresponsibly!  Why, established media members like Chris Mortensen and Chad Ford and Ken Rosenthal and on and on and on never participate in the race to the bottom that is the effort to get a scoop.  Just because the "instant update" nature of the internet has dragged established media like those guys into its game doesn't mean you can go blaming blogs for it.  And better yet, this whole article is actually a complaint about Simmons, who hasn't broken a fart's worth of news in his whole career.

covered games and press conferences on site, 

Hahahahahahahahahhahaahahaaahhahahaha

interviewed subjects, 

Nothing like a HARD-HITTING Mike Wilbon interview/ball washing session to really get yourself inside the mind of a professional athlete.

understood libel/slander law

Subtext: Jay feels as though he has been the victim of libel and slander.  Reality: Jay has deserved each and every bad thing anyone has ever written or said about him, even the ones that weren't true.

and carried the profession with savvy.

Yes.  Savvy.  So much savvy.

So, to have any chance, many of these new sites went low-brow and hired fans with no training in anything but how to wear a personally customized jersey to an arena, drink three beers and cheer maniacally for one’s team.

Well now you sound like you're just complaining about Simmons and Bleacher Report (They were made for each other, weren't they?), when I really feel like we were building some momentum towards an anti-blogger rant.  Disappointing.

Bill Simmons, for instance.

At least Bill has never (to our knowledge) stalked or assaulted a woman.  Good for him.  Wait, is that libel?  Probably not, since Jay pleaded no contest to charges of both of those in 2011.

ESPN.com, then a digital embryo in a growing corporate empire, lured the eyeballs of sports fans by hiring one. Simmons had some talent, 

Mariotti admitting that Simmons has talent is kind of like a 6 year old admitting that his 8 year old brother is smarter than him.

spoke the fan language and understood the fan perspective, so the hire was a good one … as a blogging niche. But then ESPN did the inconceivable, unleashing him as a sportswriting monster who decided 6,000-word pieces without a quote — 6,000 words of literary masturbation — were good reads. 

Whoa, I have to admit it--all of a sudden Jay is bringing some FIRE.  GO JAY GO.

They were not good reads, 

HOW WILL WE LOOK BACK ON THE MOMENT WHERE WE REALIZED THEY WERE NOT GOOD READS 15 YEARS FROM NOW?  Also, Jay, you're a horrific writer yourself.  Your masturbatory articles just happen to be shorter than Bill's.

but at that point, anything with the ESPN stamp of approval seemed to succeed as the network claimed domination of the industry, 

I will mock Simmons for a lot of things, but one claim I will never make is that he "only obtained his success because he was piggybacking on ESPN's success" or something like that.  He earned all those fans on his own.  Most of them are dipshit morons who know nothing about sports and should never be conversed with, but still: he earned them.

whether it was a revolving all-night cycle of SportsCenter or the quieting of four sportswriters with a mute button on a debate show (I was on that show).

WERE YOU?  REMIND US.  What a monument to the professionalism and savviness of REAL SPORTSWRITERS that show is.

Sports fanboys began to read the fanboy sportswriter. Traffic grew. Advertisers bought in. Simmons wrote two masturbatory books, both best-sellers. Suddenly, it didn’t matter if he never broke news and never quoted anyone but himself and his cousin. 

All true.  Maybe your ire should be directed towards the people who made Bill popular, then, no?  The idiocracy of sports fans creates phenomena like Bill.  Additionally, it's more than worth pointing out that the only person to blame for Jay's lack of success is Jay.

ESPN created the original fanboy sportswriter, spawning a generation of fanboy sportswriters who also don’t know how to break news responsibly, interview subjects and cover sports properly.

I know I've used "hahahahahahaha" already a couple of times in this post, but seriously, how else do you respond to this?  Jay Mariotti just wrote that sentence.  THE Jay Mariotti.  July 2, 2006 Jay Mariotti.  He thinks today's new media sportswriters are irresponsible, shouldn't matter because they don't have ACCESS, and cover sports improperly.  What else do you say to that?

Friday, ESPN uncreated Simmons, choosing not to renew his contract.

VINDICATION!  Maybe they'll hire Jay to fill his shoes!

At long last, an embarrassing business might have a chance again.

Oh my God.  I can't keep going on this tonight.  Someone who simultaneously thinks that Bill only got popular because ESPN got popular first, yet is also to blame for all the shittiness that makes ESPN what it is today, should be placed in a spaceship and immediately shot into the sun.  Seriously, fuck both of these people.

Bill's Guide to Gambling (alternate title: How to Lose Money By Being Stupid), Part 3 of 3

Whoa, I kind of took a break there.  I figured that Bill was on a break (check his Instagram for awesome pictures of him golfing!  Actually maybe don't bother), so I might as well take one too.  Here's what I learned: blogging is fun.  Let's finish Bill's comprehensive gambling guide, since he's back from suspension tomorrow.

I'd like to say for sure that even if I were hired to work at Grantland like Bill Barnwell (who did a slightly-less-awful-than-Simmons job of making picks in Bill's absence), I wouldn't turn into a Simmons disciple, but I can't, because you literally couldn't pay me to work at Grantland.  At every salary level reasonably able to be offered by a somewhat popular sports website owned by a big media company, I would sooner panhandle than work for anything associated with ESPN.  But I won't say "You couldn't pay me enough" to work there.  Because you know what?  For $1,000,000 per second, I will happily sell my soul to Disney.  No problem.  Just give me the contract.

OK, back to Simmons.  Underdogs went 13-16-1 since my last post, making them 44-43 on the year.  So remind me--is it the year of the dog?

Rule: Don’t forget — it’s the Year of the Dog!!!

Ohmygod it is!  It's the year of the dog!!!!!!

Write it down! YEAR OF THE DOG!!!!!!!!! Got it?

I literally did!  I literally just did!!!!  Where is my free money?!?!?!?!?!

Before we hit the rest of the Week 1 picks, I wanted to mention my “circle” theory 

About as useful as my "Larry B has a huge penis" theory.

that I keep bringing up in podcasts but haven’t properly explained in print. 

Ah, THAT'S the problem with whatever half-baked waste of pixels he's about to spew--it hasn't been explained in PRINT.  Finally!

We don’t have legitimate NFL juggernauts along the lines of the early-’90s Cowboys anymore; the Salary Cap Era makes it impossible. 

This is true.  He should have just ended the article right here.

By January, every playoff team just hopes they became one of the seven or eight contenders with a chance to win the Super Bowl.

This is not true.  He should have ended the article back there.  Sure, some pretty good teams (2011 Giants, 2012 Ravens) just want to hang around for as long as they can and sometimes it works out.  Then there are really awesome teams (2012 Broncos) that flat out fall apart when the chips are down, and specifically, fall apart because they fail to execute, not because "the league has too much parity boo hoo!"  This being a Simmons article, though, I suppose the oversimplification of something fairly complex is to be expected.  TEN NBA TEAMS WILL CONTRACT BY 2012.  WHO SAYS NO.

Think of it this way: You always leave an NBA season saying, 

Think of it this way: if you are writing a guide to gambling on the NFL, what's the first thing you want to do?  Yes, that's right, you took the words right out of my brain: you start babbling about the NBA.

“The best team clearly won,” with very few exceptions (2013 and 1988 being the most recent). 

Even for Bill, this is staggeringly retarded.  I'm not even sure I want to go into explaining all the times between 1988 and 2013 that the "clear" "best team" did not win, because I want to go to bed before 4 AM.  The 2011 Mavericks were clearly better than the Spurs, Bulls and Heat?  The 2007 Spurs were clearly better than the Mavericks and Suns?  The 2006 Heat, with all of their 52 wins, were clearly better than the Pistons or Spurs?  And so on and so on and so on, perhaps most glaringly demonstrated by the 1995 Rockets, who went 47-35 and finished 6th in the West (Hakeem started 72 games, by the way, so it's not like they were hampered by an injury to their HOFer), but who were apparently "clearly" the best team in the league.  Holy dinosaur shit, this is bad, even for Bill.  

You always leave an NFL season saying, “One of the best teams caught a few breaks, took care of business and deserved to win.” 

Back to being right, except you can replace "an NFL" with "a sports season of any kind at pretty much any level."

Most of it makes sense, but not all of it: the Helmet Catch, 

IT'S NAWT FAY-UHHHHH

Rahim Moore, 

Take it from this Broncos fan: it makes perfect sense.  Moore was a 2nd year safety who was on the team for his hitting and run support, not his coverage.  He never should have been on the field for that play.  It's really not particularly surprising that he got beat deep on that play.  Flacco threw that pass like 90 yards in the air.

Kyle Williams, 

The dude fumbled a couple of times.  He's not currently on an NFL roster.  It's not like he was revered for his non-fumbling ways prior to that NFC championship game.  It was chilly and damp that evening.  This is not nonsensical in any way.

Santonio Holmes dragging his feet … 

You mean an awesome athlete make a great catch?  THE BASKETBALL EQUIVALENT OF THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN, EXCEPT IN 2013 AND 1988 (I didn't mention it earlier, but of course him listing that year is a dig at the Lakers because of course it is; they won more games than anyone in the NBA that year but were CLEARLY NAWT THE BEST TEAM even though they were defending champions).  THE BASKETBALL ARIZONA CARDINALS WIN THAT SUPER BOWL 10 TIMES OUT OF 10. 

I mean, in the words of Tony D’Amato, it really is a game of inches.

Someone give this man a Pulitzer.  How many seconds do you think he spent on that line?  Four?  Zero?  Did his editor add it for him, just to see if anyone would notice? 

So you want to break into that January circle. Seven contenders usually do it, then there’s always that eighth late bloomer/sleeper/surprise team that unexpectedly crashes the party. 

No.  No.  That's not at all an accurate characterization of how the NFL playoffs work.  Fuck off and die, you hack.  

We’ll call that team the Wonk Team, 

THAT'S A BUZZWORD PEOPLE SOMETIMES USE!  VERTICAL INTEGRATION MACHINE AT WORK!

since things always get wonky as soon as the Wonk Team reveals itself. 

2013's Wonk Team: the Decatur Staleys!  Watch out, NFL!

Check out how the last seven seasons played out. (Teams got two asterisks if they won the Super Bowl and one asterisk if they lost the Super Bowl.)

2013: Denver (13-3, alpha dog),* Seattle (13-3),** New England (12-4), San Francisco (12-4), Carolina (12-4), New Orleans (11-5), Cincy (11-5), San Diego (Wonk Team).

I hate that I'm even engaging on this, but Kansas City was clearly the wonk team, and they lost their first playoff game, because they weren't that good.  That is a common characteristic of what I'm assuming Bill calls "wonk teams," and just because the GREATRIOTS lost a Super Bowl to a #6 seed mediocre Giants team seven years ago, now all of a sudden we get to read about how wonk teams always gum up the works.  Sure, Seattle and Denver were pretty clearly the best teams in the NFL last year, and they met in the Super Bowl, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WONKY CHARGERS?

2012: Denver (13-3, alpha dog), Atlanta (13-3), New England (12-4), Houston (12-4), San Francisco (11-4-1),* Seattle (11-5), Green Bay (11-5), Baltimore (Wonk Team).**

Hey, look at that!  The division champion Ravens, who kicked the shit out of the Patriots in New England after squeaking by the Broncos, just happen to be a Wonk Team (tm)(patent pending).  What a surprise!

2011: Green Bay (15-1, alpha dog), New England (13-3),* New Orleans (13-3), San Francisco (13-3), Baltimore (12-4), Pittsburgh (12-4), Houston (10-6), NY Giants (Wonk Team).**

Same for the 2011 division champion Giants, who were obviously a wonk team, while the terrible mediocre Texans were not!  Funny how that works!  I can't even go through the rest of this list.  If you want to develop brainrot, by all means, be my guest.

2010: New England (14-2, alpha dog), Atlanta (13-3), Pittsburgh (12-4),* Baltimore (12-4), New Orleans (11-5), NY Jets (11-5), Chicago (11-5), Green Bay (Wonk Team).**

2009: Indy (14-2, alpha dog),* New Orleans (13-3),** San Diego (13-3), Minnesota (12-4), Dallas (11-5), Green Bay (11-5), Arizona (10-6), NY Jets (Wonk Team).

2008: Tennessee (13-3, alpha dog), Carolina (12-4), Pittsburgh (12-4),** NY Giants (12-4), Indy (12-4), Baltimore (11-5), Philly (9-6-1), Arizona (Wonk Team).*

2007: New England (16-0, alpha dog),* Green Bay (13-3), Dallas (13-3), Indy (13-3), San Diego (11-5), Jacksonville (11-5), Seattle (10-6), NY Giants (Wonk Team).**

From 2007 through 2013, the alpha dog made three Super Bowls and lost all three … and the Wonk Team won four Super Bowls and lost a fifth. That makes no sense whatsoever, 

Sure, the teams that won the Super Bowl were good teams that maybe dropped a couple regular season games they shouldn't have, but had great QBs (some would say ELITE in the case of one Joe Flacco) and played their best during the playoffs.  This makes no sense, if you're fucking stupid.  If you have an IQ over 70 it's pretty unsurprising.  QUICK, BRING UP ANOTHER HALF BAKED THEORY THAT'S PATENTLY IDIOTIC!  IT MIGHT SAVE THIS IDEA!  

but it also makes SOME sense if you believe that (a) the “Nobody Believes In Us” factor matters way more than we realize, 

/finger gun to the head blowing own brains out motion

and (b) the NFL playoffs are a freaking crapshoot.

They are.  Like the playoffs in any American pro sport.  Since I am an AMERICUNN I love me some high stakes playoff drama, but I have to admit, European soccer (for all its insufferable fans and dumb idiosyncrasies) kind of has a good thing going with the whole no playoffs thing.  Really, do we need to keep letting 86 win MLB wild card teams win the World Series?

Here’s what my 2014 circle looks like: I’m locking down Seattle (my 2014 guess: 14-2), New England (12-4), Denver (12-4), San Diego (11-5), New Orleans (11-5) and Cincy (11-5) as my six true contenders. 

Disappointingly reasonable guesses, even if the Saints look crappy and the Bengals suddenly look shaky.  I can't believe the damn Patriots got their act together yet again.  I hope Brady throws a 99 yard pick six that costs them a playoff berth in week 17.

The seventh contender: the NFC North champ (Green Bay or Chicago are both going 10-6 and it will come down to the 17th tiebreaker). And for the Wonk Team, let’s go with either Green Bay (if it’s a wild card) or A Team Coached By A Harbaugh Brother. That’s right, San Francisco and Baltimore — I’m looking at one of you to get your wonk on.

By which he means, both of those teams are good, so TRY NOT TO SHIT YOUR PANTS if one of them does well in the playoffs, because HOLY SHIT NO ONE BELIEVES IN US EXCEPT EVERY PUNDIT WHO BELIEVES IN EVERY TEAM ON A WEEK TO WEEK BASIS.

One more note: I don’t think San Francisco AND Green Bay will make the playoffs. 

They will.

At gunpoint, I’d say Green Bay is in, San Fran is out … and Baltimore will be the Wonk Team. My other three playoff teams: Tampa, Indy and Philly. So there you go.

I can't dump on him too hard because so much of this is actually somewhat reasonable, but Jesus, the Bucs?  Why?  The Lovie Smith factor?  Mike Glennon?  Hard to understand what he was going for there, until you realize he has his head up his own ass most of the time.

Why didn’t I decide on a Wonk Team to win it all? 

Because wonk teams don't exist?  Because it's idiotic to say a 9-7 team will win the Super Bowl?  It doesn't matter, no one gives a shit about your consistently shitty predictions?

I believe the Seahawks are talented enough and hungry enough to become our third back-to-back champs since 1994. 

How he managed to not make the cutoff 1999, and point out that only New England has repeated since then, is beyond me.  Maybe he actually is changing.

Unlike so many other defending champs, they didn’t lose three or four key free agents; they didn’t get fleeced of their slightly overqualified assistant coaches; they didn’t have to overpay any of their Super Bowl heroes; and they actually might be more explosive than last season because of Russell Wilson (edging closer and closer to his prime) and Percy Harvin (finally healthy). 

Meh, mostly reasonable, but after 6 weeks, it looks like Wilson is kind of bumping against his ceiling already, the defense is still great but no longer devastating, and Harvin isn't a huge difference maker.

They have the best home-field advantage in any sport. 

#hottaek!  Not that it's a dumb taek, it's just 1) been said like 50,000 times in the last 5 years by everyone, and 2) every good team has a good homefield advantage; that Seattle's seems to be a little bit better than most really isn't a "win the Super Bowl" kind of difference maker.

And best of all, everyone writes off defending champs for all the reasons mentioned earlier — we just assume the NFL is too much of a crapshoot, and that you’re never getting that lucky twice.

JUST LIKE EVERYONE WROTE OFF THE 1987-1988 LAKERS, WHO WERE OBVIOUSLY NOT THE BEST TEAM IN THE NBA, EVEN THOUGH THEY LOST NO ONE IMPORTANT FROM THE PREVIOUS SEASON AND WON MORE GAMES THAN ANYONE IN THE REGULAR SEASON. 

You know what? That’s awesome for the Seahawks. In a weird way, they’re almost the “Nobody Believes In Us” champs. 

This is the stupidest line in this whole column; pundits and fans everywhere picked the Seahawks to repeat.  But Bill has decided that didn't happen, with no evidence to support this contrarian position presented, because it fits better with his narrative.  Bill is truly a dickhead.

I have them beating my beloved Patriots in the Super Bowl, followed by four straight months of my dad complaining, “I can’t believe Pete F​-​-​-ing Carroll just beat us in the Super Bowl.”

If the Patriots make it to the Super Bowl, I will stop paying attention to sports forever.  Don't let me down, rest of the AFC.  I kind of like sports.

More from Barnwell/Simmons later.

Maybe I need to turn this blog into a Twitter feed

It sucks.  I mean to post more often than I do.  But often, when I'm about to, I start to think "Well that's not really enough for a post.  I need something better if I'm going to put in all the effort it takes to log into Blogger and stuff."  Which is so dumb.  There is no rule about the appropriate length for a post, and in fact, some of the best posts in the history of this blog have been very short.  But somehow I hit a strange mental block when I want to do a short post.  So, maybe I should switch to @FireJayMariotti and throw in the towel on this blogging game.  Probably not going to happen though.  Sounds like a lot of work to get that whole deal set up and stuff.  (Also, a quick search shows that @FireJayMariotti is available.  If any of you sign up for it after reading this and then try to sell it to me, I will send you a strongly worded email informing you that that was not a nice thing to do.)

Anyways, here are some of the half-baked ideas and quick thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head recently.

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Earlier tonight I was watching Heat-Thunder on TNT.  Reggie Miller is pretty decent in his role as Kenny Albert's broadcast partner, although he certainly talks himself into a corner from time to time.  Tonight he ended up here:

The league has a huge group of very talented small forwards right now.  Of course you've got LeBron and Durant.  And then Paul George belongs in that group, I think. (Pause) And then there's DeMar DeRozan... (trails off)

Easy there, Reggie.  Next time get all the way through your thought before you start speaking it.  George is a fantastic player, but like everyone else in the NBA, he's two steps below LeBron and one below Durant.  And then maybe end your list there, because while DeRozan is having a nice breakout year and is a perfectly decent player, he's significantly worse than George at 1) defense, 2) rebounding, 3) distributing and 4) shooting 3s.

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Pierre McGuire is a useless sideline reporter/sometimes color commentator/penis with a microphone who takes much more away from a hockey broadcast than he adds to it.  But I have to tip my hat to him for his performance during today's Canada/U.S. women's gold medal game.  The number of times he made sure to interrupt Doc Emrick's skillful play-by-play call to inform us that a trip or cross check administered by an American girl to a now-crumpled Canadian girl was completely clean warmed my patriotic little heart.  If there's ever a time to be an obnoxious homer, it's when a gold medal is on the line and your country's team is playing a country whose fans are raging cunts at all times.  The eventual result of the game made my stomach churn and ruined my day, but hats off to Pierre (non-sarcastically) for contributing to broadcast for once in his career.  May the U.S. men beat Canada by 15 tomorrow.

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Spotted earlier today among the front page headlines on ESPN, now relegated to the NFL page:

Older, wiser T.O. says he can still play at 40

Hopefully older, wiser sports fans will soon realize ESPN is a bottomless abyss full of nightmares and cat shit and decide to get their news and analysis elsewhere.  I know that I contribute to their pageviews by going there to find shit to blog about, but I swear, I don't pass through for any other purpose anymore.  If I'm not looking for a Simmons/Easterbrook/Reilly/Keri article to dump on, I'm not going there.  I encourage you to do/not do the same.  Fuck ESPN with a rake.

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Finally, earlier this week, Simmons (fresh off of winning yet another Nobel Prize in economics) put out his annual article about the worst contracts in the NBA.  I'd like to do a full breakdown later, but for now, two brief highlights.  Here's the opening paragraph:

In December, I gave my kids $20 for a toy store trip and they picked out $90 worth of stuff. They had no concept of money. They didn’t know if our house cost $2,000 or $2 billion. So I started making them pay for small things — Starbucks, Jamba Juice, pizza, whatever — hoping they’d slowly understand the concept of worth. I think it’s working. When we attended Monday-night Raw in L.A. last week, I gave them a $100 salary cap on whatever they wanted. They spent

RIVETING. If you want to engage a group of strangers, be sure to start with a story about your kids. Instant entertainment. Good job, Bill. Also, fuck you for giving your grade school-aged kids a $100 allowance for one night.  A night they're already spending at an awesome event.  I'm not going to attack the guy's kids because the irreverence expressed on this blog does have SOME boundaries, but let's just say I question whether that is a good parenting decision.

Finally, the dunk contest has gotten extremely stale.  Bill, use your wondrous powers of genius to save it, please.

My quick fix for 2015: Remodel it into a “Dunk of the Year” contest. Twelve contestants, 12 dunks, America votes on the winner. Your 12 contestants: nine NBA players, two D-leaguers, one street baller. Name it the “Bud Light 12-Pack Contest.” Oh, and if they want to raise the rim to 12 feet or higher for their one dunk, they can do that, too. Anything goes. I’d like to meet the one person who wouldn’t watch this.

So before, it was a dunk contest, but now it'll be a dunk contest.  Brilliant.  WHO SAYS NO?????

Bill Simmons is a horse's ass.

Mariotti vs. Simmons in an ethics-off. WHO YA GOT? (Part 2)

In which we learn nothing, because we already knew Mariotti was a sanctimonious, hypocritical dipshit and Simmons was a gigantic idiot.  (Also: I checked out the link tony harding put in the comments to the last post.  I don't know if there are enough sarcastic anti sports media bloggers on this planet to properly break that thing down.  I might get to it at some point and take a crack though.)

In a 2,720-word apology, Simmons tried to explain what the hell he was thinking. It sounded more like a plea to a lawyer to have mercy on him, 

If you so dare, check out the link from the comments I just discussed, specifically the part in which Jay addresses his legal problems.  It's fannnnnnntasTIC.

with Vanderbilt’s partner pondering legal options. Wrote Simmons, in a typically rambling stream of consciousness that felt like a tidal wave:

Least effective insult for Bill's writing I've ever seen.  

(We switch to Bill's writing at this point.)

“Once a few people nudged us and said, Hey, read it this way instead, you transphobic dumbasses, that lens looked totally different. Suddenly, a line like “a chill ran down my spine” — which I had always interpreted as “Jesus, this story is getting stranger?” (Caleb’s intent, by the way) — now read like, “Ew, gross, she used to be a man?” 

Yeah, I know, when I see something strange, like someone riding a unicycle, a chill usually goes down my spine too.  Strange = spine tingling.  Especially when the "strange" thing in question is a trans person.  EWWW!

Our lack of sophistication with transgender pronouns was so easily avoidable, it makes me want to punch through a wall. The lack of empathy in the last few paragraphs — our collective intent, and only because we believed that Caleb suddenly becoming introspective and emotional would have rung hollow 

"Why approach this issue with tact?  No one is going to believe us anyways.  Might as well just be crude and insensitive about it."

— now made it appear as if we didn’t care about someone’s life.

I wouldn't go that far.  I would just say that it made it appear that you were fucking morons, which you are, because you are Bill Simmons and people hired by Bill Simmons.

“We made one massive mistake. I have thought about it for nearly three solid days, and I’ve run out of ways to kick myself about it. How did it never occur to any of us? How? How could we ALL blow it? 

See above.

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up.”

That’s because Simmons shouldn’t be editing a website.

As I said last post, I don't disagree with Mariotti, but can you imagine the colossal fuckups that would happen on a consistent basis if Mariotti were editing something like Grantland?  Everyone involved would be fired within six months.  It would be the sports website equivalent of the Hindenburg crash.

“I don’t remember the exact moment when I realized that we definitely screwed up.

Could have been soon after the intense public backlash started, but that's just a guess.  It sure as hell wasn't anytime before that, because, as Simmons admits in his own apology, the article was published and available for several days before the whole thing came crashing down.  It took a little while for people to realize how fucked up the situation was because Grantland didn't promote the article particularly aggressively.

 … I am apologizing on our behalf right now. My condolences to Dr. V’s friends and family for any pain our mistakes may have caused. I spent my weekend alternating between feeling miserable, hating myself and wondering what we could have done differently,” he wrote.

I think he's being sincere.  I also still think he's a fucking tard.

“Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. 

Actually, the author still deserves some blame.  Jesus, dude.  I haven't taken a course in journalistic ethics but I'm going to guess you fucked up at a number of points while researching this piece (not to mention while writing it--although those fuckups are admittedly more on the editors to fix).

It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.”

Again, this is sincere and heartfelt, but classic Simmons.  ME ME ME ME MY WEBSITE MINE ME ME ME.  While it's good to take accountability and apologize, Bill, you still manage to frame it in a way that lets everyone know you're convinced you're at the center of the fucking universe.  It's quite the skill you have.

(Now back to Jay.)

Actually, it also is the fault of the ESPN executives who have enabled Simmons. John Skipper and John Walsh have been partners for decades, going back to their Rolling Stone days, and they have honed the edgy feel 

ESPN has become grotesque and horrendous in a lot of ways, but it sure as hell isn't "edgy," unless you're a boring old shithead who hates the way teenagers wear their damn pants so low.

that has melded sports and entertainment at the Disney-owned leviathan. 

Points for identifying that the main thing wrong with ESPN is its constant need to meld sports and entertainment.  Negative points for using the word "edgy" in the previous half of the sentence, rather than "terrible."

But they also have been reckless in some personnel decisions, 

LIKE WHEN THEY FIRED ME OH GOD I WANT TO BE ON TV AGAIN SO BADLY PLEASE I'M SORRRRRYYYYYY

You know he wants that.  The internet indicates he's actually "back" with ESPN, doing freelance stuff, something I hadn't heard about.  But when you're as egotistical and bombastic as Jay is, I get the feeling nothing can replace the sweet sweet sound of your own voice coming out of the idiot box.  May the powers above (the football gods lol) spare us from ever having to experience this again.

and it now seems that once a week, a high-profile commentator is immersed in a mess about something. I don’t mean Skip Bayless ticking off Richard Sherman. I mean Dan Le Batard, mindlessly handing over his Baseball Hall of Fame ballot to an amateur-hour website and prompting questions about his lack of professionalism. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Oh Jay.  You are the fucking best.  Independent of how fantastically hilarious it is that Jay would accuse anyone else of lack of professionalism, I like how he puts this on ESPN's executives.  LE BATARD WAS A TICKING TIME BOMB.  EVERYONE COULD SEE IT.  HE WAS JUST BOUND TO SELL HIS HALL VOTE ONE OF THESE YEARS.  I don't think I've heard a single established media member indicate anything but surprise at the fact that DLB was the Deadspin guy.  John Walsh and John Skipper can go fuck themselves for a lot of reasons, but I definitely wouldn't put that incident on them.

That was last week. Simmons and Dr. V was this week. What possibly will happen next week?

ESPN somehow going bankrupt, hopefully.

Bob Iger and the big Disney bosses don’t care if the noise translates to ratings and more megaprofits. But the Simmons snafu, with Grantland based in Iger’s Los Angeles backyard, could cost the company dearly in legal losses and public relations. 

Again, I would be shocked if anything comes of this besides a quiet settlement of an undisclosed amount.

“We want to keep taking risks. That’s one of the reasons why we created Grantland. Every mistake we’ve made, we’ve learned from it,” Simmons wrote.

How about going away before you make another?

If only.  Jay kind of has a point here--this isn't a tech startup entering a new field that needs to figure out what works and what doesn't.  Sites like Grantland should not make mistakes like this.

“Bill’s a fan,” Rivers said last summer, amid his epic televised argument with Simmons. “Is he qualified to do the NBA? Well, we can debate that all day. But Bill’s a fan, and I get that.”

A better question: Is Simmons qualified to do anything? Exactly who is he, where did he come from and what are his credentials other than being a fanboy? Can anyone answer that?

Bill almost certainly does not know more about the NBA than Doc Rivers, but he also almost certainly knows more about sports in general than Mariotti does.  If you gave me a horrible Sophie's choice in which I absolutely HAD to let one of them continue to write about sports, I'm taking Bill over Jay every time.  So, to answer your question, Jay, his credentials are knowing a little about sports and oscillating between being bad and terrible at expressing his thoughts.  Given that you know even less and are always terrible at expressing your thoughts, please stop throwing stones from your glass house.  Please take your "credentials" and "industry know-how" and shove them directly up your ass.

As it is, Simmons has shown a gross insensitivity toward other worldly subjects. Remember when he went to Memphis for a Grizzlies-Clippers playoff series last year and compared the Martin Luther King assassination to the crowd mood at Game 3? Said Bill: “I didn’t realize the effect (the King tragedy) had on that city. … I think from people we talk to and stuff we’ve read, the shooting kind of sets the tone for how the city thinks about stuff. We were at Game 3. Great crowd, they fall behind and the whole crowd got tense. It was like, `Oh no, something bad is going to happen.’ And it starts from that shooting and it’s just that mind-set they have.”

King was assassinated in 1968.

Now Jay is getting off the mat and back into the game.  That's a posterizing slam dunk for him.  Holy shit, I had forgotten about that Simmons bit.  That might be the dumbest thing I've ever read.

After that blunder, I e-mailed Skipper — I worked eight years at ESPN as a regular panelist on the debate show, “Around The Horn” — 

DID YA?

and suggested in good faith that Simmons was grossly overworked. “We do that to our people sometimes,” Skipper said.

"These 'John Carter'/NBA playoffs cross-promotional pieces aren't going to write themselves!"

Nothing changed. Simmons continued to be routinely overworked, which is Skipper’s responsibility as ESPN’s president and lead decision-maker. And the more Simmons worked, the more power he tossed around. If it wasn’t true that he ran Magic Johnson off the “NBA Countdown” show in which Simmons regularly appears, 

And let's hope that it was, because that would be great.  To Magic's credit, he has remained very quiet about the whole thing (as far as I know).

tensions between Simmons and Michael Wilbon sometimes flared during broadcasts. 

I renew the comments I made in the post linked just above.  It was great that Wilbon talked down to Simmons and treated him like dirt, but it doesn't change the fact that Wilbon is a fucking twat. 

Wilbon is one of the best sports journalists in America, 

BWAHHHHHAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAAHAAH

trained at Northwestern and developed at the Washington Post, and he has broken too many stories in his career to count. 

Wilbon may be an excellent reporter, although I doubt even that much.  But let's be clear: as a journalist, the man fucking stinks on ice.  He's atrocious.  I hope he moves to Antarctica and doesn't come back.

Simmons couldn’t break a piece of china. Wilbon looked at Simmons as an alien from outer space, untrained and unkempt in the industry. Yet Wilbon, overworked himself, departed the show while Simmons pal Jalen Rose came on board, in what is now more than ever a distant also-ran to the Charles Barkley-fueled “Inside The NBA” show on TNT.

Not going to bag on Simmons too hard for that.  There's only one Chuck, and ESPN doesn't have him.  But yeah, don't bother watching NBA Countdown, it's a disaster.

Simmons has the ear of Skipper. Why? Because Simmons, with his Hollywood connections as a former comedy writer for Jimmy Kimmel, 

BWWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH

WHAT CONNECTIONS

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This is the best Mariotti piece I've ever read.

could meld show business with Bristol. What Simmons has done well at ESPN was conceive the “30 For 30” concept, sports documentaries created by some of the film industry’s best directors. And the best decision Simmons made, in regard to the project, was staying out of the way of those productions.

Just seconds after nearly making me fall out of my chair with laughter, Jay makes another legitimately good point.  Really pulling a Jekyll and Hyde act here.

In my world, Simmons doesn’t write well, doesn’t do TV well and really doesn’t do much of anything but schmooze the right people. 

Dear God, don't make me write it.  OK, I'm going to really regretfully write it.  Look: the guy has an audience.  A huge one.  That does not mean he's not a gigantic fucking self-centered dope, but the guy has an audience.  I'm pretty sure that's the one thing he does well.  

At ESPN, any guy off the street — myself included, I suppose — could do a few shows and become a star, 

False humility alert!

based simply on the network’s massive clout and reach. But at some point, there has to be a redeeming value to a personality. And don’t tell me about page views, unique visitors and Twitter followers — the biggest ongoing scam in the web media is how people buy and fabricate numbers, in some cases by the hundreds of thousands. Ignore numbers.

Or do tell me about pageviews, because they drive advertising rates, and advertising money drives the network.  So yeah, in evaluating whether Simmons is actually bringing anything to the table for ESPN, go ahead and do the opposite of what Jay just said.  And if you want to somehow believe Simmons is gaming the system to inflate his pageviews or something, you can also go ahead and do that, but just know that you're siding with Jay Mariotti.  That should get you to reconsider.  Also: assuming Jay is actually implying that here, it's almost funnier than Jay's insinuation that Bill is some kind of Hollywood insider.  As if a corporate behemoth the size of Disney/ABC wouldn't have a very firm grasp on what drives their web traffic.  And as if it would be possible for one of their own employees to commit pageview fraud right under their noses.

Bill Simmons, BS for short, 

POW

is the product of a network so big that it can make media sensations out of hubcaps. 

Except that Simmons, for all his flaws, and he does have many of them, is something of a self-made success story (even if he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth), so that argument doesn't really resonate here.

Now that he has become a liability to that network, expect him any day back in the Garden with his Celtics jersey. Once a fanboy, always a fanboy.

This is Jay Mariotti for Sports Talk Florida, signing off.  

/single tear drips down Jay's cheek as he closes his laptop and goes to sleep in the back of his car

Mariotti vs. Simmons in an ethics-off. WHO YA GOT? (Part 1)

So I did not post about Simmons's conference championship game picks, but needless to say, he took both underdogs to win outright, and instead both favorites covered.  To be fair to him, had I posted my picks, I would have only gone 1-1, as I liked the Broncos and Niners to cover, and the Niners to possibly win outright.  To be unnecessarily generous to both him and me, the Niners were about a foot away from winning outright.  Anyways, much as we all wanted to enjoy some tasty Simmons schadenfreude after the GREATRIOTS laid a huge egg in Denver, his Twitter feed was silent between Friday evening and Monday morning, and when he did get around to tweeting on Monday, he had bigger concerns to address.

I assume you know what I'm referring to, but if you don't, Google "Grantland Dr. V article."  You'll find plenty of thoughtful (and some not very thoughtful) responses to what went down.  It's a tragic story that reflects very poorly on Grantland and Simmons, but I'm not here to pile on them.  I'm here to bring you the response the incident prompted from sports journalism's foremost expert on ethics: Jay Mariotti!

Like you, I had no idea he had a job again.  Somehow, he convinced some outlet called Sports Talk Florida to pay him for his labor.  As far as I can tell, Sports Talk Florida is an internet radio station that also publishes STRONG TAKES from its personnel on its website.  Jay apparently hosts a show from noon to three every afternoon, and also gets to write.  And when he writes, you know he's not going to shy away from the hot topics of the day.  Bill Simmons: prepare to be TAKEN TO TASK.  As Chris W said when sending this link to Jack M and I, let's root for the meteor.  (Late breaking edit: I didn't realize commenter tony harding also placed this link in the comments to my last post until just now.  Thanks dude.  I assume SportsTalkFlorida is in your blogroll.)

A fanboy should not be a sports columnist, a TV analyst and a website editor. 

Can we just end the article here?  Actually, even that's taking things too far and giving Jay's thoughts too much credit.  I think it's fine for fanboys to be columnists.  I'm a nerdy blogger who lives in his parents' basement, etc., so I have to support the idea of fans having a voice in the sports world.  I don't hate Simmons because he became a popular writer on a huge platform without any journalism credentials.  I hate Simmons because he's a fucking idiot.  However, I will agree with Jay that just because you have the magic formula that causes dipshit sports fans everywhere to gobble up anything you write doesn't mean you should be given a role on TV or creative and editorial control over a (corporate-funded) website.  Jay and I are definitely on the same page there.

A fanboy should remain a fanboy, 

Oh no.  You know where this is headed.

root vacuously for his teams 

If you use your imagination, you can hear Mariotti's voice morphing into Wilbon's as this sentence goes along.

and leave the serious work to the trained journalists. 

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Only SERIOUS JOURNALISTS like Bill Plaschke and Jay should be able to offer up HOT TAKES on matters related to sport.  If you don't own a journalism degree, you shouldn't be allowed to offer your opinion as to whether or not Ozzie "the Blizzard of Oz" Guillen is utilizing his bullpen properly.  

What a fucking cunt.

Several years ago, ESPN turned a fanboy named Bill Simmons into a blogging cartoon character 

It is true that they literally turned Simmons into a cartoon character at one point (2005?  2006?) for a very short-lived online series that was as poorly executed as it was conceived.  I think Jay is referring to the fact that ESPN employed him at all here, but I just wanted to remind you that "Sports Guy's World," or whatever the fuck that web cartoon was called, was a thing that ESPN spent money on.

— the Sports Guy, he was called — who was cast as a role model for legions of other fanboys unqualified for professional sports media and used by the network to generate traffic for then-fledgling ESPN.com.

I know you feel threatened by the fact that just about anyone can start a blog and develop a reader base these days, Jay, but let's not take it too far.  At the time ESPN hired Simmons (1999?  2000?) blogs were still several years away from being a thing (I hate using that terminology, but it's the weekend and I'm feeling lazy) and your cozy little job at the Chicago Sun-Times was still perfectly intact.  Simmons was only hired as a role model in the sense that his appeal was based on being an everyday fan.  Jay seems to think that ESPN hired him in order to inspire other knuckle-dragging non-accredited journalists to become successful BLOGGERS (term used pejoratively in this case) and RUIN SPORTS MEDIA FOREVER.  Kind of sounds like sour grapes from a hard-partying no-contest-pleading-to-charges-of-woman-punching fuckass who has no one to blame for his own downfall from major newspaper columnist to internet radio station guy.

This was when the Internet was swallowing the world and newspapers were starting to die, a perfect segue to a sportswriting fad. 

Yes, a "fad," which played a huge role in the death of many gigantic newspaper institutions, as you just acknowledged, and which will be the main way people get sports content for a long time to come.

Problem was, Simmons spawned a lot of other fanboys who could become sportswriters simply by signing onto Word Press and launching blogs. 

Although there are relatively inconsequential differences between a Blogger-hosted blog and the site Jay is using now, for all intents and purposes, one of these so-called "weblogs" is the only reason he has a voice right now.

Around this time, web entrepreneurs with no conscience about accountability and ethics 

Yeah, I hate those unethical bloggers!

launched their own grubby sites, 

I'm not going to link to it, but if you're feeling generous, go to Sports Talk Florida's site, and soak up the non-grubbiness.

then hired fanboys for pennies while ordering them to accrue as many clicks as possible by whatever means possible, 

LEAVE BLEACHER REPORT OUT OF THIS.  THEIR MOBILE APP IS ACTUALLY KIND OF GOOD.  (No really, it is.  ESPN Scorecenter has become progressively shittier with every upgrade, and Bleacher Report TeamStream is non-horrible.)  I also love the insinuation that it's only bloggers who ever stoop to ethical lows to generate buzz.  No mainstream old media print journalist would ever consider such a thing!

even if it meant stalking famous athletes and media people and publishing blatant lies, blind items, dick and vagina photos, whatever attracted the eyeballs of various stoners and losers.

Deadspin's commenters are the worst people on the internet, but I'm pretty sure there are at least some non-commenting readers who are neither stoners nor losers.

All of which brings us to Simmons today. Having ruined the sports media industry in too many ways to count, 

This is attributing too much power to Bill.  He's an obnoxious, talentless pile of dinosaur shit--but his overall impact on the sports media industry is probably no worse than "kind of bad."  It might even be neutral.  Sure, he's spawned a massive crowd of mouth breathers who think that liking sports means comparing athletes to characters from TV shows, and that the Ewing Theory is demonstrably provable via the scientific method.  But he's also probably inspired a lot of smart and entertaining people to start writing about sports.  Lord knows I'm not one of them (I'm not inspired by Simmons, nor am I smart or God knows entertaining).  But many of your favorite bloggers, and maybe even some of your favorite mainstream writers, probably owe a little bit of their success to him.  Plus, Grantland as a whole is a steaming sauna of shit fumes, but it employs some great writers like Bill Barnwell and Zach Lowe.  If I had magical past changing powers, I'd cut off Simmons's career around 2003 (and even that might be too late), but I certainly wouldn't stop him from ever having begun writing.

he now finds himself in an unforgivable legal predicament that could end his hollow reign atop a media empire that should know better. 

If the fallout from this Dr. V situation is the end of Grantland, I'll grow a mullet.  Wishful thinking on Jay's part.

It was Simmons, as editor-in-chief of ESPN’s Grantland spinoff site, who approved the publication of a piece last week called “Dr. V’s Magical Putter.” The story was intended to determine the legitimacy of a unique piece of golf equipment. It ended with the transgender community crying foul over the insensitive work of the story’s author, Caleb Hannan, who discovered in the course of his reporting that the putter’s inventor, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, was a transgender person.

When Vanderbilt learned that Hannan was aware of the information and that he had told Phil Kinney, one of the putter’s investors, she e-mailed Hannan and accused him of a “hate crime.” Then she committed suicide. The date was Oct. 18, 2013.

Last week, Hannan’s story ran on Simmons’ site, outing Vanderbilt as transgender and not treating the suicide with the proper tact and care. After reading it, and then absorbing the firestorm of criticism accompanying it, all I could ask myself was: 

How can I make this about me somehow?

Why is a career fanboy 

To be fair to Bill, he's been a professional writer in some capacity or another (term "writer" used loosely for the past seven or eight years, as he's averaged about three columns per year, but still) for pretty much his whole adult life.  He's an insufferable fanboy, and a real piece of shit to work with, but he knows the sportswriting industry.  I'll give him that much.  He still shouldn't be Grantland's editor, but acting like he's nothing but a guy who likes sports is disingenuous.  He's shitty sportswriter, but he's still a sportswriter.

making critical decisions about a difficult story involving suicide and a transgender person? Why was Bill Simmons in this position to begin with? Shouldn’t he have been back in Boston, wearing a Celtics throwback jersey and screaming from the cheap seats that Doc Rivers quit on the team?

While that is some top-notch mockery, let's face it: if Jay were editing a site as big as Grantland, he'd make horrendous ethical gaffes like this fucking constantly.

Part 2 later this week.

Back to the salt mines

Wow, I took some time off there.  That's what happens when you're a burnt out sports media blogger--sometimes you just have to disappear for a couple weeks and realize that no one really gives a shit whether you post anything or not.  That's just the impetus you need to get back in the game.  Lots of ground to cover here.

First of all, thanks to dan-bob for posting a couple things while I sat on my couch and watched TV rather my usual practice of sitting on my couch and watching TV while blogging.  That was the first time since November of 2010 that dan-bob posted twice in the same week.  Just goes to show you that he's still got excellent writing, analysis and joke-writing skills, but unlike me, actually has other things going on in his life that usually prevent him from exercising those skills here on a regular basis.  I know nobody cares, but since I'm on the topic of real lives of FireJay bloggers, not all that much has changed for any of us since 2007.  Back then we were recent college grads (except for PNoles, who was still in college) living all over the country who didn't have a whole lot of ideas as to what we really wanted to do with our lives.  Now, we are late 20somethings living all over the country in different places than we were back in 2007, still without a whole lot of ideas as to what we really want to do with our lives (except for PNoles, who is the only one among us who has a job that I'm pretty sure he likes and intends to keep for a long time).  Life is good!

----------------------------

Second of all, Jay Mariotti has launched a new website, or is about to launch it, or something.  Fuck if I care to bother knowing the details.  All you need to know about it can be read here, and also, just know that we won't be expending any effort around here towards getting him "fired."  Such effort would be unnecessary, because that new website of his does not constitute a "hiring" of any kind.  He was fired by all of his employers several years ago, remains fired, and may he fuck off and disappear from the public consciousness as soon as possible.

----------------------------

Third of all, I wanted to clarify some comments I made about the Biogenesis mess and its fallout.  The last thing I can afford to do is alienate any of our seven readers, so let me be very clear.  When I said this in the comments section to one of my short posts a few weeks ago:

But it's also kind of too late to undo A-Rod's career, and the mouth-breathing retards clamoring for JUSTICE AGAINST CHEATERZZZ could probably use a reminder that the guy who's pulling out all the stops to nail Rodriguez, including by jumping right over the top of the JDA and going to the CBA to find the sword he wants to use for a JDA-contemplated problem, is the same guy who has himself done tons of harm to the game in years past.

I did not mean to imply that everyone who wants to see users get in trouble is a mouth-breathing retard.  Not at all.  There is plenty of room for disagreement as to what level of outrage towards steroid users is warranted.  I do not harbor much of it (certainly way way less than the average baseball fan), but I do harbor a little of it, and I do want to see the players who get caught under the program agreed to by the league and the MLBPA get the punishments they have coming to them as laid out in the Joint Drug Agreement.  I just happen to think that many baseball fans (or perhaps I should say, many baseball fans who are vocal on the internet--if you've read anything online about the Biogenesis fallout in the last six months you've heard from them, I'm sure) and most baseball writers have a depressingly shortsighted perspective on the whole issue.  They can't seem to think any deeper than GRRRRR CHEATERZZ IS BAD and they think the solution is Draconian punishments like TAKE AWAY THEY'RE CONTRAX AND GIVE DEM LIFETIME BANZZZ, when even those steps will never come close to eradicating usage.  They also are offended at the fact that Braun escaped punishment in 2011/2012 by using the appeals process granted to him in the JDA, and offended at the fact that Rodriguez is using the appeals process granted to him in the JDA to play right now.  The idea of due process and collectively negotiated rights don't mean anything to these people--they just want heads to roll, and they want those heads to roll now.  That is why they are mouth-breathing retards.

I also happen to think that the 200+ game punishment Selig wants to give A-Rod when the JDA lays out very specific rules as to how steroid-using players should be punished, as well as his reported consideration of punishing A-Rod under the CBA instead of the JDA (to prevent A-Rod from playing while the appeal process happens), are both fucking laughable.  What a piece of shit Selig is.  Where does this guy get off?  Steroid use is a practice that the league not only didn't punish, but condoned and indirectly endorsed when big home run totals and the big revenue they led to were a financial life preserver for the league.  Now that Selig is coming to the end of his time as commish, he's going to get TOUGH ON CRIME because he wants to preserve his legacy.  Where was this response in 1998 and 2001, Bud?  What a fucking piece of shit.  I could riff for paragraphs on this complicated subject, but I'll wrap it up by saying that it's not that people who want to see users get punished are idiots for having that desire--it's that many of them (both professional writers and commenters) seem to 1) not be aware of Selig's full legacy as commish, with regard both to steroid use and other problems, and 2) think that the harshest possible response to a infraction is the right one (always beware of people like this, because they are usually fucking idiots).  So go ahead, be glad that the Biogenesis users got caught.  Just don't be the kind of person who lets the fact that Braun and Rodriguez are unlikeable people color your judgment as to whether those players deserve to use the appeals rights given to them in the JDA, and don't be the kind of person who thinks a lifetime ban is a sensible punishment for something that, well, let's just say A LOT of MLB players engage in, and have engaged in for years, often to the benefit of MLB.  The league should take steps to curb steroid usage but LOCK 'EM UP AND THROW AWAY DA KEYS is not one of them.

----------------------------

Fourth of all, before disappearing into Sitonmyassville a couple weeks ago I promised I would take on Simmons's abominable NBA offseason HEY IT'S JUST LIKE AN 80s MOVIE MOST PEOPLE HAVE SEEN ONE OR ZERO TIMES column.  Good news!  I'm still going to do that, since it's not like he's going to write another article anytime soon.  Bad news!  I'm not really starting tonight.  I mean, I'll give you a quick taste.  But I don't have much time to spare right now after slogging through those incoherent ramblings about steroids.

When Alan Sepinwall tweeted about Midnight Run's 25th anniversary two weekends ago, I did a quadruple take. Twenty-five years? How could that be? Top Gun seems like it came out a million years ago. So does The Breakfast Club, so does Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, The Killing Fields, Coming to America, and every other memorable mainstream '80s movie. 

All of those movies seem like they came out during the 80s, which when Midnight Run came out.  Bill is the guy at the party trying to make his inability to perceive something that pretty much everyone can perceive into an interesting conversation.  "Man, can you BELIEVE that gas is like $4 a gallon now?  I just can't even fathom it!"  Bill Simmons is a fucking moron.

Midnight Run? It's an outlier, a timeless classic, our least-dated '80s movie.

Oh my God.

Watching it all these years later, only a couple things feel rusty: The cars, the lack of cell phones, Robert De Niro's cheesy leather jacket, the relentless cigarette smoking and, most strikingly, the fact that anyone could bring guns on airplanes like they were Altoids. Everything else feels fresh. 

So, excepting all of the styles, trends, societal cultural norms, technology and laws that are different, IT HASN'T AGED A DAY.  Basically, it's 100% fresh in the sense that it's a movie about criminals and cops, some of whom are good guys and some of whom are bad guys, and those kinds of movies still get made in 2013.

It's just as funny as it was 25 years ago, the action moves briskly, and the chemistry between De Niro (as bounty hunter Jack Walsh) and Charles Grodin (as the Duke, an on-the-lam accountant who stole $15 million from a mob boss) remains ridiculously good.

Charlees Grodin!  There's an actor who makes you think "This movie definitely isn't from the 80s--gotta be more recent than that, right?"

When I retweeted Sepinwall and added "Is this Moron Number One? Put Moron Number Two on the phone" (one of Dennis Farina's many classic moments), 

"Classic move by me to pick that quote, don't you think?"

my Twitter replies quickly filled with other Farina one-liners. That made me wonder if I'd found the right medium for my annual "Movie Quotes As Awards" breakdown of the NBA's busiest offseason month. Two days later, Farina passed away at 69. Now it had to happen.

Without that inspiration, who knows what flick Bill might have chosen to fill out his unimaginative and pointless "[sports event] is just like [movie]!" template this time around.

Quickly on Farina: I first remember him during Season 1 of Miami Vice, 

DOESN'T IT SEEM LIKE THAT SHOW JUST ENDED????

when he played a wisecracking mob boss named Albert Lombard. By the end of his last episode, you liked him, you feared him, you laughed with him and, strangely, you wanted him to stay alive. (Retroactive spoiler alert: He didn't.) NBC jumped on the momentum by giving him the leading role in Crime Story, an innovative cop drama that never made it. Two years later, he stole every one of his scenes in Midnight Run and could have been nominated for an Oscar, but since Academy Awards voters don't respect or appreciate comedies, astonishingly, nobody from Run got nominated for anything.

I have never seen Midnight Run all the way through, but have seen the whole thing in pieces, and I can promise you that while it's an above average movie its lack of Oscar recognition is about as tragic as Zoolander's lack of Oscar recognition.

At that point, you would have bet anything that Farina was going to become a star 

And he did.

— a funnier James Gandolfini, basically — only it never happened. 

If you think Farina's resume is not that of a star, at least on some level (WHAT LEVEL OF STAR WAS FARINA?  IS JOE FLACCO ELITE?????), you know even less about pop culture than I already thought you didn't.  

That's Hollywood for you. Some people never find the right part, and there's more luck involved than you'd think. 

ONLY I AM ENOUGH OF A HOLLYWOOD INSIDER TO KNOW HOW THESE THINGS WORK!  YOU HAVE NO IDEA!

Once upon a time, David Chase agonized about casting Gandolfini or Michael Rispoli as Tony Soprano. Had Rispoli ended up with that role, there's a good chance we're remembering Gandolfini as the unforgettable bad guy in True Romance and that's it. Farina never landed his Sopranos-like break, but Midnight Run's Jimmy Serrano lives on and on. He's one of the best things in one of the most rewatchable, funny movies ever made. This column is dedicated to him.

Please, no one tell Farina's family about this.

Last note: No movie used more F-bombs more effectively than Midnight Run. As much as it kills me, I'm dashing out all those F-bombs for this column, just because of their sheer volume. 

And because I would never directly admit it, but I'm letting ESPN's desire to make Grantland as mainstream as possible subjugate my editorial authority.

And if you don't like it, I have two words for you.

I HAVE TWO IMPLIED WORDS FOR YOU THAT I WILL NOT BE SAYING DIRECTLY!

Let's check in on this blog's namesake

----Update, written five minutes after I published this- I'm not 100% sure the Mariotti Facebook account is real. There isn't another one out there that suggests otherwise... but some of the stuff on this one is almost too good to be true. Hmmmmmm. Meh, fuck it, does it really matter either way?----

----Double update: dammit, Deadspin is saying it's fake. Well there goes that. I knew it was too good to be true. Even Mariotti isn't stupid enough to suggest that the MLB ASG be played after the whole season is over. Still, I'm shocked that he doesn't appear to have a (public) Facebook profile of his own. Come on Jay, what are you waiting for! You can be a celebrity in your own little world! It's everything you've always wanted!----

When we last left multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Jay Mariotti, he was being fired from everywhere and allegedly hitting his girlfriend in public (and pleading no contest to reduced charges... you know how it goes). On more than one occasion. Fortunately, thanks to Facebook he still has an outlet for the well-crafted pieces of brain poop that occasionally spill out of his head. (Full disclosure, I saw this on Deadspin. But rest assured that I'll be checking his news feed without being tipped off by anyone from now on.)

He always did have a way with clever nicknames. But he dropped the ball a bit here- that's the Blizzard of Stink Face to you, Jay.

Only Jay could be so intentionally contrarian and desperate for attention that he would take a shot at the USWNT when they're at their absolute apex of popularity. Big ups to Russell Paperz for burning Mariotti with the burniest of burnsauce.

Let's do one more. Why not.

1. No.

2. Hey, everyone loves the Pro Bowl, amirite?????!!?!?!?!

Huh. Interesting

Not that we here at FireJay condone domestic violence or anything... but it seems somewhat likely that this will lead to a firing of some kind. So in that sense, and that sense only- hooray!

TMQR post coming up later this weekend.

Time to Rip Off Simmons (even moreso than I normally do)

[Note added after the post was finished: it's pretty long, and there's a link to a charity thing at the end. So if you're one of those people with a short attention span, just go all the way down and check that out.]

In what way will I rip Simmons off this time? I mean, everything I do rips him off in some way, because I'm super jealous of him, a fact which one or two Simmons fanboys are usually quick to remind me of in the comments every time I do a post on him. But THIS TIME I'll rip him off by doing a post that more or less amounts to a mailbag. Before we get there, though, let me provide you with some background/tell all four of you readers something I've wanted to tell you for a long time. In addition to being something I want to get off my chest, it will also give context to the post.

So the very, very brief history of FireJay is as follows: pnoles, Chris W, dan-bob, me, and maybe some other people got together via email and decided to form the blog in May 2007. We later discovered that there was already some blog out there called "Fire John Morgan" which we were allegedly copying, both in terms of format and content. Who knew? I had certainly never heard of them until some mean ol' commenters over here let me know of their existence. Anyways, that's how it all got started.

From then up until August 2008 (when I finally fulfilled my dream of one day studying law), FireJay ate up a lot of my time. I really got into it- tried to post every weekday, or at least three or four out of every five; checked the Google Analytics every single day; tried to get us linked on Deadspin and The Big Lead, even though The Big Lead is a complete and total travesty; frequently checked the email account and responded to anyone who wrote in; engaged in email back-and-forths with real sportswriters like Jeff Pearlman and Jerry Crasnick- yeah, I mean, I was into it. I guess you could say that I really wanted to be part of the BLOGOSPHERE.

In any case, like I said, in August 2008, shit changed. I got a lot busier than I had been, for one thing. I also was maybe a little burnt out on blogging- turns out that at some point, as most members of the BLOGSITES will attest to, it starts feeling less like fun and more like a chore. I know the other writers listed over there on the left sidebar will attest to that. (That's not a passive-aggressive dig at them- they already know I hate them for posting so infrequently.) So yeah, that's kind of how it's worked for the past 22 months or so. Posting has obviously tapered off.

But don't worry, this story doesn't end with "So that's why I'm telling you that we're shutting the blog down." No, not at all. We're going to continue at our current pace pretty much as long as we feel like; a couple shitty posts a week, many of them short. We'll keep half-assedly writing them as long as you keep half-assedly commenting on them! I mean, just because I'm not nearly as excited about doing this as I used to be doesn't mean I should stop doing it entirely. There's still shitty sportswriting out there and I'll be damned if I don't occasionally take a few cheap pot shots at it.

So if the point of the story wasn't to announce that we're shutting down the blog, what was it? Well, of course, part of it was to tell the few of you who are devoted readers and check the blog every day to please keep doing so. We're not going away entirely anytime soon. But the other part (which I really could've just come out and said, rather than taking this roundabout route) is to tell you that until tonight, I had not checked the official, Google sponsored FireJay email account since last August. I shit you not. Kind of crazy. I can't believe they didn't close it, really. But they didn't- and upon logging in, I was met with 5,000 pieces of spam (most of them announcing that we've won a lottery- a disappointingly small number of the "GROW UR DICK 9 INCHES IN A WEEK" variety) and about ten relevant emails.

So tonight, because I am both lazy and super jealous of Bill Simmons, I will write what basically amounts to a mailbag column. I bet maybe two of the people who wrote these emails end up seeing these responses, but that's OK. The rest of you can read anyways. And hey, maybe as a result you'll be inspired to write your own email to firejaymariotti@gmail.com; at this rate, I'll get back to you around April 2011. And awayyyyy we go.

On August 13, some dude who wrote a blog called Fire Rick Reilly (DOESN'T HE KNOW HE'S RIPPING OFF FIRE JAY MARIOTTI?????) checked in to thank us for adding him to our blogroll, which I had promised to do about a month earlier.

Hey Larry,

Thanks for your note. I appreciate you looking at the site and putting me up on your blogroll. Keep writing.

-Tapps

I say "wrote" rather than using the present tense because Fire Rick Reilly hasn't been updated since March 31. And I didn't follow through on that promise then. BUT I WILL NOW. Enjoy, Tapps. Maybe this will inspire you to get back into blogging so you can quit again in a few more months.

On October 6, Dan emailed us about Gene W. You know which Gene W he's referring to.

Please write about his terrible article about the game last night. He says he was raised on the Packers (long before Favre was around) yet he's happier to see Favre win than his favorite team tie up the division and get a key divisional win, not to mention sucking him off for every throw he made when he had all the time he wanted. And despite 2 turnovers, Rodgers still kept them in the game even though his line quit on him and the game changed for good after that 4th down drop. Swap quarterbacks and the Vikings probably win by more.

Apt analysis. Although let's not dump on Aaron Rodgers too much- not only is he a good QB, he also shat all over Tony Kornheiser last week. And anyone who does that is cool in my book.

He is a terrible writer, only using hyperbole and making stars like Favre and Tiger seem invincible, then disappearing or making excuses when they fail (like the Jets season and saying Tiger was absolutely winning the British, then after he missed the cut writing about how it's no big deal, Tiger's reign isn't over). Fuck him

Dan

Welcome to sports journalism, Dan. I assume that in the last 8 months you've become more and more familiar with the "make a bold/outrageous claim- pretend you never made the claim when you end up being totally wrong" phenomenon. You know, that's the one redeeming part about Around the Horn- all those morons call each other out for their dumb predictions since they see each other every day. And that's the last nice thing I'll ever say about Around the Horn. I also want to start ending emails with "Fuck [person place or thing] Larry" with no punctuation. I dig it.

From November 10 (email titled "GREGG EASTERBROOK!!!")-

Since I know you guys will comment on gregg easterbrook; column at some point.

I did.

You could comment on how he doesn't understand ineligible receiver rules.

Unfortunately, I didn't. I mostly bitched about the Crabtree Curse. BEWAAAAAAAAAARE

A couple weeks ago and in this week's coumn he wrote about a screen pass that goes for a touchdown that should be called back because of lineman downfield. But if its a screen pass behind the line of scrimmage it doesn't matter. I just find it funny he's brought this up multiple times. It might even be a weekly thing, I can't stand reading his whole column every week.

Have fun with this weeks TMQ,
Chris.

"It might even be a weekly thing, I can't stand reading his whole column every week" pretty much sums up my thoughts on almost everything Easterbrook writes. Science fiction movies are unrealistic. The team in Friday Night Lights DOES NOT PLAY AN ACCURATE TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL SCHEDULE. There are football gods. Teams that kick field goals when they're down 35-0 with 3 minutes left are doing it because they are desperate to avoid shutouts. Etc. Although I've gotta say I do enjoy when he calls out public officials for spending money on ridiculous bullshit. That 1% of his writing is cool with me.

Fast forward all the way to December 30. James wants us to know that:

Jay has no facts but equates Leach to the torture in Midnight Express.
This joke of a sports expert has no credibility. He works with Craig James, he knows Craig James, thus James' kid can do no wrong.

If I never hear another word about Craig James's silver spoon fed crybaby spoiled child, I won't shed any tears over it. Obviously Mike Leach is insane, and probably did some shit he shouldn't have, but yeah- Craig James can kiss my dick for the way he handled that whole thing. And while I never read Mariotti's take on it, I'm sure that take was a complete and total fucking bullshit.

Maybe trying for some bromance with his colleagues. Ozzie Guillen had it right.

The Blizzard did indeed have it right.

On January 17, a dude without a name sent a link to an amazing article re: why stat nerds know nothing about who belongs in baseball's HOF and who doesn't. I'm not going to post the link because I want to do a full writeup of the article. It's preposterously funny.

The non-spam emails were coming fast and furious at this point. Must be the cold weather keeping people inside, right? Except that blog nerds are ALWAYS inside, which is why they don't know how to talk to girls or what it feels like to go from first to third on a single to right. So I guess that's not an explanation. Anyways, on February 9, Chris (a different Chris than before) wrote in:

Hi.

As a fan of your site, I created my own version of the types of things you're well known for.

I hope you like it.

He attached a Fire____ type breakdown of an article about a Giants Eagles game from 2008. I'm very flattered. It's getting a little dusty in here, honestly. Good to know that as the non-asshole version of Ken Tremendous once inspired me (like... pre-2007 Ken Tremendous), I inspired someone else. The guy has a blog, but it's not a Fire____ blog- just a blog about shit he likes. I think it's kind of cool. He hasn't updated since late April though, so like FireRickReilly, this one's time may have already passed. Check it out anyways. (He didn't put his article breakdown on the blog- just emailed the text.)

Just a few days later, on February 14, Trevor asked us to:

Please please please please please please please do a takedown of Jemele Hill's latest column.

We didn't, unfortunately, but be sure to check out the column anyways. Guess what? It's fucking terrible. And somewhat topical, even four months later.

March brings a few things to the sports world: spring training, March Madness, and NFL draft hype. OK, spring training actually starts in February and NFL draft hype starts in September. But whatever. On March 17, annoyed by all the bullshitting and ridiculous prognosticating about a certain Jesus-loving now-Denver Bronco, Justin sent us a long and thoughtful email. He started by kissing our asses. Sort of.

Dear kind folks at FireJayMariotti,

I enjoy your site immensely, even if there has been a bit of downtime on it lately.

Right. Like I said though, don't give up on us.

Just as well, I haven't been as frequent a visitor as I used to be due to an uptick in things going on, so I completely and implicitly understand, and I'd apologize, I guess, but I'm not sure to what.

Right. Not sure where that sentence was going, but no apology necessary. So then Justin did kind of a cool "guess who said this?" setup and copied and pasted a couple pieces of analysis (analysis in italics) uttered/dictated by ESPN's talking heads without telling us who wrote them until later. The first:

So what I would do with Tebow is take him in the third or fourth round. I would commit to continuing to develop him as a passer and change his mechanics. But I would promise him and the team that he would not step foot on a football field on Sundays for two years. If that can take place in today's NFL, I believe Tebow one day down the road can be a successful quarterback.

And then the second:

I look at Tim Tebow as a football player,

I knew exactly who this commentator was once I read this. And I fucking despise him and his Legoman hair.

and that's one of the highest compliments I could pay a guy. Given the right circumstances and given the time to learn his craft at the NFL level, I don't think there's any question that he could be a successful QB. But here's his value in the first couple of years when he's probably not playing a lot -- he's going to be running a scout team situation and he's going to be making that defense better. They're going to ask him to run the Wildcat quarterback and he's going to be flying around the football field

What kind of field?

giving the defense an unbelievable look. An average Joe fan never sees that.

OK Justin. Take it away.

The first is Trent Dilfer.

Unsurprising.

The second is Mark Schlereth.

I KNEW IT. I FUCKING KNEW IT.

Yes, Tebow needs to be taught things and is a project, but the methodology they provide to make him into a top-flight player is nothing short of a combination between uneducated guessing and nonsensical ramblings.

I am simply astounded these two are continually allowed to appear on television, describing a game they once played (surprisingly) well with the logic and vocabulary of a six-year-old gushing over a toy.

Pretty much par for the course for most draft prospects, but yeah, ol' TT#15 seemed to get the "toy treatment" just a little bit more than the average dude.

Plus, Dilfer looks inbred.

Kaboom!

I doubt this will make it on the site as an entry you tear asunder, but I still felt this travesty should be duly noted. Thank you.

Noted. Well, what Dilfer and Schlereth said eventually made it onto the site. And your analysis made it too! All because I'm too lazy to write my own analysis. Ah, user generated content: the wave of the future. (Did I use that term correctly? I'm really more of a first-wave blogger; all this newer internetty stuff is beyond me.

A guy who will remain nameless, just because I don't want this to somehow pop up and get him in trouble at his job (as a newspaper writer, no less! You know, someone who's part of the OLD media!), wrote in on March 22 to give us a big electronic high five.

I am the editor of a small paper and I'm with you --- I am even emailing you from my work account, cause this guy Mariotti is so shabby (in my opinion). I'm embarrassed by him, I hate his work so very much.

[Name withheld]
Managing Editor
[Vague Midwestern Sounding Location] Times

Ah, if only you and him could switch occupations, kind sir. Interesting use of "shabby"- I think of that as a British-sounding adjective, but it works well for Mariotti too.

March 29 brought a great email- probably my favorite in this bunch. It's from Rick, and he only has one thing to say:

The guy is a joke, fire away.

That's it. That's the whole email. Sounds like you need to start alsofirejaymariotti.blogspot.com. Rick. And you know, you remind me- PNoles really shouldered the Mariotti stuff, and obviously, he doesn't write here anymore. I should make a conscious effort to take on the JayBird more often. PNoles grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I did not, so my personal distaste for him doesn't run as deep. But yeah, I should get on that.

The account was quiet for a couple months, until May 21, when another Chris offered some analysis:

In an article i caught today: http://jay-mariotti.fanhouse.com/2010/05/20/life-isnt-fair-when-nash-cant-win-title/

"The Suns have a problem down low named Amar'e Stoudemire, who is playing like someone who will be fleeing the desert in a few weeks and signing elsewhere. Unwisely, he ridiculed Lamar Odom's 19-point, 19-rebound breakout in Game 1, saying, "I'm not giving him no hype right now...

Can't disagree with Jay's general premise. Stoudemire is a fucking dingbat.

...Stoudemire didn't help the situation by refusing to back down from his comments. "Nah, I'm gonna always be myself,'' he said at a shootaround. "That's just my character. It's just what I was feeling. It's not happening any more. We're going to contain him.'' This garbage came only days after his 54-year-old mother, Carrie Mae Stoudemire, was arrested in Scottsdale for not having an ignition interlock device on her Lincoln Navigator. The device doesn't allow a car to start unless a driver breathes into it and records a legal blood-alcohol level. Stoudemire's mother, who has been arrested several times for charges including drug possession and prostitution, received a three-year prison sentence in 2006 after she was convicted of aggravated DUI following an accident.

Meanwhile, Odom was rolling his eyes about the lucky crack."

Hooooooooo boy. Hoo boy. That Jay- oozing class, as usual. Back to Chris's take on the whole dealio.

Mariotti jabs Amar'e's mother and then just moves on. If he wants to write an article about Amar'e's sad, sad family (2 brothers in jail, a deadbeat mom and non-existent father) then he can write it. Maybe it would bring context to the man's foibles. But I'm trying to figure out what bringing up her arrest had to do with Amar'e's comments. Nice journalism, ass.

So you're saying bringing up something tragic about someone's personal life DOESN'T add context to a discussion of game-related trash talk?

Please let me know if you run this.

I'm running it, because what you said rules. If I wasn't supposed to without clearing it with you, and you want me to take it down, DON'T send us an email about it. I won't get that email. Instead, leave something in the comments. And hey, although I've identified you as Chris, you're the third one I've mentioned in this post. So you kind of blend in.

Finally, just a couple weeks ago on May 29, commenter Fred Trigger wrote in about a worthy cause:

Hey guys, Fred Trigger, as I'm sure you dont recognize the name. Would you mind giving a quick link to friends of the blog Respect Jeters Gangster? They are trying to raise money for the Childrens Health Fund and are trying to get it as much exposure as possible. Here is the link.

http://respectjetersgangster.blogspot.com/2010/05/chf-and-rjg-get-benevolent-for-children.html

Thanks.

No, thank YOU. Everyone click on that. And email it to everyone you've ever met. They're doing a raffle as part of supporting their cause, and the winner gets tickets to a Yankees/Red Sox game in August. Even if you fucking hate both those teams, which I kind of do, you have to admit that seeing a game between them in person would be kind of cool. And even if you don't want to enter the raffle, be a peach and help spread some awareness.

Well, I think this was sufficiently long. A real post, later this week? Maybe. Joe Morgan hasn't seen me post, so he can't say for sure whether I'll post again anytime soon. I might, or I might not. But anything could happen. It's a long season.