Once the New York Yankees were mercifully eliminated from MLB’s playoffs (after embarrassing the we-can’t-hit-or-field Red Sox), I relaxed and watched a lot of the games for pure enjoyment, and did get a kick out of Yanks’ diehard fans making crazy declarations on Twitter. Fire Aaron Boone and Brian Cashman? All the same to me. I don’t have a strong rooting interest in the World Series, starting tomorrow night, but as an American League guy I’ll passively pull for the Blue Jays over the Dodgers, whose front office (and owners) are the smartest and creative in the game.
Unlike some viewers, I didn’t mind Hall-of-Famer John Smoltz’s commentary during the ALCS. He’s gabby, making each pitch a mini-series, mentions his golf game too much, but like Ron Darling and A.J. Pierzynski has knowledge (and PG-rated anecdotes from his playing days) and is less irksome than most regular-season “color” commentators. I tune out de facto ads like “Statcast courtesy of Google Cloud” and let my wander about past baseball seasons.
Anyway, the TV guys run laps around the sportswriters, several of whom are still employed by newspapers, who get worse every year. In the late-20th century I made fun of Roger Angell’s long New Yorker articles about the World Series (usually published around Christmas); Angell—especially his non-sports essays—was an excellent writer but got carried away, calling players “gladiators” and “warriors,” which was silly. However, compared to the stories I read about Shohei Ohtani’s latest, and best, achievement last Friday night, pitching six innings of shutout ball, whiffing 10 and hitting three homers, I retrospectively feel a little churlish about past needling of Angell or Thomas Boswell, who were, if not “appointment reading,” always worthwhile.
Here’s the lead of The Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes report on the Dodgers’ NLCS pennant clinch: “This is Beethoven at the piano. This is Shakespeare with a quill… This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of the debate: Shohei is the best baseball player who has ever played the game, the most talented hitter and pitcher of an era in which data and nutrition have made an everyman’s sport a game for superhumans… And Friday night was his Mona Lisa.”
I’ve no idea if Tiger Beat still exists, but that’s the Davy Jones/Bobby Sherman rhapsody in Janes’ “quill.” Never mind the Shakespeare comparison—at a time when political reporters describe the most mundane actions of Trump or Obama as the equivalent of “a Greek tragedy” or The Odessey, attentive readers are inured to such absurdity—but combined with Beethoven and da Vinci, in one paragraph, it’s fair to wonder whether Janes is paying the Post to allow her to write this drivel. Sportswriting dies in darkness!
By contrast, The New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas wrote a thoughtful essay the day after the Dodgers’ clinch. She did say Ohtani’s feat “was the greatest performance by the greatest player in history,” but I don’t think many who saw the game would disagree. But Thomas’ analysis of the playoffs was the most astute I read. Unlike hysterics who say the Dodgers are ruining baseball with their big-spending—the worst say their success guarantees a player’s strike after the 2026 season; unpredictable, but I doubt the union’s members, especially older athletes looking for that last contract, will leave so much money on the table—Thomas isn’t hopped up on handfuls of Reese’s Pieces like her competitors or some of the most nutty Woodstock ‘25 #NoKings protesters last Saturday. She writes: “[The Dodgers] have become a symbol of something bigger than a juggernaut. They’re sometimes framed as an existential threat to other teams. It’s a strange argument—the Brewers, not the Dodgers, had the best record in baseball during the regular season… If anything, the two franchises seemed to support the notion that payroll is only loosely correlated to success.”
Back to the ridiculous. I hardly ever look at The Athletic (launched in 2016 and purchased by The New York Times in 2022), because its hyperbolic content is a bitter reminder of when the likes of The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated and writers like Dave Anderson and Robert Lipsyte ruled the roost. Jayson Stark, longtime drone baseball writer, who did a long stretch at ESPN and is now at The Athletic, was on a par (or quadruple-bogey) with Chelsea Janes in his recounting Ohtanti’s Oct. 17th feat. (Not surprisingly, Ohtani’s rumored gambling outlays and other questionable off-field business practices have been at least temporarily erased, perhaps at the insistence of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred.)
Stark’s lead: “There are stars. There are rock stars. And then there’s whatever supernatural phenomenon that Shohei Ohtani is.”
And then: “But what the amazing Ohtani did Friday? That has never happened. Never. Ever. Regular season. Postseason. Any league. Any ballpark. Any continent. Any solar system.”
What’s a reader supposed to do with that? Ohtani’s the best baseball player I’ve ever seen: topping Mays, Mantle, Koufax, Pedro Martinez, Trout and Rickey Henderson, to name but a few. But the hero worship, the “jock-sniffing,” and Stark’s line, “this caped crusader from the mysterious planet Ohtanus,” defiles the memory of the men (and occasionally women) who wrote seriously about sports.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023