ESPN looks up, finds nadir

In a piece for ESPN the Magazine on Barry Bonds, Bill Simmons drops this little boy in an aside:

the Smithsonian doesn't ignore nadirs in this country's history like slavery, Hiroshima or Vanilla Ice.

Cheers for using the word “nadir.” I would have guessed that no ESPN writers even knew what the world meant, much less that they could correctly use it in a sentence.

Jeers for his choice of nadirs beyond slavery. Did none of the editors (if there are any) at ESPN.com think to point out that maybe Hiroshima was not considered by a plurality of Americans to be a nadir? Or is this groupthing at its finest? 200+ years, and he comes up with Hiroshima?

If he wanted a bombing, couldn’t he have at least picked Nagasaki? As the descendant of someone who fought in the Pacific in World War 2, I’m kind of glad that we didn’t lose hundreds of thousands more soldiers in the island hopping campaign, perhaps including my grandfather, which perhaps means I wouldn’t have been born.

And Vanilla Ice? He broke the rap color barrier and allowed white rappers to flourish, like Eminem and, uh, all those other guys. Where we would we be today without him? In a much poorer place.

ESPN isn’t biased...

It’s just that the teams in the west suck really bad. At least, that’s the impression I’m left with after reading their predictions for the upcoming baseball season.

First of all, a small historical note: in the last 8 years, every division has won the World Series at least once.

Re-read that again: every division, even the woeful AL West (Anaheim Angels, 2002), has won the World Series at least once since 2000.

That’s parity the NFL can only envy since 2000, where the AFC North and East have combined to win 5 of the last 9 superbowls , and two divisions haven’t won since the late 90’s.

ESPN’s got a lot of confidence that the Central and East divisions are where it’s at this year in baseball, with 89% of the experts picking the World Series winner to come from one of those divisions.

Even more glaring is the section on individual awards: 53% of the MVP/Cy Young/Rookie of the Year voting goes to players from the East, 49% goes to players from the Central, and a scant 8% from players in the West.

But I guess that explains why so few experts predict the World Series winner to come from the West: those guys are seriously amateur out there.

How to Read ESPN.com

As a service to both my readers, I thought I’d provide a guide to the ESPN.com Page 2 columnists. I’ve been following Page 2 for many years now, having weathered everything from the Page 3 debacle to the dark days of Dan Shanoff.

For all you newcomers, here’s a handy style guide to what kind of article you can expect when you click on any of these writers currently serving in sportswriters’ purgatory.

Easy Like John Tesh

Just as John Tesh ruined the Olympics by focusing on the athletes’ “personal stories,” so these columnists prattle on over things we couldn’t care less about. Better still, they often try to negate any sort of joy you might feel about enjoying sports by finding downtrodden former players and sometimes hinting that it was sports that drove them to ruin.
Sam Alipour
Mary Buckheit
Jeff Pearlman

Let us discuss this word...

ESPN consistently labels these writers as humorists, despite the somewhat niggling detail that they’re not funny, except perhaps in some sort of Bizarro world.
[UPDATE from e-mail: “Bizarro think they funny! In Bizarro world, this mean they not make Bizarro laugh! They bad! Bizarro smash!”]
Jim Caple
DJ Gallo

Association of Carlin-Type Persons
These guys are living off a reputation for being scandalous, but they’re actually passé and not the least bit provocative. Kind of like your fat uncle who was a member of the Weather Underground but now works for Goldman-Sachs.
Bill Simmons (if your uncle had been neutered by his wife)

Larry King League
You know how you can always count on Larry for at least one “what the hell did he just say” moments during election coverage? Similarly, as you slog through the drivel of these so-called writers, you can be sure that you’ll have a difficult time figuring out what the hell they’re trying to say.
David Fleming
Scoop Jackson

Carmen San Diego Division
It’s inexplicable that these pictures don’t appear on the author’s page at the bottom, yet the articles do appear. Unless you invent some sort of wild conspiracy theory involving scandalous pictures, which I won’t do because I don’t know how to Photoshop.
Todd Boyd (often)
Jonah Keri

“Aren’t those just words dumb people use to sound smart?” Collective
Some writers believe that even if you’re writing drivel, if you throw in enough big words it’ll look profound and meaningful. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: obfuscation through elocution is not elucidation.
Todd Boyd
Jeff Pearlman

Pele Who? Relegation League
There are some things that no matter how much you push them on me, I’ll only resist them because I don’t care. I understand that it’s not their fault I don’t care, so I won’t insult them. I’ll just say that I never read what they write because I don’t care. Have I mentioned that I don’t care?
Patrick Hruby
Paul Lukas

Hoary old chestnut roasters
Great writers can help us to see something from a totally new viewpoint by bringing a fresh viewpoint to a familiar topic. That’ll never happen to these writers, since they ceaselessly rehash the same exact stories over and over and over again.
Mary Buckheit
LZ Granderson
Jemele Hill

Twister! Masters
I love this group, because they go through the most torturous contortions known to man in order to address some topic tangential to sports. Of course, it’s almost unanimously “Bush lied, people died!” but I’m sure that after the 2008 elections they’ll find something new to carp on.
Jim Caple
Gregg Easterbrook
Jeff Pearlman (bonus points for his recurrent anti-Jesus theme)

The Peter Principle
Maybe they’ll develop into top-notch talent someday. As of now, that day has not yet come.
Jemele Hill
Patrick Hruby
Eric Neel
Kurt Snibbe

Walter Durantly Memorial Award
When ESPN needs a company voice to sally forth and defend the indefensible, they know who to trust to bring home the bacon. Whether it’s pumping up the AFL (partially owned by ESPN) or excusing Colin Cowherd’s latest excess, you can always count on a homer to look the other way as thousands of Ukranians starve in the gulag.
[Note: I am aware that I have earned entry in the Twister! division for that paragraph alone]
Le Anne Schreiber

Keep a defibrillator handy
As Bill Murray said to Punxsatawney Phil, “Don’t drive angry!” These writers should really remember that, as their palpable anger seethes from every word. Or go ahead and get angioplasty now, whichever one will bump up their life expectancy.
Jim Caple
Tim Keown

Caldecott Awards Honorees
These award-winning writers can always be counted on to provide well-written, thoughtful material on sports and society today or a humorous insight into the foibles of the sports world.
(This section closed until further notice)

Happy reading!

Your Lava Colonoscopy is Ready

I really wanted to read Bill Simmons’ ESPN.com debate with himself about whether the ‘86 Celtics or the ‘07 Patriots were the greatest team ever to grace Boston. But then I remembered that I needed to get a root canal from my nearsighted dentist with hands the size of oven mitts, and I wasn’t able to read it.

These are the kind of articles that sports networks love to run, but which are excruciating for non-fans to read. Why do they punish us with these things? They promise all of the joy of hearing a drunken friend debate with himself whether his penis is longer or wider than the normal man’s, with none of the schadenfreude of watching him vomit on himself at the end of the night.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know!

One of my favorite ESPN.com columnists is Jonah Keri. But he's been MIA for a while over there, and his picture had disappeared. So I went looking for him, and turns out he's over at Deadspin.com. I'd noticed on ESPN that he hadn't written anything in a while, and what little appeared in December was now "Special to ESPN.com" instead of "By staff writer Jonah Keri."

Now, Deadspin is on my links. But since he's writing about college basketball, I didn't notice. Yes, not only am I lazy I despise college sports. So sue me.

But what happened to Keri? Did he get fired? Was there a fight at the ESPN Thanksgiving party and he ended up breaking a beer bottle over Bill Simmons' head? Did he punch Dieter (or whatever the Sprockets guy's name is) in the face?

And more importantly: other than TMQ, is there really any reason to read ESPN. com any more?

Hurricane Simmons Upgraded to ‘Insufferable’

Hurricane Bill Simmons, which has plagued ESPN Page 2 for several years, was upgraded last week to ‘Insufferable’, meaning that reading his columns can now be expected to cause headaches, nausea, and an intense feeling of disbelief. It had previously been at ‘Arrogantly Hubristic’ for almost two years.

The storm, which upon outset was ‘Funny’, has been growing steadily worse over the years as Simmons built up gale-force winds from a toxic mix of boosterism, hypocrisy, and bitchiness. It reached its previous maximum in October 2004. The prior worst storm was Hurricane Yankee, which raged unabated from 1996 until 2000, after which it has gradually subsided to a ‘Favorable Wind.’

The latest surge was touched off by rumors of a darkly ineffective conspiracy which caused the Patriots to play a close game which they ended up winning. Generally believers in conspiracies are of lower mental ability and poor logical capacity, which describes the last two years of the Simmons Experience quite well.

Forecasters had hoped that Hurricane Simmons would soon either blow itself out or, preferably, that the root causes of the storm could be mitigated, perhaps with an undefeated Patriots regular season followed by a second-round playoff loss, but warn that this might also cause Hurricane Simmons to increase further to ‘Irrationally Antagonistic’ and begin lashing out at everything in sight.

Late last year some mitigating impact on the Hurricane was observed thanks to La Sports Gal, which proved to have more comedic force and football knowledge than Hurricane Simmons. The La Sports Gal effect has been curtailed this year by El Niño, with disastrous results for ESPN.Com Page 2.

A hoped-for reversal in the Arrogance Potential of Hurricane Simmons following the disastrous (and brief) Kimmel Depression in 2004 did not materialize, and the only real impact of that was the sudden addition of worthless LA detritus in Hurricane Simmons and the boring Kimmel Windstorm that accompanied Simmons for a brief period of time.

Officials recommend staying away from any area affected by Simmons whatsoever, most particularly ESPN.com, until an ‘All Clear’ is sounded.

A Poem for Todd Boyd

I was going to write a long counter-argument to this poorly-reasoned piece of garbage on ESPN, but moments before I began I realized that life is too short to waste arguing with cretins. Thank goodness, because it would have taken me hours to unravel the Gordian knot of foolishness that columnist Tood Boyd has woven together.

Instead, I’m going to pen a poem:

An Ode to Dr. Todd Boyd, AKA the Notorious PHD:

I think that I shall never read,
Another piece by PHD.

Whose dissertation must have been,
as good as gas from my rear end.

He loves, o’er all, the seventies,
Which calls in doubt his faculties.

(A decade that was so abhorrent,
We ‘scaped but recently its torrent,

Blacksploitation it did not lack,
But Culture? Fashion ? Not one smack!)

So if you go to USC,
Don’t suffer you his fallacies.

But rather, take a real major,
Where teachers think instead of blather.

A Second Look at Hashmarks

I took a second look at Hashmarks, ESPN.com’s football blog. I reviewed it a long time ago and said some not-exactly-charitable things about it. I figured that now that it’s been running for a while, I’d check back and see how Mr. Mosley was getting along in the blogosphere.

Not well, it turns out. I didn’t think it was possible to become more obtusely vapid, but somehow he’s managed to do it. His bio says he’s an award-winning writer, but I have to wonder if it’s like one of those Nursery School awards that you get just for showing up. Did maybe his mom give him a trophy once?

Then an insight hit me: maybe it makes sense if you’re an idiot! So I put on my Terrell Owens Cowboys jersey, hung a Baylor poster on the wall, fired up some John Mellencamp, put a Chinese lead-painted toy in my mouth, and then reread Hashmarks to see if it would be more blogtastically fabulous.

Fortunately when I collapsed from inanity overload my wife was there to call 911 and paramedics were able to revive my by reading excerpts from “A Farewell to Arms.” But it was pretty close there for a while, and I think I heard a deep voice telling me to step into the light.

So all you kids out there, don’t try that at home. In fact, for safety’s sake just stay away from Hashmarks altogether.

[Disclosure: Yes, I continue to be bitter that he gets a million jillion hits for every hit I get, yet his blog stinks like an unburied raccoon. My blog stinks too, but at least I don’t do it on such a colossal platform.]

Pissing Up with Pearlman

Regular readers (both of them) may have noticed in the past my not-so-subtle attempts to spark up a public flamewar with someone vastly more popular than me (columnists, celebrities, Martha Stewart, etc). Come to think of it, that pretty much describes everybody currently on-line, from moon landing doubters to blogs that focus on the proper way to cook turnips.

Anyway, one particular target I fired at early on was Jeff Pearlman, who I vented my spleen on here. Sadly, I couldn’t stoke it into a big public fight to garner some linkage. Turns out, I didn’t try hard enough: in his column this week Pearlman links to a blog that ripped him over another column he wrote.

Oh, the pain of knowing that if only I’d pushed harder, that could be my blog in there instead of FireJayMariotti! The sleepless nights! I’m terribly depressed.

Having missed the boat with Pearlman, I’m going to rev it up and take a shot at another ESPN columnist, Jonah “Smirkmeister” Keri. Here’s my opening salvo:

“In his latest waste of electrons, Jonah Keri would have us believe that he’s a 6’4” tall Nordic god with wavy hair and muscles like Thor. I doubt it. He’s probably five foot nothing, his muscles pale and flabby from disuse, and also balding with an appalling under bite. I bet that his picture is photoshopped so much Reuters wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. But I would believe he has Thor bedsheets and Spiderman underwear on his flabby, uncool ass.”

There. Now I just have to sit back and wait until Keri deigns to notice me and responds. In fact, to make it easy, I’m going to suggest a response for the estimable Mr. Keri:

“So some stupid blogger douchebag said I was short, pale, flabby and liver-spotted. I may be pale and flabby, but I’m a full 6’4” pale and flabby! He’s probably some chickenhawk red-state goober that hates soccer and has lots of girlfriends from Canada. I’m not going to link to him so that none of you catch a bad case of dumbass from him.”

There, that’s all done, then. If there’s a hole in this plan, I sure as heck don’t see it.

I wonder if Andre Waters would have laughed?

This is in very poor taste (from ESPN yesterday):

Head trauma is not all that funny, and the NFL and NFLPA's complicity in this is shameful. Were we discussing any other big business, this would be major news and cause a huge public outcry. But because it's sports, we keep lining our children up for head trauma and pretending that the depression, suicide, and loss of faculty that afflicts football players is okay.

But so long as the bread and circuses flow, I guess ESPN is happy.

Jonah Keri Needs Re-Education?

Full disclosure : I’m a Braves fan, so perhaps I’m hyper-sensitive to New York bias, particularly when it comes to the Mets. However, I was really pleased to see this in the ESPN feature, Keri the 10:

8. The Mets are coming back to the pack.
They're still a great team with enough talent to make a World Series run. But this isn't the NL Central, where 85 wins probably gets you to the playoffs. The Braves and Phillies are good teams, with enough resources and farm system talent to trade for upgrades where needed; and the Marlins have a history of staging big, surprising runs.

Finally! An ESPN employee who’s not so infatuated with New York that he can speak reasonably and refrain from spouting excuses for why the Mets have lost ground. There are 2 other good teams in the NL East and one “sleeper” team (never discount Florida until they’re mathematically eliminated, and then only at your peril), and it’ll take more than New York mojo to win the NL East. The Mets will have to actually win some games, probably within the division.

Every team has injuries at this time of year, and the relentless excuse-making for the Mets (and to some extent the Yankees) gets tiresome to those of us not beholden to the New York teams.

So Amen, and preach on, Brother Jonah!

Caple Makes Good Point

I agree 100% with Jim Caple’s thoughts today on the music for closers coming into the bullpen. I would also suggest “Ride of the Valkyries” by Wagner, for a nice classical touch.

But if you really want to throw them off, why not come in with something like “Baby Elephant Walk” or the Looney tunes theme? You just need to distract a batter a little bit to make a home run a long fly ball, right? And what could be more confusing to a batter than that?

New Feature: ESPN Feeder

My brother is a computer programmer, and he’s come up with a program that will take digital TV broadcasts (like CNN or Fox News or what have you), convert them into headlines, scan the net for additional information, and then present them as a sort of synopsis “News Feeder” for a blog. He’s asked me to give it a beta test here on my blog with ESPN.

I let it go overnight and here’s what it came up with:

Keyshawn Johnson joins ESPN: Filling the “protectionist gasbag” void left by the departure of Michael Irvin, Keyshawn Johnson retired from football to begin broadcast duties for the network. Some commentators allege that Johnson has been retired on the field for some time, while others questioned his ability to comment beyond “Look at me!”

Roger Clemens plays solo game: In a scene reminiscent of “Bugs Bunny versus the Gashouse Gorillas”, Roger Clemens apparently unfurled his genius and will be the only player for the Scranton Yankees in their exhibition game against an unnamed opponent.

Barry Bonds is surly: Barry Bonds was surly today, a sign that the pressure of chasing Hank Aaron is getting to be too much for the normally jovial slugger.

Roger Clemens warms up: Roger Clemens warmed up in preparation for his start with the AAA club. No word yet on whether or not there will be opponents.

Tennis: After several highly-ranked Americans were bounced out of a tennis tournament, it ceased to be news. The tournament was in a foreign country, so it wasn’t that important to begin with.

Roger Clemens picks nose: Reports from Scranton were confirmed that Roger Clemens did pick his nose while in the bullpen waiting to start for the Scranton/Wilkes Barr Yankees.

Roger Clemens throws a pitch: In what must be a rare occurrence, Roger Clemens actually threw pitches during a tune-up start for the Scranton Yankees.

Roger Clemens sits in dugout: Roger Clemens sat in the dugout while the other team, whose identity has not yet been confirmed, played defense.

Roger Clemens throws more pitches: Roger Clemens continues to throw pitches for the Scranton Yankees in their game.

[...]

At this point I had to cut it off because it malfunctioned and continued to do only Roger Clemens updates for another sixteen terabytes. It’s surely because of a programming error, because I know that ESPN isn’t interrupting actual sports news to hype Roger Clemens starting against AAA players.

I’ll ask my brother to do some fine-tuning and try this again later.

ESPN has Valentine Fever

I ignored this comment to replace Joe Torre with Bobby Valentine some time ago, but now I see that Valentine fever has swept through Page 2 (via Jonah Keri wondering why he's not managing) and must be stopped. Is there not some sort of vaccine that these guys can take to protect from this?

How else could you explain a career 0.500 manager who managed to underachieve in both Texas and in New York, and whose greatest accomplishment is sneaking back into a dugout in a poorly-drawn fake mustache, be suggested two times as someone who could be a potential “savior” manager?

Does he have some sort of ability that I don’t know about, and I’ve never seen? I know he’s reputed to be a managerial genius; is there any evidence of this? Did multiple Mets late-season collapses not sufficiently damage his reputation to keep him out of the majors forever?

Can someone explain this to me? Please? Anybody? Does Bobby Valentine have naked pictures of ESPN honchos following his stint as an announcer for the network? Is he cousin to Bud Selig? Does he have Svengali-like powers that we can only suspect? Seriously, what’s the deal here?

Imagine if Valentine ended up managing the Yankees, thus ensuring 4 or 5 years of futility. The only competition for the Red Sox would be the Orioles (now in their 12th year of corrupt incompetence) and the Blue Jays (it’s baseball, eh!).

We’d have to live with Red Sox fans, insufferable under the best of circumstances, shoveling a potent cocktail of self-loathing and hubris down our throats 24/7, abetted by celebrity fans and sympathetic media. Is the sports world ready for that? I doubt it.

Introducing New ESPN Blog, Skidmarks Hashmarks

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I’m aflame with jealousy that this measly shill is prominently placed on ESPN and gets more hits in an hour than I’ll get in a year.

Now, having said that, this really is a terrible blog that ESPN foists upon us. I’m pretty sure just reading all that cost me 1 or 2 IQ points, but I was drowning my sorrows in generic cough syrup as I went, so it’s possible that you could read it without the same effect. But why take the chance?

I read all 17+ inaugural posts, though, and as a matter of public safety I’ll try to sum them up and give you the gist of the blog so that you don’t have to wade through it yourself. Anyway, here’s a roughly chronological summary of “Hashmarks”:

The obligatory “Welcome to my blog!” post, complete with ESPN cross-promotion. The boys upstairs must be proud of him. Includes occasional flashes of good writing obscured by clouds of smarm, which as it turns out is a pretty accurate forecast for the rest of this blog.

Dallas Cowboys rule! Since Mosley used to write for a Dallas Cowboys blog, he’s decided to go with what he knows and feature the Cowboys prominently. Very prominently, since a little over 1 out of 5 topics are Cowboys-based. Including two on Keyshawn Johnson, whose retirement appears to be a bigger story than the last 3 years of his career and is of critical importance to Mosley since Johnson will be working for ESPN soon. What, is Keyshawn going to sign this guy’s checks or something?

• Random use of bullets and “block quotes”, all arranged in a bizarre fashion as if crafted by an idiot savant who’s not quite got the grasp of the “savant” part yet…more on this later, appended randomly for no apparent reason

A plea for his readers to write as much of his blog as possible. I wonder if that works? If anybody’d like to fire me off a long-form post on the subject, feel free. Try to keep it under 5000 words, though, and please cite all references.

Some clucking about being the lead link on “Hot Read”, followed by pimping other ESPN stuff. The boys upstairs must be really happy with this blog. I don’t even know what Hot Read is, and judging by this, I don’t wanna know. Is it too late to demand that high-quality stuff like this be placed in the “ESPN Members Only” section, since I’m not a member?

Newslike substance and updates on events that happened around the NFL…two or more days ago and already beaten to death by other blogs. He’s not kidding when he says you should check there third or fourth after a story breaks. He failed to mention that you should also let the news age a little, since recent stories just aren’t his thing. Imagine a guy that posts every 90 minutes but can’t post anything topical. It boggles the mind.

Two (two??) posts on his first day derived by printing and responding to reader e-mail. I strongly suspect one of them is full of made-up reader quotes, since it’s very complimentary. Thankfully, if there are references to stuff that would let me know it’s fake, I didn’t pick up on them, so my brain isn’t synced to idiot-wave frequency…yet.

Midway through the writing smacks of somebody running out of steam. Not so good, since the blog’s not even a full day old yet. It's one thing to so boldly ape Bill Simmons; must he do it so poorly to boot?

A derogatory post about punters. Good to see he’s breaking new ground in football comedy. Originality is nice.

Signing of posts with a cryptic “m”, unless of course it’s one of the many posts that doesn’t have the cryptic “m” at the end. Wide variations in style make it seem as if it’s written by two separate people, although I refuse to believe that it takes more than one person to write this incoherently.

A post about his “blog numbers.” No, I’m not kidding about that: his blog’s not even 24 hours old and he posts a “lookee what I got” post. But he says he only got 5 e-mails from “current NFL players who happened to stumble across this blog.” I can’t decide if that’s sad or impressive. No, really, I can’t. Seems like it ought to be more, but then again, I’ve never gotten an e-mail from a current NFL player. Of course, I’m not front-page on ESPN. See? Not so easy to judge, is it?

The mercifully final post (the last time I dared read the blog) is an obligatory “roundup of news” link that shows he’s out of ideas, out of talent, and out of bed at 2:00 in the morning. One of them is about a brawl at DisneyWorld, so we can expect that he’ll be fired within 24 hours for besmirching the home office’s reputations, thus ending our long national nightmare.

Now we can all go to bed, which is something that Mr. Mosely apparently fails to do in a timely fashion. Good night, and God bless.

UPDATE: As I post this, I see that he's "off to Plano for an interview", no doubt at the urging of his now-wrathful masters. And no, I didn't read the other posts. I'm quite dumb enough on my own, thank you very much!

Ripping Yarn from ESPN Ombudswoman

Oh, what a fairy story the ESPN Ombudswoman weaves for us here! Unfortunately, I don’t believe much of it. I’m not calling her a liar; I think she believes every word she wrote. But that doesn’t make her accurate.

Schreiber would have us believe, against all logic and the functioning of every other successful communications outlet in the world, that ESPN does not “coordinate” their message. Apparently producers just choose random topics out of the air, which conveniently happen to align with network interests and dovetail on a common set of topics. And in related news, monkeys might fly out my butt.

It seems more likely to me that they take their cue from some original source, directed by the network hierarchy. Why else would John Amaechi’s book, Arena football, and NASCAR be such hot topics when otherwise they’d go relatively unnoticed? In fact, Arena football and NASCAR are not new at all, yet their ESPN coverage is. Any ideas why?

And on the flip side, how is it that no criticisms of ESPN or its affiliates ever seem to see the light of day at the network, and dissenters are ruthlessly crushed? Is it possible that this is a method of nonverbal communication?

Now for some fun with numbers. Here’s what ESPN says about Hockey coverage:

"We compared all the 1 a.m. shows during March 2007 with all the 1 a.m. shows in March 2004, the last year ESPN had hockey rights," said Craig Lazarus, vice president of studio productions, whose responsibilities include overseeing all productions of SportsCenter. "We found that in March 2004, hockey accounted for 20 percent of the Top Ten highlights. In March 2007, the percentage was 18 percent."
In all other segments of the 1 a.m. "SportsCenter," the show with the heaviest emphasis on highlights and events coverage, there were 29 fewer minutes of standard, daily NHL coverage in March 2007 than in March 2004. Those 56 seconds a day amount to a 28 percent decline in hockey's allotment of airtime, but I doubt that fully accounts for the feeling that hockey gets "no love" anymore.

So NHL coverage has dropped by 10% in the Top 10 highlights and 30% in coverage outside of the Top 10 highlights. To me that’s significant. They go on to say that since NHL2Night isn’t on any more, that’s probably why hockey fans are upset.

So basically, coverage of their sport dropped by 40% on Sportscenter and they lost 100% of the non-Sportscenter coverage. I don’t watch hockey, so it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other what happens to it. But these fans have a point: ESPN has just about dropped Hockey coverage.

As an excuse ESPN offers some tripe about the rights packages, etcetera. I’m pretty certain that if ESPN wanted to continue to do NHL2Night, they could. Hockey’s not going to turn its nose up at being on ESPN. But the fact is that since ESPN can’t derive profit from it, they ignore it.

The reverse is true for NASCAR and Arena Football. Now ESPN has profit motivation, so now they are in high gear to promote the sports (pardon the pun). I don’t believe for one second the part about “untapped fan bases” and the other nonsense. It’s money, pure and simple. But Schreiber is sure to toe the company line, letting us know how big a draw NASCAR is (bigger than Yankees-Red Sox!) to defend these decisions.

She also doesn’t seem to show any intellectual curiosity about whether or not it’s ethical for ESPN to own part of the AFL. My judgment, obviously, is that it isn’t.

What’s more, though, these are phenomenally bad business decisions! ESPN is going to try to push Arena football on a public that already has two professional leagues (NFL and college) and has resisted every other effort to introduce more football (USFL, anybody?). They’re antagonizing the 800-pound gorilla in the room (NFL) for what is probably a low-return proposition. They’re alienating hockey fans for no other reason than arrogance.

In short, they’re behaving as a classic monopoly. The end point of this behavior is pretty clear: a competitor will be born to address the problems they’ve created, and end up crippling their business.

Don’t believe me? Tell me how AOL, once in command of the Internet, has been doing lately.

Kudos to Pearlman

If you're going to rip somebody, you have to be sure to point out when they get it right, as Jeff Pearlman does in this column. So go read it, then turn your computer off and take his advice. It'll all be here when you get back.

TMQ Mental Health Watch

I’m worried about Gregg Easterbrook, the writer of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (also called TMQ). I’ve been a fan of Easterbrook for a long time, since his first tour of duty with ESPN.com. I followed him to NFL.com when he went into the wilderness, and I’ve followed him back to ESPN.com in his second incarnation. TMQ mixes the NFL and social commentary in a way that nothing else does, with a dash of theology and physics thrown in from time to time.

I feel that Easterbrook is probably one of the more intelligent men writing about Sports today, an accomplished and talented man who is always a delight to read. He runs on for several thousand words, but so do I, and with far less reason. Politically I’d say he’s probably libertarian, and is pro-stripper and anti-gambling, both positions I can agree with.

Last fall (I think), he threw in an aside about how the USA was responsible for what happened in Iraq and how we, as a people, were morally responsible for each death there because we had invaded. I wasn’t totally agreed with the way he framed it (and I don’t remember it very specifically, so I may have misrepresented what he said). Then in a later column he snapped at Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC, for the infamous “Playboy Mansion” ad against Democrat Harold Ford, calling Mehlman a nasty name (something about a reptile or being reptilian) and implying that this was standard Republican dirty tricks.

The ridiculousness of that comment was overwhelming; having had the joy to watch both Ford and Corker's ads, I can honestly say that both were negative, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that was insulting to the intelligence of the viewer. They jumped in mud and started slinging. To single out one or the other, and act as if they were more aggrieved, is simply wishful thinking.

In today’s TMQ, on the draft, he works in one of the beloved canards of the left, saying that in 1979 Ronald Reagan was “still just a washed-up actor” when the original Battlestar Galactica crew reached Earth. Not exactly: in 1979 Reagan had been governor of California twice, from 1967-1975, had pursued the Presidency in 1976 and almost unseated sitting president Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Washed-up actor may have been on his resume, but he was hardly “still just” a washed-up actor. Easterbrook’s old enough to know better than to toss that little gem out there.

What worries me is this: I don’t care if Easterbrook is a Republican or Democrat or Green Party or whatever. But when he makes these comments, he begins to betray lazy thinking and flawed analysis. And I read Easterbrook because of the sharp thinking and insight he brings to the topic at hand. Not just the football, either: his analysis of other subjects is often clear and concise, and he has good insights into society, politics, law, and anything else he sets his hand to.

Comments like this make me wonder if he’s starting to let politics drive his brain, when it should be the other way around. I don’t know if that was part of the deal with ESPN to get back on the site; maybe he has to throw in the occasional liberal talking point to make his ABC masters happy. But I do know that I worry that his reason, which is the whole point of reading 5000 words of TMQ in the first place, slips when he makes comments like these.

Did I make a difference?

I see that ESPN.com shuffled their Page 2 contributors' photos this week, moving everybody into alphabetical order except Alipour, Keri, and Lukas. Noting, of course, that Simmons is still riding at the head of the class. Also, Easterbrook's photo looks like something out of a 1950's yearbook, and is conspicuously black and white instead of color.

I would like to take full credit for this change, which means that I had an impact on the 2000-pound gorilla of the sportsworld from my anonymous blog. Army of Davids, indeed! Reality is probably far different, and I would ask that any who know the true story not spoil my fantasy.

Fortunately, the DJ Gallo "Sprockets" photo is untouched, which brings me joy. I love that photo.

I'm a little concerned that Pearlman has vanished, but searching didn't turn up any buzz on him one way or the other. I'm guessing he didn't get the axe, since the typical ESPN style is to act like Horemheb and erase all mention of fired employees from the website, like they did with Easterbrook (during his two-year "separation" from the website) and Whitlock (whose columns are there but hard to find). Pearlman's archive is still there, so I'm hoping he's okay. Yes, I know I was hard on the guy, but what do my opinions count for? I'm an anonymous dweeb running a low-wattage blog. And unlike some, I don't want people to lose their jobs. Especially because of my big mouth!

How ESPN.com Views Its Staff

Much like a movie, ESPN has organized its stable of ESPN.com writers alphabetically. Also much like a movie, the exceptions to this rule are very interesting. Walk with me, if you will, down the list of contributors to see the good, the bad and not a few ugly.

Bill Simmons
He’s first, he’s smug, and he’s the undisputed king of ESPN.com. Lord of the roost, cock of the walk, and flavor of the month all rolled into one. But he looks a hair nervous. That’s because he knows his wife is not only a better writer than him but knows more about football, too. If she starts writing about basketball and obsessing over Larry Bird his days on ESPN are over.

Mary Buckheit
Pity poor Mary: she’d be first in line if it weren’t for Simmons demanding top billing. She kinda sorta came out a while back, after the infamous Tim Hardaway comments about gays. And just to show that there’s no stereotyping at ESPN, they made her main beat women’s beach volleyball and interviewing former winners of ESPN’s “Sexiest Female Athlete” award. You can’t make this stuff up.

Jim Caple
Caple used to be funny, but went insane after the 2000 election. Since then he’s become a sweaty, conspiracy-theory-spouting, wild-eyed toad, which is pretty well represented in his picture, actually. His pet project since then has been 24 College Avenue, which explains why it’s drivel.

DJ Gallo
Up next on Sprockets: herr Gallo shows us his latest work to shock the masses, De Virgin unt Rhino Testacle. Seriously, what’s with this picture? But you’ve gotta hand it to Gallo: not only did he sell out to serve the masters at ESPN, he managed to replace the execrable “Daily Quickie” with an even more vapid “AM Jump.” That was some nice work.

Jemele Hill
A newcomer to ESPN.com, and writer of the lamest introductory column I’ve seen on the website yet. ESPN apparently trusts Hill enough to let her write without an editor, which about one time in five turns out not to be a mistake.

Patrick Hruby
You know, I can’t think of anything to say about Hruby, other than I’m not at all sure how to pronounce his name. H-ruby? H-rue-bay? Hurby? H-rubby? A pronunciation guide would be nice.

Scoop Jackson
Somewhere in ESPN headquarters there’s a checklist of things that they’ve tried with Scoop to see if he has any skill at them: “Television? Nope. Commentary? Nope. Athlete interviews? Nope. Play-by-play? Nope. Column writing? Nope.” So for now they’ve decided to just stick him on the website and see what happens.

Bomani Jones
I’ve no strong feeling on Jones one way or the other, but he looks pretty happy to be here. His primary focus appears to be race and sports, which he does okay at, although not as well as Whitlock did (or the late Ralph Wiley before him).

Tim Keown
The human spleen's job is to make out lists of things he doesn't like, prefaced by some supposedly witty prose about things he hates. Even though it's phonetically unlikely, I guess that Keown rhymes with 'sneer.'

Eric Neel
How many substandard forgettable columnists does ESPN.com need to employ, anyway? Three per sport or something?

Kurt Snibbe
Greg Maddux is a gold-glove winning pitcher and…wait, that’s not Maddux? Oh, um, I guess Snibbe’s illustrations are okay. But the combination of Snibbe and Caple should be banned from the pages, since they bring out the worst in each other.

LZ Granderson
I actually think this guy does all right. ESPN doesn’t, though, because he stuck out here past Snibbe in his own subcategory. I don’t know what he did to deserve that. Maybe he agreed with Jason Whitlock or something.

Sam Alipour
You know why he looks like he’s about to cry? Because his last name starts with A but he’s way out here near the end. It’s like getting a 2 on your performance review. You’re not fired, but almost.

Jonah Keri
I don’t know Johan Keri. I don’t read Jonah Keri. I have no animosity towards Jonah Keri whatsoever. But based on this picture, I’d like to punch him in the mouth.

Paul Lukas
Not only does he look like a Muppet, he’s the driving force behind Uni Watch. Those are both good reasons to let him go back to doing his own thing on his own blog.

Jeff Pearlman
Is he really wearing a T-Shirt in a publicity photo? Also, as readers know, I’m not particularly a big fan of his writing.

So there you go: the ESPN rogues’ gallery. This is presumably what the editors of ESPN, if any, think of their writers:

Lord of the Realm: Simmons
Peers: Buckheit, Caple, Gallo, Hill, Hruby, Jackson, Jones, Keown, Neel, Snibbe
The guy they don’t want to put in the next group for unknown reasons: Granderson
Serfs: Alipour, Keri, Lukas, Pearlman