Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

That made me weep with joy.

 

Why's that?

 

Because the guys behind it are too busy writing sitcom scripts to keep doing it?

 

Scary talented, they are.

 

I detect a hint of sarcasm here, might want to check out what they've done.

 

Ah, FJM is back: the Matt Taibbi of sports. Whenever I don't feel I have enough material to make my point, I'll just type FUCK! The Internet will love it.

 

It's a hell of a lot better than that. It takes pious old sports writers and knocks them down a couple pegs, writers, who in the old days would never be questioned. It use to expose good ol cliched bullshit.

 

Isn't Matt Taibbi the Matt Taibbi of sports?

 

You're certainly free to think that. And I'm free to think FJM is the class clown who gets all the kids in the back of the room laughing because he's making fun of the teacher, not because of anything the teacher says but merely because he's the teacher. The blog crowd just follows along because they've chosen up sides before even reading/hearing it.

If FJM had its way, every MVP voter in the league would just go to baseball-reference.com, click on OPS+ leaders and write down the top 10 names on his ballot. That's as dogmatic and stubborn in the new world as they accuse writers of being in the old scouting world.

As to the initial article, Albom may have said it a little more angrily than he needed to, but he is right: Fantasy games detract from the enjoyment of the real games. I hated baseball by the end of my four-year Rotisserie run in 2002. These days I like it as much as when I was 12. Of course, the reaction to what I just said could be to put me in the "Get off my lawn!!!" demographic, which is as much the same cliched bullshit as bloggers-in-mom's-basement or 95 percent of the stuff that gets written on the blogs that consider FJM a friend (currying favor with the bully so as not to get picked on).

He writes about sports a lot, but he has branched into a wide variety of topics from Goldman Sachs to the media storm around McCrystal.

 

No, he is not correct. Not across the board. My love for the NFL hasn't been hurt by a decade's worth of fantasy football.

 

A fair point. I will reword to say that as an opinion piece, his view is not nearly as invalid or unheard-of as FJM makes it sound by lumping him in with the "Get off my lawn!" crowd.

 

Different strokes, I guess. My productivity was shot the hell yesterday when I realized it was FJM day on Deadspin.

I don't agree with everything they write. I'm not as much of a stat-head as they are. But I do love how they puncture the reflexive thinking and writing that too many of the big-name columnists in our business tend to rely on. The Albom take down was brilliant. That was tacky, sentimental crap Albom wrote, filled with cliches and lazy thinking.

It's worth noting, too, that the FJM guys are raising money for the Jimmy Fund/Sloan-Kettering in honor of Mike Celizic, whom they often ripped to shreds but who was apparently an incredibly good sport. They wrote a nice tribute about him last night.

But, this is all over thinking things. I just think they're funny as hell. That's enough for me.