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Sports
November 14, 2007
Why Don't Major League Players Die?
Despite the recent and high-profile deaths of Corey Lidle and Josh Hancock, being an active Major League Baseball player is one of the best ways to protect yourself from the reaper. You're around three times less likely to die than someone else your age. While the rest of the 20- to 35-year-old American population keels over at a rate of 0.09% per year, baseball players only die at a rate of 0.03% per year. In fact, only seven out of more than 20,000 active players have died since Yankees catcher Thurman Munson crashed his plane in 1979.
Media
November 6, 2007
Hurting for Material
By mid-football season, most of the great editorial fodder about a team has already been used up. Instead, sports journalists on deadline must scrape together whatever scraps they've got left over into something resembling a column for their readers. Sometimes, they can pull it off; other times, their efforts turn into monstrosities containing the stilted prose of high-school valedictories, out-of-context references to current events, and cloying references to long-past family tragedies. Here are three of our favorite column openings from this week:
Sports
October 25, 2007
I Wanna Jam It With You
Stu Scott's recent experiment in SportsCenter poetry jamming ("Superstars without a ring/that is the thing that binds them") was called "what absolute bottom for SportsCenter looks and sounds like" by the blog Mister Irrelevant. Gelf thinks Who's Now gave it some pretty strong competition. Nonetheless, we agree that it was ridiculous, and badly written. Prof. Grant Farred—Gelf's resident expert on ESPN and language—has, shall we say, a different take:
Sports
October 22, 2007
Taking Baseball's Eccentrics Off The Field
After watching Indians pitcher Rafael Betancourt take an incredibly long time between pitches in Game 7 of the Indians-Red Sox series, Gelf couldn't help but wonder if that kind of hesitation carried over into his everyday activities. Does he signal three minutes before changing lanes? Can he finish a bowl of soup before it gets cold? Betancourt isn’t the only oddball player out there; Gelf pictures how some of the other quirks of notable players and teams from this year's playoffs might affect them off the field:
Media
October 16, 2007
Getting Ready for Prime Time
Now that the New York Times has gotten rid of its pay-per-view service TimesSelect, readers are free to check out the musings of the Gray Lady's opinion writers. It should be great for them; after two years of being blocked from the majority of their potential readership, columnists like Maureen Dowd are once again at the top of the Times's most emailed list. There's one unintended effect, though: Writers who were able to skate by when they had limited readership now have their drivel exposed to the masses.
Sports
October 8, 2007
At Least They Weren't Playing the Nats
Because a baseball season is so long, covering the games can become an exercise in repetition. So when something truly extraordinary happens, many sportswriters and headline editors just can't stop themselves from making excited puns and metaphors. When New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain was swarmed by a freak infestation of insects and allowed the tying run against the Cleveland Indians, the sports press rushed to their keyboards like moths to a flame in order to record with the best bug line they could find. Here's what they came up with:
Sports
October 1, 2007
When the Mets Died With Their Boots On
With the Mets playoff drive imploding in spectacular, historic fashion, Gelf knew that there was only one man who could fittingly capture this dramatic—nay, epic turn of events. Mets.com beat writer Marty Noble has been featured in this space before for his over-the-top recaps of Mets games this season. He always brings a mix of enthusiasm and cliché to his writing so potent that Gelf wondered if he would be able to raise his game to match the current occasion. As always, Marty didn't disappoint.
Sports
September 17, 2007
Gaining Perspective on Oden
One of the old standbys in the sports columnist's arsenal is to occasionally step back from courtside and proclaim that the sporting world needs to be put in perspective. In the wakes of 9/11 and Katrina, for example, journalists tried to outshout each other while declaring how trivial the baseball playoff races and the upcoming football seasons were. But Oregonian writer John Canzano has taken what was a shaky premise to begin with—assuming your readers are too dumb to know the difference between sports and real life—and has totally outdone his peers.
Sports
August 31, 2007
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi
Fox Sports…oops, ESPN, mistook the home of the Rebels, Archie Manning, and self-important tailgate parties for the home of the Bulldogs, Sylvester Croom, and, once, John Grisham. In last night's LSU-Mississippi State game, the network showed the usual ads touting each school, only it ran the Ole Miss ad, complete with Faulkner references, instead of the one for MSU.
Sports
August 30, 2007
What's OK to Say?
For sports columnists, the line between edgy and offensive seems to move all the time. It can cost you part of your livelihood if you point out—as Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist Paul Zeise did on KDKA-TV's Sports Showdown—that "It's really a sad day in this country when somehow … Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman if you look at the outcry of what happened." For that supposed offense, he had to issue an apology and will no longer be invited back on the show.
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