NotCoachTito: Dispatches from Parody Limbo

NotCoachTito is the former fake manager of the Boston Red Sox. He currently resides in the Parody Account afterlife, occasionally sending vulgar messages from the Other Side, about Bobby Valentine and John Lackey, to his personal medium Hunter Felt. In his spare time, NotCoachTito enjoys drinking Bigelow Green Tea, listening to Happy Mondays and pinch-running for his best hitters in the ninth inning of tied games.


Chris Brown Beats a Bill Walton to Death
by NOT COACH TITO

Chris Brown is why America can't have nice things. The renowned domestic abuser and also room-temperature-tapwater R&B artist recently struck his latest blow against actually entertaining pop culture, this time on Twitter.

A few weeks ago, "CHRIS BROWN IS A LEGEND" (yes, of course, in all caps) appeared in Twitter's trending topics. @TheBillWalton—an award-winning account written in the voice of basketball legend/current broadcaster/diehard Deadhead/Bill Simmons lust-object Bill Walton—responded with this joke: "'Chris Brown Is A Legend' is trending on Twitter. With that, we should all celebrate his greatest hits starting with Rihanna. Congrats, Ike!"

The Man Who Wouldn't Learn

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

It is October 11, and ESPN's Buster Olney has opinions about things. Specifically, he thinks the list of candidates to fill the hole Andy MacPhail has left in the Baltimore Orioles' front office has six names on it: Tony LaCava of the Blue Jays, J.P. Riccardi of the Mets, Dan Jennings of the Marlins, Gerry Hunsicker of the Rays, Josh Byrnes of the Padres and Thad Levine of the Rangers. All Assistant General Managers or the equivalent, all men with rock-solid backgrounds in player development, all men with proven success in that role. It is a good list.

Local media sources in Baltimore, the Sun's Peter Schmuck most prominent among them, suggest that perhaps even this list is too long—that the Orioles are working off a list of five and do not intend to add any more candidates.

Then the madness begins. In a matter of days, Jennings and Riccardi drop off, replaced almost immediately by De Jon Watson (Dodgers) and Jerry Dipoto (Diamondbacks). Hunsicker indicates he isn't interested in the job by way of the not-a-blog of ex-New York Times sportswriter and current baseball grump Murray Chass.

Then Logan White (also Dodgers) and Al Avila (Tigers) pop up as candidates, as does Darren Oppenheimer (Yankees, and only the Scouting Director). Byrnes and Levine disappear as quickly. There are whispers that the Orioles even want to speak with Tony Reagins, the last general manager of the Los Angeles Angels—the guy who traded for Vernon Wells on purpose and, one would hope, while sober.

But that's fine; by October 25 the top two candidates on the list, Dipoto and LaCava, have already visited the large brick warehouse looming over Camden Yards' right field and have not only met with the Orioles search committee but also spoken with owner Peter Angelos himself. Most have Dipoto as the favorite for the job, with LaCava a very strong second. Both men are supremely qualified, relatively young and very highly regarded in their field. For the first time in years, things in the Baltimore front office are looking up.

One week later, Angelos and his Orioles are again the laughingstock of Major League Baseball.

Remembering the League Division Series

GAME 162
On the last day of the season, the Phillies eliminated the Braves, letting the Cardinals slip into the NL Wild Card spot, while a rain delay and extra innings allowed a historic Red Sox collapse to nearly synchronize with an Evan Longoria homer that sent the Rays into the playoffs as the AL Wild Card. It was amazing, and it prompted an almost explosive joy from fans. This was what the end of the season should be like. This is why we didn't need another wild card team: "This is what you can shove up your horse and ride outta town, Mr. Bud."

At once, I sympathized and felt confused.

Disliking Bud Selig feels natural, like flowers growing toward sunlight or toddlers fearing snakes. Bud Selig does bad things to baseball, but wanting another wild card isn't bad so much as it's the least progressive solution to expanding opportunity for all teams. It's a simple solution, and as is the case with most institutional solutions in America, we assume that simpler ones are better because difficult or unseen challenges automatically portend something worse. Adding another wild card feels a lot like solving the inequities of private health insurance by mandating everyone buy it instead of trying a public option: when in doubt, motion will be mistaken for a valid substitute for real improvement.

Seven Games in September, Part I

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

Jonathan Bernhardt is a freelance writer born in Baltimore, Maryland who lives and works in New York City. His very first concrete memory of the Baltimore Orioles is Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series. He hopes they either get good or move to the American League Central before his liver fails. You can follow him on Twitter.

I. The Mathematics of Emotion

Since the last round of expansion in 1998, the 30 teams of Major League Baseball play a regular season of 2,430 games across six months—roughly 13 of them a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each of these games in turn lasts nine innings; some go longer, but for simplicity, let's say nine innings. That's 21,870 innings, bare minimum, each year.

Each team plays 162 of these games, roughly 26 per month. One thousand, four hundred fifty-eight innings—the regular season is unkind. It is long and grueling, and it bleeds together until games are just moments of madness linked by double plays, blown saves and fat men behind home plate. In the end, the difference between elite and hopeless teams is 40. A 100-win team is going direct to the playoffs; a 100-loss team is going direct the other way.

The Baltimore Orioles won 98 games in the 1997 regular season. Between then and last Monday, the team played 2,096 games of regulation baseball. In a few years, they will pass that 2,430 number. When you dream of Hell, pray you dream of lakes of fire and men with farm tools, not of 20,000-odd innings of the Baltimore Orioles playing the Baltimore Orioles, 13 hours a day, every day, all the way down. If you do, pray you wake up. If you don't, pay attention to Daniel Cabrera's year; it's possible this is the change of scenery he needed.

But that moment is still terrible basement-dwelling seasons away. Last Monday, the number stood at 2,096. Our story begins before the first of those; it begins with one last great fight between Could Have Been and Never Was.

Seven Games in September, Part II

Continued from Part I, "The Mathematics of Emotion."

II. The Chase

The first game of the doubleheader on Monday, September 19 is a solid Baltimore win, but there's no feeling of destiny to it. The Orioles start Jeremy Guthrie, a nice guy and solid, back-of-the-rotation starter that they got serious about trading two years too late.

The Sox start Kyle Weiland. Francona gambles here; the cupboard's a bit bare of major league-ready pitching since graduating Lester, trading Justin Masterson last year for the now-departed Victor Martinez and dealing Casey Kelly to the San Diego Padres as part of the package for Gonzalez. After injuries, they're left with Weiland. He might one day be a solid number-four starter, but this will likely be his last start of the year, even before he takes the mound. Once he leaves it, it's all but certain.

Weiland lasts 4 and 2/3 innings and gives up six runs, five earned. Looking back, there are rumblings on the horizon. In this marginally safer and more innocent time for Red Sox Nation, very few Boston fans have any real conception of who or what a Robert Andino is.

Seven Games in September, Part III

Continued from Part II, "The Chase."

III. Birds in Fall

On September 26, the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox reconvene at Fenway South, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, to send this season screaming back to Hell. Tommy Hunter starts for the Orioles; Josh Beckett, again, for the Sox. Each man allows two runs through five innings pitched; then Hunter pulls his groin. He makes it through the fifth but is pulled for former Houston Astro Troy Patton. Both Patton and Sox reliever Matt Albers came to Baltimore in the trade that sent Miguel Tejada to Houston; Albers was allowed to leave in free agency after the previous season. Patton was an intriguing starting prospect for the Orioles, until he tore his labrum twice. Now he's the most middling of middling relievers. Nevertheless, he gets out of the top of the sixth without allowing a run. He has, in fact, looked almost impressive over the past few weeks.

Beckett takes the mound in the bottom of the sixth and the game spirals delightfully out of control. Guerrero takes the first pitch up the middle for, yes, another seeing-eye single, with which he passes Julio Franco on the all-time hits list for Dominican-born players. With a strong second half, he's been an important contributor in the Orioles' resurgent September. As transitory as such success is, the Orioles can always use something to be happy about.

On the very next pitch, Wieters actually tries to bunt for a base hit as the Sox put on the shift. It barely goes foul. Jim Palmer shakes his head—you can almost hear him doing it—as the Sox stand pat and don't adjust their defensive formation. Wieters drills a ball to center; Ellsbury is there.

Yankee Fans Boo Rick Scott?

I promise to write about something other than Rick Scott soon, but this struck me as interesting. Political boos at baseball games are pretty commonplace; in fact, finding a way to tie them to Barack Obama is apparently a cottage industry at the National Review. And most of the time, their origins are simple. A recent tax hike or hiring cutback sends fans jeering a governor or president when the policy might well have been the legislature's. Even by those uncritical standards, though, these boos seem a little odd, for four reasons:

Rays 2010 Post-Mortem: Someone Started a Few Playoff Games and Two Crime Scenes Broke Out

If Boston's performance in the 2004 American League Championship Series taught us nothing else, it's that even a team down to single-game elimination can surge back to win it all. I have no doubt that, given a time machine and some clever disguises, the 2004 Red Sox could have done that in the ALDS this year. Unfortunately, the team I'm talking about is the 2010 Tampa Bay Rays, and obviously it's over. For regular fans watching at home, it might have been over the moment Rocco Baldelli limply struck out with the bases loaded in game one.

For most web-savvy fans it probably ended the moment their RSS feed binged and brought the news of the starting rotation for the ALDS. Manager Joe Maddon slated James Shields to start game two, something that writer Joe Posnanski outlined as a BAD IDEA pretty neatly:

JOE MADDON, SUPER GENIUS?

[He’s] starting James Shields in Game 2? My buddy Ed Price has a piece up at Fanhouse quoting Maddon saying that while Shields’ more obvious numbers like ERA and home runs allowed and such were dreadful (he led the league in runs, hits and homers allowed), his “deeper numbers” were better. And his xFIP — what is basically his expected ERA if you take fielding out of the equation – is a very good 3.72, better, in fact, than CC Sabathia’s.

I certainly appreciate the nod to xFIP, but I can’t help but think that the REAL reason why the Rays are starting Shields is because of that absurd “Big Game Shields” nickname that someone stuck on him. And while I love Maddon being unconventional, I can’t help but worry that he’s overdoing it. Joe Maddon is really smart. I just hope he doesn’t think he’s smarter than that.

For fans of old Warner Brothers cartoons, the title says it all. Wile E. Coyote bore the title "Super Genius" around on a business card whenever urbanely introducing himself to somebody, and still he spent every waking moment of his life being incidentally murdered by himself due to a dumb bird.

The Loyal Opposition at Tropicana Field

I've grown to love Tropicana Field in spite of itself. While I won't be sad to see it go, there's something kind of mistakenly charming about it whenever I get out there for a game. It's almost adorably wrong, not in any terribly profound way, but in the homey way that one gets used to. Like the ballpark equivalent of a front door that makes an uncanny belching sound if you open it too slowly.

Aside from the game itself, easily my favorite part is the people. I always wind up near someone memorably bizarre, often average-guy out-of-towners, the nameless and questionably solvent drifters of sports fandom, the opposite of the high-powered corporate type who flies in for a day's work and gets a great ticket on someone else's dime. These are the sorts of people generally filtered out by sustained team prosperity (and its increased season-ticket purchases) or by local fascination with a swank new ballpark. They still seem like a hearty core of the Tampa fan experience.

You can see the fan-filtering process at work in Fenway Park in Boston, where repeated championships and the exclusivity of available seats, plus their high cost, has made the Red Sox "event baseball" instead of just baseball. Out-of-towners are rich people often unserious about the game. People in the stands use their cell phones constantly, network, don't seem fired up for what's happening, don't cheer as hard as they used to when a Sox pitcher has two strikes on a batter with men on base.

New stadiums seem to have this inattentiveness problem, this "baseball as the secondary concern at the ballpark" thing: people show up for the food and the nicknacks hidden in the concourses. The point isn't the game but being at it. A friend of mine who went to Pac Bell park for the first time couldn't remember the score of the game but told me in detail all the different types of food he'd had there. He wasn't from the area and didn't like baseball, but it seemed like a thing to do. That would never have happened at Candlestick Park, because Candlestick was frigid torture garnished with gray hot dogs. You went to the 'Stick for baseball. Going for the stadium or the food would have been like going to the dentist for the magazines.

Isner, Mahut and 'Levels of the Game'

Just moments after tuning into American John Isner and Frenchman Nicholas Mahut's five-set epic at Wimbledon, I started thinking of John McPhee's Levels of the Game.

It was an odd thought. If they were to reach for any analogue at all, most people would probably think first of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe's 1980 Wimbledon final, with a fourth-set tiebreaker that went to 18-16. That's assuming they thought it worth the effort to try to draw any comparisons at all. At this point, Isner-Mahut defies most of them.

Consider the following:

• at 7 hours, 6 minutes in length, the fifth set alone eclipsed the duration of the longest tennis match in history by 33 minutes;
• Isner has already broken the record for aces (78) by a solid 20 (98);
• Mahut has broken it by 17 (95);
• they are tied at two sets and 59 games apiece;
• 59 games is enough to win over three different matches in straight sets;
• the match is not over.

This is no ordinary degree of overtime. During the broadcast, increasingly loopy broadcasters whom one suspects were obliged to urinate in empty jars behind the desk on set kept mentioning sports overtime anomalies that might seem comparable and failing. There are none. Not only has no one done anything like this in tennis; no one has done anything like this ever. The longest baseball game in history went 25 innings over eight hours. Isner and Mahut have been playing this match for ten hours over two days, set to try to conclude it on a third.

Another reason not to think back to Borg-McEnroe is that it's likely to be the default analogy for sportswriters looking for sloppy means of putting this match into perspective. Why bother?—everyone else will do it for you. Journalists in general don't like to work without comparative examples: it's why they measure everything in Rhode Islands. But sportswriters in particular seem beholden to forcing analogies, even if the only purpose is to break them later. Take the Boston Red Sox's incredible comeback against the Yankees and first World Series title in 86 years. Even then the default strategy for demonstrating the scale of the achievement was to labor to liken it to something else, only to explain why the similitude failed. This was totally unique because it was just like these other things, except for how it wasn't.

Opening Daze #1: ESPN's Enduring Failure

When Josh Beckett throws his first pitch, on April 4th, to officially begin the baseball season, I emit one of those involuntary ahhhhhh sounds that you occasionally hear when you walk out the front door of an airport and are surrounded by smokers lighting up for the first time in five hours.

I'm sure that I have a sincere and elaborate opinion somewhere in me explaining why baseball is the greatest game, but at this moment, only three explanations come to mind:

1. It's back, and football isn't. Also, the World Cup hasn't started yet.

2. You really don't have to pay too much attention. I mean, yeah, there's all that poetry in what doesn't happen — or so say people like George Will, who claim that social justice occurs when you don't do anything either. Basically, you can glean as much or as little from a baseball game as you like. If you want to observe defensive shifts and whether a pitcher is banging the outside of the plate against somebody, great. If you've got work to do, great. You can hook up the radio, worry away at something on the computer, do the dishes, make a dinner or tinker in the garage. Baseball is the most rewarding auditory game. Vin Scully proves this. Most people who get all uptight about how you have to watch everything are usually annoying, even if they aren't statistics wonks or bad gamblers. Most of them are probably dishonest, too. Practically everyone I know grew up with as much baseball on the radio as on the TV. And we grew up into having MLB cable packages.

3. It's a long season, so missed games and losses don't matter that much. Football is so immediate and so statistically compacted that everything seems pressing. With football, most of the games each week happen at the same time on the same day. If you're busy then, you miss out. Worse, it's on for less than half the year (20 weeks, counting the postseason), and most of those weeks feature so much head-to-head stuff that you can't see it all. Baseball happens for most of the year. Many of those days, there are games on at 1 pm, 4 pm, 7pm and then 10 pm (Eastern). Best of all, even if your team is absolutely amazing, they're still going to lose 60 times. You can afford to not sweat the small stuff — while in the garage, trying to fix your stupid lawnmower.

Southern College Football Fans Are the Biggest Bandwagoners in American Sports (BCS Game Edition)

A short while ago, I wrote about how southern college football fans are the frontrunning-est fans in the country. Beyond insulting other parts of the country in the name of southern pride and other regionalistic ugliness, beyond silly displays of tribalism, they basically want to root for winners, and rooting for teams from the south tends to provide that for them. Just as I was starting to wonder if I'd been a little too critical, the BCS Championship game happened.

Before, during and immediately following it, most of the people I know on Facebook and many of the people I know on Twitter updated their thoughts about the two teams and who deserved to win, and reading it was like experiencing a live-action commentary on and performance of the earlier college football piece I'd written. Screenshots or copied-and-pasted text from tweets or Facebook updates will get dull fast, so rather than bore you, I'll just summarize:


Let's go, One Part of the South! Because it's the south and the other part of the south isn't really the south, or something.
I know a lot of people from the south, very few of whom are from Texas, and very few of whom root for Alabama. In spite of that, all but one of them interested in the game posted something in support of Alabama, from mere rooting interest to rabid cheering and shit-talking. And almost all of them posted an explanation why: "GO SEC."

The Yankees Are Cancer: World Series, 2009

You already know the outcome, so welcome to the last bit of liveblogging doom, gloom, angst and loathing for the 2009 baseball season. Think of this as the sports equivalent of watching Glenn Beck read a newspaper. Only I'm not actually insane. Let us instead enter a legitimate Chamber of Loathing:

Being a baseball fan and rooting for the Yankees is like being an oncologist and rooting for cancer.

I don't remember when I wrote that. I want to say the 7th inning. And while I recognize that it is partially histrionic, I think also that it's true.

Most baseball fans want to see their teams win, and aside from a few sociopaths or fans of teams who've been so horrible for so long that they've earned a malicious desire, very few fans want to see their teams stomp holy hell all season and win a championship effortlessly. In video games, it's one thing to play in God Mode, to force trades and make your team a roster of monsters, but in real life I think we all acknowledge that victories are sweeter for being won rather than being taken and walked off with. I think any Red Sox fan would, in a candid moment, admit that 2004 and 2007 would have been dreadfully dull without the 0-3 and 1-3 comeback runs in the ALCS to get to the World Series, because those Series games were almost painfully lopsided. (I think any good Red Sox fan would also admit that the team had an obscenely large payroll and reaped the rich benefits of the same.)

Series Blog, Games 2 & 3: Corporate Whore Stadium and, Like, Double Guitars

As I explained at painful and unfunny length in the Game One blog, I'm sports superstitious. Sure, I'll be ironic and dismissive about it, but I still take it seriously behaviorally. Sort of like a guy who constantly busts on fat chicks yet has unprotected sex with a different one every night. I might dismiss my sitting in a weird position for "Good Luck," and even mine some good jokes from doing so, but I'm still the one sincerely doing something inadvisable or aesthetically wanting with my body.

Because the Phillies had won Game One while I was chitchatting with people online, I had to do that for Game Two, right? I didn't want the Phils to lose. The problem was, the people I'd been yammering at weren't online. Thankfully, one of my few Pennsylvania buddies, a former online writer I know, was around and willing to be bugged. Let's play ball!

'Reverse Jinx?' World Series Game One — Sort of

I can't explain how I watched last year's World Series. I managed to pay attention, take notes and write not one but two live-blogs of the thing. I suppose I was distracted enough by the novelty of reacting to things via live-blogging to not collapse in a wet sack of neuroses about the games themselves. No such luck this year.

I'm genuinely sports superstitious. Even as I'm doing superstitious things, I can tell myself, "This is objectively nonsensical. There is no causal relationship between your behavior and team performance," yet I won't for a second stop whatever's occupying my attention. One time I saw my team win a late-inning playoff game while I was seated in a weird way and holding on to a magazine I'd been flipping through. I sat in that position, clutching that magazine, for the rest of the games. They won 'em all!—I developed a peculiar pain! No, seriously. I had trouble walking because I'd sat like a mutant to watch baseball. Somehow this made perfect sense at the time.

In a strangely obverse display, I once walked home from a trip to The Booze Store during the early innings of a playoff game and discovered that while I was out, the Red Sox had scored three runs. A few minutes after sitting down in front of the TV, they gave up two. I immediately left the house and walked around my neighborhood for what I later figured out was eight miles. I periodically called friends to check the score. The Sox wound up winning by nearly ten runs, but when I'd gone home in late innings and after they'd gotten a large lead, the opposing team put runners in scoring position (RISP), and I left the house again.

Having a McCarver Moment: ALCS Games 1 & 2

It was not a day well-planned. When you spend about four hours watching DVDs of The A-Team looking for godawful effects shots that you can rip off and insert in a deliberately godawful promotional video and then feel too wiped out to watch playoff baseball, you have gravely miscalculated.

But I had fun. I was with good people, and I think I strained something laughing when I saw the guy who played Rasczak in Starship Troopers guest starring as an evil taxi company mastermind who wore skin-tight nylon pants with no zippers or buttons up front, a prominent dong-bulge and a 1980s-sized cell phone improbably jammed in a pocket.

Still, when you wind up falling asleep in your chair after one inning of the first game of the American League Championship Series, you have managed your time poorly. You've done worse when you wake up and realize you didn't set the DVR to record the game. Consider this my McCarver Moment of the 2009 playoffs. Because of it, the Game One recap is going to be awfully short.

No Postseason Shower's More Delicious Than Tony La Russa's Tears

Tony La Russa is a good baseball manager. He takes teams to the postseason; he gets unexpected performances out of seemingly mediocre players. He has won championships. You could fill a railcar with sportswriters bound for ovens he designed, and they would nevertheless still lazily anoint him as humanity's closest thing to a baseball godhead. As I've said before, I hate the guy.

My antipathy for the man owes more to his press than anything he's done. But he's never repudiated his press and has instead encouraged it. There's something detached about him (a trait his followers attribute to some serenity from a higher perspective) that seems to suggest that it would be gauche for him to toot his own horn, but he wouldn't dream of pushing away someone tooting his for him. He's become his presentation, with only rare-to-nonexistent demurral. Since baseball beat writers who pretend to poetry and a spiritual understanding of what happens between actions on a baseball diamond lionize his micromanagerial maneuvering — and since their plaudits tend to manufacture a reality out of convenience or apathy — this vision of La Russa as a calculatingly remote man-shaped baseball sublimity will likely endure for generations.

MLB Playoffs '09, Day Two Roundup

I'd intended to keep a liveblog going of the three games today, but I also intended not to have a giant goddamn headache. Instead of watching the Rockies at the Phillies, I wound up lying down and listening to most of it it, then napped through a bit of the Cardinals at the Dodgers, then had the big screen commandeered to watch TiVo'd episodes of Community and The Office during part of the Sox/Angels game. I felt way too funky to put up a fight anyway.

Now of course I feel better and can't sleep, so at the risk of seeming ignorant — after all, I missed quite a bit — here are some stray observations from Day Two of the 2009 MLB playoffs:


Pregame:
• For some reason, the human mattress that is David Wells is in the TBS booth this year, and someone's already cleaned him up from Day One. That was incredible. He wore this strange brown shirt that looked like some earthy tunic a civilian guest star would get on Star Trek and, over it, a brown jacket that I swear was a Members Only™. So you had this guy who made millions as a pitcher and is probably getting paid tens of thousands to be a commentator sitting amidst three other guys dressed in suits, only he looked like he'd stolen his outfit off a pensioner passed out at the local VFW. Amazing.

Fucked-Up Video Wednesday: Gabe Newell, Death Dealer

I have no idea who Gabe Newell is. Apparently he runs Valve Media and the Steam community, but these words are meaningless to someone whose gaming enthusiasms run to forcing trades for all the best players to the Boston Red Sox and destroying the New York Yankees for an entire season, or getting completely shitfaced and then sprinting through Star Wars: Battlefront II and slaughtering Jawas because I find their screams arousing.

Online gameplay has never meant anything to me, because in-house gameplay has already permanently evolved beyond my commitment. Sure, yeah, if I stop and put some thought into it, I can play any game really well and know what all ten buttons do, but I don't care. That's work. I want to play a game. If I wanted labor at great expense to my free time, I'd swap my wife's birth control with sugar pills. What I want from a game is about six buttons, max, most of which are devoted to:

Field of Schemes: A Glimpse at the Neocon Playbook

Occasionally, we get an IM, an email or read a comment saying, "That might have gone a bit far." For instance, Ezra Klein's recent deconstruction of Megan McArdle in the Washington Post tonally paralleled a lot of what Mr. Awesome had to say about her column, and some readers reacted as if Klein had been infected with a kind of political rabies. One can only imagine their reaction had they read our piece here. Probably something on the order of setting fire to this portion of the internet to prevent the contagion from spreading.

We're not insensitive or insensible to such criticism. Admittedly, sometimes snide jabs here veer wide of the mark or hit it with a viciousness that's perhaps inappropriate. For some time now, I've regretted saying that, "Glenn Beck is such a glutinous wad of overfed white Americana that he looks like 185 pounds of lard and bull semen poured into a 5-foot 8-inch man-shaped condom." Condom was all kinds of wrong. I should have said "tapeworm."

Joking aside, sometimes the content excoriates individuals, but despite whatever attempts I make at handwringing, I can't bring myself to feel much shame or dismay at it. The targets of that acidity willfully fabricate evidence, often in service of ideas that can bring direct harm to people. Mr. Awesome flayed McArdle's column, but the column itself was like watching Harry Lime in The Third Man explaining his indifference to the specks of humanity on the ground, then interrupting his impious sermonizing to shout through a megaphone at them that his defrauding them and their being prey to indifferent death is to their benefit. Whatever I may say about Glenn Beck cannot elide that the man has stood in front of The Alamo and fetishized it as a symbol of armed insurrection, lionized a man who shot minorities in the back and killed them, then turned to his audience with a wink and a smirk that looks like it was carved out of a bucket of Country Crock, as if to say, "I'm just thinking out loud! I'm not advocating anything. By the way, the President is a Fascist because he is a Communist, like Hitler. You know what to do, gang!"

It's nearly impossible to be washed over with guilt at unkind words when these people so readily just make shit up, then couple it with equally unkind words intended to demonize the people they're already misrepresenting with contrived evidence. To give you an example of how thorough and pervasive this is, how arrogantly false it is, how almost proudly full of crap the sort of people we occasionally assail are, take baseball.