Why Nobody Cares About College Baseball

This article, in which Bill Simmons interviews Chuck Klosterman, is pretty good, but the part that really bothered me was when Klosterman asked why nobody cares about college baseball and Simmons gave him an utterly incorrect three-part answer: 1) there are too many games and it’s too hard to follow, 2) goofy “USFL-y” uniforms, and 3) aluminum bats. This is ludicrous. I’ll concede that there are too many games and that it’s too hard to follow, but the uniforms? Come on. If loud, ugly uniforms made something unpopular, the Seattle Seahawks wouldn’t exist, and neither would half the college basketball programs in the country. It’s not like college baseball teams are out there in all-orange hat-jersey-pants combinations like the Clemson football team.

There’s one big reason why college baseball isn’t as popular as the NCAA version of the other two major sports (football and basketball): the makeup of athletes in the pro game. In the NBA and NFL, the college game is the highly visible and direct pipeline to the pros; you can virtually guarantee that the marquee college players will become pro stars within a couple of years (or at least flame out spectacularly on a large scale, a la Gino Torretta or Ryan Leaf).

This could never be said of college baseball because of one big difference. Unlike the NFL or NBA, which are composed almost entirely of guys whose previous athletic experience was in American colleges, a big percentage of MLB is foreign-born now, and even in the pool of American players almost half of them come to the pros straight out of high school instead of college. With football and basketball, you can pretty much say that D-1 athletics are the premier place to play in the world for guys ages 18-22. In baseball the world’s best players are all over the place; some go straight from high school to the minors, some are in college, and some are in the Dominican Republic. It’ll never be the big show, even for kids that age, and THAT’s why college baseball isn’t popular, not the goddamn uniforms or bats.

In conclusion, there is something absurd about Bill “a large part of my livelihood comes from making fun of Tim McCarver and Beverly Hills, 90210” Simmons writing about the worthlessness of people who write endlessly about the media. And did he have to name his Q&A pieces "Curious Guy"? That sounds more homoerotically suggestive than the names of most gay clubs.

Abusive Boyfriend

My girlfriend now writes a blog. Kind of. It could more accurately be described as "a compendium of all the horrible things I have said to her," and will be updated regularly. It's something for her to give the lawyers when that special day comes.

Things My Boyfriend Has Told Me

Things I Hate

I decided to throw something up today in honor of Ramit Sethi (who was apparently a member of my graduating class this summer), who writes the "Things I Hate" blog. Those of you who know me know that the list of things I hate could stretch to the Sun and back, because it could be summed up by saying "the entirety of human behavior," but here's a start.

- When a site has a ridiculously overblown Flash intro that takes too long, and then the site itself is incredibly poorly designed and not at all user-friendly. It's like the Web designers got so caught up in masturbating over their Flash capabilities that it didn't enter their minds that someone might actually be trying to get information from the site in an efficient manner. Guess what: Every single person is going to click "SKIP INTRO" as soon as they can locate it.

- People who try to make casual conversation with you when you are wearing IPod headphones, which are the universal symbol for "don't talk to me."

- People who ask straightforward questions like "Who was president after Teddy Roosevelt?" or something VIA THE INTERNET. THAT IS WHY GOOGLE EXISTS.

- People whose voicemail messages are like 30 seconds long. I know how to leave a message; you don't need to tell me to "leave your name and number at the beep, and I'll get back to you as soon as possible."

- Commercials whose premise involves people behaving in a completely illogical or unbelievable manner, like when an adorable four-year-old child grows concerned over whether his father has life insurance.

- ESPN.com for taking away the "Race" feature on the MLB standings page. The "Race" feature pulls up a graph that tracks the number of games a team is above/below .500 as the year goes on, and is an easily readable summary of a team's winning and losing streaks. I brought this up while talking to my friend Glenn the other night at a bar, who immediately knew exactly what I was talking about and was equally enraged about it, and my girlfriend looked at us like we were crazy. Also, Glenn pointed out that it would be incredibly easy to color-coordinate the graph lines with the teams they represent (say, A's=green and Giants=orange), but ESPN still didn't do it.

- When someone is late and then complains about the traffic/weather/etc. like it's a valid excuse. I know we all run into unexpected situations every once in a while, but if you're going to be late, CALL AND INFORM ME OF IT ONCE YOU KNOW YOU ARE RUNNING BEHIND, not when you're already 20 minutes late and calling to tell me that you're "almost there." That is what cell phones are for.

- People who misuse common phrases, like when they say "It's us against them, mano y mano." It's "mano a mano;" instead of "hand-to-hand" you're actually saying "hand and hand." I'm looking at you, Joe Horn.

- Skip Bayless, for being a contrarian dick and never giving credit to an athlete for any accomplishment, ever; for trying desperately to make every trivial issue into a moralistic debate; and for co-hosting a show with Woody Paige. What makes me the angriest is when he picks an outlandishly moronic position like "Lance Armstrong is the greatest athlete in the history of sports," builds it up like thousands of people are clamoring in support of it, and then argues against it like he's somehow standing against the tide of ignorance.

- Lastly, Paris fucking Hilton. I could literally write a 100-page treatise on why, and how much, I hate her. In a nutshell, she is a blight on the face of humanity and deserves to be crushed into a fine paste and then fed to orphaned puppies. The only thing that makes me angrier than she does is the men who are attracted to her. I know the primary line of reasoning is "Who cares how dumb she is, she's hot!" No. SHE IS NOT THAT ATTRACTIVE. Her face looks like Howard Cosell fucked a cracked-out prostitute, and her chest looks like a ten-year-old boy's. And dude, if the only thing that makes you attracted to her is her omnipresence, then do I have an invention for you: the Internet. I can name 100 hotter actresses, models and pornstars off the top of my head, all of whom have the added benefit of actually getting naked for our viewing pleasure and who probably don't give head like they were shaving down a Popsicle with their teeth.

- Just for good measure: obnoxiously fat people, Us Weekly/People/Cosmo/all those other magazines that make women dumber by the word, MTV, pretty much every celebrity, PETA, McDonald's, bumper stickers, people who hesitate in front of your car in the crosswalk and then cross anyway, guys who wear jeans to the gym, unattractive porn actresses, and smokers.

MLB Power Rankings, 9/20

Here are this week's MLB Power Rankings, as promised. Again, this piece appears in this week's online edition of Barstool Sports.

1) St. Louis Cardinals
The complete package. St. Louis is the only team that can conclusively say they have a playoff spot locked down, and the only team that has been in absolute control of their division from day one. For all the hype surrounding Dontrelle Willis and Roger Clemens, Chris Carpenter should take the NL Cy Young, and the Cardinals' offense is rock-solid. Really, what more is there to say? If the Cardinals were a chick, they'd be the girl who critiques the San Diego Chargers' secondary and then says something like "Deep down, I think all women are a little bit bisexual."

2) Atlanta Braves
A team with all the consistency of the Yankees, except without the persistent hired-gun label and the daytime-soap atmosphere. Far and away the second-best team in the National League, especially since Andruw Jones decided he was the second coming of Barry Bonds. They could still melt down, since they have two big series left against the Marlins and three more games with the Phillies, but count on the experience of playoff vets like Smoltz, Chipper Jones, and Hudson to carry them. And as for the guys you hadn't heard of before July, someone should write a book about John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox. Jorge Sosa? Jeff Francoeur? Ryan Langerhans? There's still that little matter of closing the deal and getting a ring, though. If everyone forgot that Cox beat his wife (a 1995 battery charge for punching her) as fast as the media apparently did, he'd get even MORE respect for that one Series title back in 1995. That 31-35 road record might start to cause problems if they have to play at St. Louis in the NLCS, though.

3) Cleveland Indians
It would be easy to get too excited about the Indians, since they're two bad days away from not making the playoffs. Still, it's tough to discount a team that has won 12 of its last 13 games. There are some positives here and some negatives. Positives: 1) Cleveland has seven more games against the Royals and three more against the Devil Rays. All things considered, both of those teams put together couldn't take three of seven from a playoff-caliber team, unless it was the Devil Rays and they were playing the Yankees in Tampa. 2) Even if the Indians don't make the playoffs they have an amazing stockpile of young players. And hey, if they flame out Cleveland fans can always fall back on the success of the Browns and Cavaliers, right? Negatives: 1) Bob Wickman is one beer-battered chicken wing away from having a massive heart attack on the mound in the middle of a game. 2) They play in Cleveland.

4) Boston Red Sox
I'm sure I'll get a slew of hate mail for not putting the Red Sox first, since they are, according to any human being or media outlet in a 100-mile radius, the end-all-be-all of American sports - hell, they are the singular defining metaphor for the human condition. However, if Gabe Kapler's done for the year, that means less speed and defense off the bench, and having at least two reliable bench guys is HUGE in the playoffs. Kapler also filled the gaping hole in the hustle quota that Manny Ramirez leaves on the field every night. Also, this may be an unfair reason to drop the Sox down to the four hole, but if one more ad for the DVD of "Fever Pitch" invades my ESPN viewing experience I'm going to personally drive to New York and tear out Jimmy "I interrupt every sketch I've ever been involved in with my Japanese-schoolgirl giggling" Fallon's vas deferens.

5) Chicago White Sox
Much as it pains me to leave my beloved Angels (or Giants, but I'm a reasonable man) off this list, they don't deserve it. When you get swept by the last-place Mariners for the SECOND time in a season, you may as well start making offseason plans. So, on to the White Sox: You have some damage control to do when your most consistent pitcher is Jose Contreras. Reading the last part of that sentence is like waking up next year and hearing "And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to... Pauly Shore!" The White Sox will probably still hang on to their rapidly-dwindling lead in the Central, but don't expect a World Series in Comiskey just yet. An unbreakable rule: Speed and defense will make sportscasters masturbate furiously over your accomplishments, but if you want to win a championship, buy yourself some arms and sticks. Personally, I like seeing history happen, so I wouldn't mind seeing the greatest collapse in baseball history come to fruition if the Indians catch them, followed by Ozzie Guillen getting capped in Hyde Park. And no, that's not just because it would eclipse the 1995 Angels' epic implosion.

Also, kudos to the Padres for beating out the 1993 Giants in the race for "most convincing argument for the existence of wild-card playoff teams." The 1993 Giants could probably STILL beat the Padres in a five-game series even though Billy Swift and John Burkett are probably making a living through motivational speaking or appearing at sports memorabilia conventions right now.

Red Sox fans are getting old

Real fast thoughts:

I got to a Red Sox-A's game at Fenway last night with two friends. I also wore an A's hat, mostly because I like the A's, but in part just to be a regionally contrarian asshole. Apparently the relationship between Sox fans and fans of opposing AL teams that are not the Yankees can be summed up as the following: "Well, I guess you have a right to root for a team that's from your hometown, but why would you want to, since the Red Sox are the absolute pinnacle of the sporting experience and - in case you hadn't heard - a perfect analogy for the futility and, ultimately, redemption of the human struggle?" And if you're a fan of an NL team they treat you like you said you have WNBA season tickets. The game itself was pretty tight; Bronson Arroyo had a no-hitter going through five but the A's lost 2-1.

Things I hate that happen regularly at Fenway Park:
-When everyone in the park jumps to their feet and screams every time any Red Sox hitter hits a ball in the air, anywhere. A routine fly ball to center field warrants a cheer that could drown out a rocket launch, and God help you if the outfielder has to take a step or two back. It does produce a pleasing sound when the ball is caught and the fans abruptly realize that they have no ability to judge distance: AAAHHHHHHHHH-AAAAAAWWWWWWwwww.
-When fans boo and scream things like "PUSSIES!" at a completely appropriate move by the other team, like intentionally walking Manny Ramirez with a runner on second and two out to get to Trot Nixon. Maybe they should be calling Nixon a pussy for sucking so tremendously against lefthanded pitching.
-When people try to start the Wave and then actively cheer its progress. Apparently the eighth inning of a one-run game between two teams fighting for playoff spots at the end of September is not enough to keep your attention. What the fuck? Did I mistakenly attend an arena football game in Wichita?

And wow, the South must be feeling great right about now. Hurricane Rita now has a projected path that goes through South Beach in Miami, South Florida, and right across the rest of the Gulf Coast into Houston, where it will probably complete the unprecedented Homo-Holo-Afrocaust. Say what you will about God, but He is persistent.

As for tonight, there are two pro football games on, the season premiere of Arrested Development, and an episode of Prison Break. I wash myself with a rag on a stick.

I now write the MLB Power Rankings for Barstool Sports. I'll post them tomorrow.

Fuck you, Quentin Jammer

In case you missed it, the Chargers lost yesterday to the Cowboys 28-24, largely thanks to three incredibly painful defensive penalties during the second half, all of them taking place on third down. If I were Jamal Williams right now I'd be taking a fat dump in Quentin Jammer's locker. The Chargers' D-line did an outstanding job of containing Julius Jones in the second half, and the secondary let them down hard.

It goes without saying that I fucking hate the Cowboys and their legion of hick-ass, stonewashed-jeans, "America's-Team," I-wear-my-1998-Troy-Aikman-jersey-to-bars fans. Why? Because I am a rational American male not from Texas. So watching them drag Drew Bledsoe, who at this point in his career is less maneuverable than a Standee(TM) of himself, into Qualcomm and walk out with a win makes me want to tear out my eyeballs and mail them to Marty Schottenheimer with the attached message "I don't want these anymore, thanks."

Nothing is more frustrating to me than defensive penalties, particularly in the secondary. Quentin Jammer has had two years to learn the new five-yard bump rule and he still CONSISTENTLY jams guys well outside the free-contact zone. The blatant pass-interference violations that DBs commit never cease to amaze me, because it's not like they ever get overlooked. If you're an offensive lineman and you hold, there's at least a chance that your jersey grab is going to get lost in the shuffle of bodies around the line of scrimmage. But there is an official assigned to every receiver now watching specifically for pass-interference calls. So Q, when you can't stop yourself from getting slapped with two huge (and obvious) PI penalties on third-and-long that end up prolonging drives for the Cowboys you might want to start looking for another job.

Jammer led the league in pass-interference calls last year, picked up a big one in the playoff game against the Jets last year, and now this. If it took me that long to learn things, I wouldn't have a job. Oh, right.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and one other thing: this morning on "Cold Pizza" Woody Paige misspelled "steroids" as "steriods" on a sheet he had printed up before the show. Two things:
1) Kudos, Woody. You were off the charts before, but now you have proven without a doubt that you are functionally retarded.
2) HOW DO PEOPLE CONTINUE TO MISSPELL "STEROIDS?" THE WORD APPEARS ON ESPN PROBABLY 100 TIMES PER DAY AND IS SPELLED PHONETICALLY.
3) I was talking to my friend Noah about a similar incident the other day. An ESPN college football writer - whose only job is to cover college football- misspelled the name of Matt Leinart, perhaps the most recognizable college football player in the nation, multiple times in his column. Noah said something that is appropriate here: "If other people's professional incompetence bothers you, you will go insane."

Jarhead

Jarhead (November 2005)

"I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self; lovers to whom I lied; lovers who lied to me. I remember going in one end and coming out the other. I remember being told I must remember and then for many years forgetting."

Everyone needs to go see this movie. It's based on the book of the same name by Anthony Swofford, a US Marine STA scout sniper during the first Gulf War. It's hard to tell much from the trailer, but based on the casting and the snippets I can recognize, it will be excellent. Better yet, read the book, THEN go see the movie.

The only thing I'm worried about is that it may become too much of a "military" movie, because the book runs even deeper than that. It would take away from the book to say that it is about anything less than what it means to be a man, because there's so much about fear and violence and America and relationships and insecurity that comes through in a lot of Swofford's writing about his family back home in Sacramento.

I read Jarhead for the first time in college, and within 20 minutes of starting it I could tell that it would be one of the best pieces of writing I had ever picked up. That book alone is responsible for a good portion of my desire to write, and it exposed to me how brutally different my life would have been had I followed up on any of the thoughts I had about joining the Marines after high school. To me, with the exception of Hunter S. Thompson and a couple of others, there was always a very bright line between people who lived and people who wrote about it, and Swofford is one of the few guys who managed to live something interesting and important and write about it in a way that is brutally honest and skillful at the same time. It is clearly the definitive book about war for our time, and should be on the recommended reading list for every American male from the ages of 17 to 25.

On an unrelated note, the new Burger King "NFL Films" commercial makes me crack up every time I see it. Clearly, I am a complex man - one full of contradictions. And Chinese food.

News

Since I don't have a job right this second (and when I do get one it will, in all likelihood, be something that makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a rusty fork) I need something else to do to be creative. Over the next six months or so, this is probably going to take the form of writing a book about growing up in Orange County during its explosion to MTV prominence in the late 90's. I already have a lot of stuff built up from things I wrote in college that I'm going to be putting together, but there's still a lot to be done. I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't fly, but as it comes together, I'm going to throw stuff up here and see what sticks.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I Was Wrong

I'll say it: I was wrong.

When I wrote that Bill Simmons sucked a couple of months ago, I was mistaken. Well, not entirely. Some of his pieces still don't silence people who have labeled him the "Pop Culture Guy," and he has an unfortunate tendency to fall back on Bill Cosby-esque "life's little foibles" humor at times.

But despite anything I could have said about Simmons, it is impossible to dispute that he's at the top of the world right now. There is nobody who does what he does better. I mean that as a compliment, because he's earned the spot he's in today, but it's also a jab - because there is virtually no good sports or humor content on the Internet, and he has no competition.

Remember when the Internet was brand new, and people who were on the cutting edge were predicting a complete overhaul of the way we get entertaining content? These were the same guys who were saying that books and TV would be obsolete by 2010, and that on-demand television and movies through the Web were the wave of the future. The most obvious thing that was going to change, though, was the writing. Young, funny, intelligent people who simply hadn't fit in with traditional media were finally going to have a voice. Nothing was stopping them, and the elder statesmen of the sports media empire were going to come crashing down. You could almost smell the first terrified squirts of urine coming from guys like Dan Shaugnessy and Woody Paige.

Since then, two things have happened because of the Internet:
1) There is now more free porn than you could consume if you masturbated nonstop until the Earth crashes into the Sun.
2) Virtually nothing has changed about the way we read opinions on sports or get entertainment.
To some extent, what the prophets said was true; more and more Americans are getting their news from the Internet. But when it comes to entertainment - particularly having to do with sports and humor - the Web is lagging. For all the vastness of the Web, there is shockingly little really good available stuff, and Simmons has become the one guy who has really capitalized well on that failed revolution.

This column is more about the current state of American sportswriting than it is about Bill Simmons, though. The sort of traditional, literary writing that appears in the annual edition of "The Best American Sports Writing" is, sadly, almost dead. You know what I'm talking about - the pieces you find every four or five months in Sports Illustrated that feel more like short stories than sports columns. But what's there to take their place? ESPN.com has tried to pick up the torch and take it in a new direction, but it's not enough.

There are reasons for this. For one, because of the low barriers to entry on the Net, sportswriters who actually have something intelligent to say tend to put their stuff elsewhere because they don't want it to drown in the sea of messageboard "DETRIOT RULEZ!!!!!11" suckiness. Still, we haven't seen that promised increase in really funny, insightful sports opinions. More competition should mean better quality, but outside of "Pardon the Interruption," sports coverage is still fundamentally the same as it was 10 years ago. The fact that people like Skip Bayless still have jobs is a testament to that.

Because of all this, Simmons occupies a unique place in our culture - he's got a distinctive writing style and he can turn a funny phrase once in a while, so he became king. He is, by any accounts, a good writer, probably one of the best on the Internet. But he also represents something disturbing, because he's the ONLy person who does his job. Think about it. Should it REALLY have taken until last week for someone to write a well-reasoned and widely available argument that the WNBA shouldn't exist?

If anything, the army of regular Joes should congratulate Simmons on his achievements, not because he represents us, but because he is, for lack of a better word, the benchmark. There's a long way to go, though. There is a void out there for at least one guy - a guy who doesn't have to deal with the constant censorship that Simmons faces, a guy who has a broader range of personal experiences, a guy who can set a new bar for writing on the Internet, whether it's about sports or not.

As we hit the 15th birthday (or so) of the online age, we're still waiting for someone else to really break the mold, but I'm still not sold. It's entirely possible that Bill Simmons might ride off into the sunset uncontested as the definitive Internet writer of our generation, and if he does, more power to him. But I know too many people who love sports and can write too well to let this happen. Do I think that someone can pull it off? Probably not, but like I said earlier, I was wrong. I'd like to be wrong again.