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The fact that Simers is an obnoxious prick isn't his own fault! It's Juan Pierre's, or Andruw Jones', or Jeff Kent's, or...
He's still labeling DePodesta?
And this an actual sentence, penned by an actual professional writer. The mind reels.
Pretty sporting of Simers to kick Juan Pierre while he's down. Repeatedly. With gratuitous pot shots thrown in for good measure. Nice work.
You're saying you'd like more time to write down the inane things you have to say?
Sure, it's like choosing death by hanging or death by strangulation, but I think I would lean towards starting Pierre over Jones at this point. Perhaps someday St. Colletti will actually take criticism from the MSM-type for having tens of millions tied up in two CFs with declining skills, who 29 other teams wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole unless LA picked up all of the remaining contract.
He seems like a good guy so he's easy to root for. It's not his fault he's become fodder in the stathead vs. MLB institutional duderheadedness war. He has a cool name, too. He should play for the Pirates.
I was completely unaware of Simers until about a year and a half ago when his articles starting getting posted here, and basically unaware until the first of these type of articles was posted, and I couldn't believe that a professional writer would do this. In the last year, I've seen that these articles come out *at least* once a month from him. Articles where he baits a player by being a dick and insults them if they respond or if they just walk away.
I still can't believe that any newspaper puts up with this. I also can't believe he hasn't been decked by someone. In The Worst Team Money Could Buy, Klapisch and Harper both write about worrying about a player's reaction to stuff that isn't 1/20th of what Simers does.
You know what else would be nice? If Gio Gonzalez were decapitated in a train wreck.
A: Nothing.
Vlad, baseball has made you bitter and frightening. I just meant he has a cool pirate name. Juan Pierre should be a captain of a privateer, terrorizing Spanish galleons anywhere a breeze blows across the West Indian seas. Arrrrgh.
Damn straight. Whenever I ride on the bus, I make faces at the little children, just to watch them cry. And last week, I peed in an unattended soda at Burger King.
A: Nothing.
Nice flawed analogy. When Primates start getting paid to be professional journalists for what we write here, then you can use that one. Until then, nice try and next time defend someone worth defending and not a dick like Simers.
I don't hate on him for being snarky. Neyer can be very snarky, I like Rob's writing. Ditto a dozen other guys. I hate on Simers because he gets into people's faces and is actively an ####### to them for the sole purpose of writing about their reaction to him being an #######. And at the very least subconsciously, he's using the fact that players will do everything they can not to hit a member of the media to perpetrate these shenanigans, which is cowardly.
Albert Belle allegedly throwing the baseball at the SI reporter?
It's not baseball, but the first clip in this reel jumped to my mind.
simers is a real tool, no doubt. but at least he's picking the right targets: jones, colletti, mccourt. if pierre catches some of it, that's a shame, but i'm not too worried. the guy is raking in a lot of money to be a slap hitting outmaker.
also, simers doesn't look so bad when you consider the other baseball columnist at the LATimes is plaschke. ick.
It was because he was calling him Chrissy, and he threw aside the table between them, but I don't think he actually knocked down Rome.
That's because Rome slipped on the puddle of urine running down his leg and so fell all by himself.
:-)
Link
Naw. Your report was factual whereas I mostly made mine up. Rome is dooshy, but in his defense, Everett's performance against S.F. in the NFC Championship game was probably the most cowardly I've ever seen from an NFl quarterback.
What did Rome have to be scared off? Everett was likely to fall to the ground to avoid a hit that was never going to come.
I think this is reversed now. He's CHB, sometimes referred to as Dan Shaughnessy by the same people who insist on calling wiener dogs dachshunds.
CHB has written good articles? Do we just not link to those here?
Well, it's one thing to say that the guy isn't a very good ballplayer and doesn't deserve to be paid what he is paid, and shouldn't be playing very much. It's another thing to question his character because he told the truth in a situation where he might have done better by his team if he had dodged the question instead of telling the truth or lying.
No it's not.
i don't recall questioning pierre's character. all i said was he makes a lot of money even though he isn't that good. i've heard he's a nice guy, good teammate. that's cool; i still don't like him as a player.
sitting pierre and jones would solve a lot of L.A.'s problems. unfortunately, andruw jones actually hit a home run last night, so torre will prob. give him another month of playing time to find his stroke.
I didn't mean you. I meant Simers.
That is silly, the professional status of the writer shouldn't affect the criteria we judge his work by.
Crap is crap. Funny is funny.
But Simmers sure has:
I've known Pierre since he was a kid playing college ball in Mobile. He was a really good guy then. From all that I've read and from someone I know who knows him well (his college coach had survived coaching me in high school and still received the promotion) he still is. Sure he can't take a walk, hit the ball out of the infield, or throw the ball across my living room. But his comments are not anywhere near the whining that Simmers and others have characterized it as. He tries hard and wants an opportunity to succeed, but isn't stating anything remotely like "if I'm not startin' I'm not departin'" or causing any clubhouse dissention. He should be applauded for the attitude and criticized for the performance. But for years, he was applauded for the performance and is now getting dumped on for the attitude.
oh ... i thought this thread was all about me all the time.
:-)
Well, a few years ago, he was legitimately a good major leaguer. The only times he's ever has a stolen base percentage less than 75% were his rookie year when he was 7 for 13, and 2004 when he was 45 for 69, but also hit .326. He's always been an excellent baserunner in the non-stolen base parts of the game, and has always played as good defense as someone with a wet noodle throwing arm can have. For a few years, his on base percentages were better than average, and they've always been less bad than his slugging percentages. He's a rare example of a guy who's a lot better than his OPS+. Even if he was never deserving of the MVP votes he got, he was still a pretty good player in 2003 and 2004, especially.
I heard once that the fight was staged. I haven't been able to confirm that, though. Wikipedia says that it has "been questioned if that fight had been staged, as Everett never hit or punched Rome."
Crap is crap. Funny is funny.
The real difference is that snarky comments made on a stat-geek blogsite are seen by far fewer people, and have far less impact, than material written for a daily newspaper with a circulation of at least sixty or seventy thousand. [800,000? You're kidding!]
The only people like to read our comments and be personally offended -- aside from unusual cases like the kith and kin of the young man whose suicide may [or may not] have been related to steroids -- are the writers who we excoriate. And they generally have fairly thick skin and a means to respond (never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrell).
But Simers knows his comments are going to reach Juan Pierre, his teammate, his bosses and his family. That does make unnecessarily mean-spirited cruelty and assholery much more inexcusable.
Yeah, and Simers is crap, not funny.
I find this to be a weak excuse. If a comment is mean-spirited, the size of the audience is immaterial to me. If it's dickish for a Marriotti or Plaschke to say something, then it's equally dickish for us (though I suppose your view allows us to maintain our sense of moral superiority over those A$$holes in the mainstream media).
To me, what differentiates Simers from just about everyone is that through his actions, he tries to goad players into saying asinine things or responding badly. That's not snark. That's Boratism.
I realize that that was a very recent column and thus fresher in your mind. (And that you didn't exactly sing its glories from Mount Olympus, either.) But it's just a laundry list of "Manny was a great hitter, but he was flaky, but he made All-Star teams, but he shoved the traveling secretary, but we loved him, but lately we didn't love him so much." It offers no detail or insight that a competent Wikipedia article couldn't tick off just as well. The sportswriting equivalent of "Chocolate: So Delicious, Yet Bad For Your Hips." Could there be a single Boston Globe reader who didn't already know every word of it?
Then why do you even bother firing up the internet, since mean-spiritedness is the stock in trade there?
I can live with it. I just don't pretend that our mean-spiritedness comments are made of marshmallows and kittens while T.J.'s are filled with barbed wire and razor blades.
Sort of the difference between your wife making a catty remark to you about one of her girlfriends, which she knows you won't repeat because, even in the off chance that you might have been listening, you don't care, you won't remember, and you would never repeat it anyway; and her making the same comment to a group of their common friends, which she knows is going to get back to her.
The former is little more than venting (which is really a lot of what we do here); the latter is a passive-aggressive attack.
Kenny Rogers has good PR people - I can't believe no one mentioned him yet.
Sorry, I don't see it that way. We come here to share our thoughts and opinions and snark with whomever will read it, and we don't give a second's thought to whether it will offend anyone.
We don't occupy some higher ground, no matter how we may want to rationalize it.
Does anyone read Simers for enjoyment or is it actually designed to be snarky message-board fodder? He's so incredibly god-awful it's hard to imagine somebody sitting at their kitchen table and thumbing through the Sports section to see what that idiot has to say three mornings a week.
I'm not so much defending Shaughnessy the analyst, as Shaughnessy the writer. That article was well-put together, I thought. I agree it didn't have any brilliant insights or anything, but it was a nice wrap-up of the Manny era. When he has legitimate insights, they are usually of the nasty variety. And he is undeniably talented at pushing people's buttons. The main point I was trying to make about him is that he's not a two-bit hack trying to wind people up -- he's a skilled professional trying to wind people up.
Shredder says that he does, so there's at least one guy.
Egg-zactly. And exactly what I meant in 19, only said more concisely.
And Boratism is a little generous to Simers. If the people Cohen was mocking were as aware of it (as opposed to thinking it the result of some sort of misunderstanding, cultural or otherwise) as the people Simers is mocking, he wouldn't have made it out of that rodeo without at least some nasty bruises.
I agree with SoSH -- there is little difference. Simers' schtick is just the comments from the thread the other day amplified, the attitude always being that millionaires have their millions to console them for a little rough treatment at the hands of Simers. I guess I like Simers because he's NOT playing the pr game played by almost every other sports 'journalist'. He's no real writer, and not pretending to be, and certainly not blowing smoke up athlete's asses and pretending he's a newspaper reporter.
I've always tried to figure out the tremendous hostility to Simers. Got a job we'd all like to have and seems ungrateful to be in that position? Pokes holes in our unacknowledged childish hero worship? Just does not in any way fit what we expect of a sports columnist?
None of those quite work, but it is strange we accept smackdowns of almost every other celebrity in the media, enjoy things like the Colbert Report and anything snarky aimed at their pretensions, and quite enjoy it on a day-to-day basis at BBTF. One response is that Simers isn't very good at it, but that's not enough to inspire hate. Maybe he's just too obvious, too blunt in the attack.
Anyway, the Rome clip gave me a great laugh. I don't like Rome, but you have to respect that he was willing to be pummeled instead of backing down when face-to-face with someone who could have left him in a nursing home for life. I'd pay to see pro athletes do the same to all of our favorite targets in the media. Who wouldn't like to see Lupica or Mariotti go flying, not to mention beatdowns of Limbaugh and O'Reilly?
One key difference between internet snark and Simers' snark is that what we write goes out immediately - and if it's edited at all, needs to be done within minutes. Simers has ample opportunity to rewrite and edit - and as a professional, he has an obligation to put out his best stuff, including rewrites of his one column a day. As internet posters, we do not have the same obligation or opportunity to rethink what we write. Undoubtedly, there are some posters who are arschlochs even with these caveats, but most of the snark here is qualitatively different than what Simers is doing.
Like others, i find it hypocritical at best, that many people have zero problems participating in the daily snark here or other places, but rail on Simers every time one of his works of art finds its way to primer.
If Simers would have come through the ranks as a blogger, like for say deadspin, FJM, or something similar, you would all probably be drooling over his every adjective.
just saying.
That's BS. Please cite any blogger or former blogger who insults people to their face or even in an article who is predominantly defended here for their insults.
The truth is - people do post snark here. But either it's defensible snark, or it gets attacked in turn. So don't act like Simers is being attacked for being part of the MSM, instead of his being attacked for his own reasons.
FJM has plenty of supporters here. But I guess that's OK, since their target is the media itself.
If you want to rationalize mean-spirited cheap shots based on the size of our audience or the likelihood of the target reading it or the time crunch we're under, go right ahead. But in my view, we (excluding those posters who refrain from such conduct) can't really stake some moral high ground when most of us, myself included, routinely engage in similar behavior.
I haven't always followed that advice, but I really do try. It's good advice.
I actively hate Simers, FJM and am ambivalent to just about anything produced by Deadspin. I rule!
If anything the comp between Simers and FJM is fairly accurate in that they both peddle lowest common denominator insults and vitriol in an attempt to portray themselves as being smarter than the people that they deign to cover in their writing.
It's not that the occasional razor-tipped barb has no place in writing, in columns or in blogs, but that they're a weapon best reserved for unique situations. Too, people that devote their writing to tearing others down rather than building people and ideas up are, quite frankly, not worth my time.
To say that Simers "mixes it up with the ballplayers" in the locker room is like saying saying I "mix it up" with bears when I throw sopapillas at them at the zoo.
Simers wants nothing more than for an athlete to take a shot at him with the press and cameras all around. There would be dozens of people there to break it up immediately not to mention the fact that it would put his face on Sportscenter for a month and give him column fodder for years.
If T.J. Simers walked into an empty dive bar with no one else around except for Andruw Jones, do you really think he would walk right up to Jones, call him a fat ass and tell him to get on a scale?
To say that he wants nothing more than to be smacked around by a ballplayer is flat out wrong. He has mixed it with Jeff Kent many times, yet Kent, and others, have no problems helping out with Simers charity's.
Is he blackmailing them too?
And it would be a little odd walking into a bar, and asking anybody to get on scale, don't you think.
Basically, we have a guy who loves to play baseball who's been put into a situation where he's under contract for three more years with a team that has decided that he's not good enough to play everyday for them (or at least that was what he thought before Torre's announcements). It's not really like his skills have deteriorated since he arrived in LA, either. If they thought they were getting anything other than a .280 hitter who doesn't walk or hit for power, has great range in the field, but can't throw, and excels in all aspects of baserunning, then they fooled themselves. For him, when asked directly, to express some frustration with his personal situation, while admitting this might be best for the team is, in my opinion, very mature. I expect this sort of reaction from the Boston/New York/Philly press, but seeing it in LA is a change for the worse.
Being a jerk and then writing about it can be entertaining. Hunter Thompson was great at it. But not all jerks are implicitly fountains of wit and wisdom. Some are just jerks.
I am genuinely curious about this.
nevermind, the chances of you finding any humor here, was probably a waste of time.
move along, nothing to see here.
Thanks for responding.
I know it's always kind of hard to talk about humor without killing it, but what about that particular passage did you find funny, and why?
as i said to each their own.
Why would the guys at FJM be afraid of a locker room? The pressbox is where they're more likey to get their asses kicked.
Red Juice, are you Simers? C'mon, admit it!
Oh, absolutely. I'm just trying to get a feel for what the people who like Simers like about him, because it's totally non-intuitive to me. A fair percentage of the time, not only do I not find him funny, I can't even tell what parts are supposed to BE funny.
Having been in press boxes, that would have to qualify as one of the most embarassing beatdowns ever.
There's a world of difference between snarking on people based on what they do or say, and actively goading people who have no recourse, THEN ripping on their responses in a major newspaper.
Juan Pierre isn't a good player, but it's not like he was a 150 OPS+ guy before he came to L.A. He's pretty much the same player he's always been... why is it his fault a GM was stupid enough to give him a fat contract?
well actually they may have.
BPro has Pierre being exactly the same player from 2005 through 2008.
I have him in continuous decline from 2005-2008
Classic!
this is Leno type stuff.
this is Leno type stuff.
Are you sure you're not Simers? A relative? Some kind of dependent?
link
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