Passan vs. Ben Verlander: The slap fight you never knew you needed

I know this was mentioned briefly on the baseball thread, but I thought it was thread appropriate. The Mods can **** off if they feel differently! (Or delete/merge, whichever they prefer) Anyway, what did people think of this?

https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/espns-jeff-passan-sorry-for-vulgar-ben-verlander-exchange/

They're both annoying in their own unique ways. Ben would be just another slapdick blogger/vlogger without his last name to nudge him into the forefront (and to also make it financially feasible to work for Fox during one of its semi-annual LET'S ACTUALLY PAY FOR CONTENT splurges, don't get comfortable there, anyone!). And I can never quite put my finger on what annoys me about Passan. The ironic Zoom background? (Rage Against the Machine? REALLY?) Lingering jealousy over the young fucking stud days (he was)? The fact that like most ESPN personalities, he becomes a shill for the sport he covers (wasn't there some ad he did for an MLB video game)? Or the fact he's sort of a dick on Twitter, as evidenced by, well, this? Curious everyone's thoughts.

 

tl;dr it for me.

Wasn't Passan one of the young fucking studs of the coterie 12-15 years ago?

 

We are not the story, we are the storytellers. I wish more people would keep that in mind.

 

“When you’re talking about Shohei you’re usually on your knees, though, right?” Passan replied in a since-deleted tweet.

Verlander, 30, didn’t seem fazed, however, once again returning to the subject of his brother.

“When you’re asking me for help getting a Justin interview you usually are too, huh??” he wrote.
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That's funnier than the last part of the sentence.

 

“When you’re talking about Shohei you’re usually on your knees, though, right?”

Imagine having 980,000 followers on a Twitter account tied to your work and thinking that was a smart, funny, or appropriate thing to tweet.

Also, Passan looks like half of Davey and Goliath.

 

Saturday morning in '70s LA was mint with Davey and Goliath followed by ...

 

Also, I'd pay to watch a death match between Davey and Caillou.

 

Haha, reminds me of one of the many "I can't believe they got away with that" Simpsons moments:

 

Gotta take a pause and just think for half a second before you tweet. I don’t know Jeff, but man what a stupid thing to do.

 

This might have been true in the print era. But social media seems to have changed the dynamic a lot and the content producers are now as popular as some of the athletes. Heck, while it is very stupid, I have more Twitter followers than some of the pros I cover and probably get stopped in public more often than some of them, too.

Again, all very stupid. But a lot of the business stopped making sense a long time ago.

 

Pushing back against readers' false or insulting-vulgar responses isn't a terrible thing. Having a personal line to draw and not go over, thus creating a problem for you and your employer, and knowing the employer's policies, is probably the best route.

Getting into a slap-slap bitch fight with some other dude like a couple of middle school teens is just embarrassing. What a couple of tools.