Pet Peeves

Hello Year Of The Beard readers! The Beard is in San Francisco, doing his best to channel enough greatness throughout the Rockies lineup to complete a sweep of the Giants, so I thought I'd drop in with another of my traditional gripefests. Yes, it's time for: Jim's Pet Peeves.


Pet Peeve #1: "Walk-Off"
The Beard's column yesterday, about Kendry Morales breaking his leg celebrating his walk-off grand slam, got me thinking. The World-Series type celebrations at the end of every single game these days is a Pet Peeve of mine, but I think The Beard covered that one nicely. This Pet Peeve centers on the term "walk-off." This is one of those terms that ESPN has brought to the forefront, and like most things ESPN is responsible for, it's annoying. What's wrong with "game-winning hit?" The term in Japan for a game-ending home run is a "sayonara homer," which I think is a great term.

My biggest problem with "walk-off" is that nobody seems to care what it really means. It's not meant to have a positive connotation... the pitcher is walking off the field, not the batter. The batter is prancing around like a jackass. So I would like to see the term "walk-off home run" replaced with "jackass home run."

Pet Peeve #2: Fantasy Baseball
I have no real problem with fantasy sports; in fact I've been guilty of taking part in fantasy football and baseball leagues for over 20 years. My Pet Peeve is the fact that fantasy sports are now being covered along with regular sports journalism. Sports journalism has long been the ugly, deformed half-sibling of actual journalism, and when you visit actual journalism's home, the only time you see sports jouralism is the rare occasion when it breaks out of the attic and thrashes the house trying to escape the sunlight before frantically humping your leg. With that in mind, covering fantasy sports is pretty much a new low for sports journalism, and that's saying quite a lot.

Do they not realize that fantasy sports is simply "regular" sports, filtered through nerd-brains? If you want to tell the viewer which players have the most home runs and RBI, then just say "Here is a list of the players with the most home runs and RBI." To have some guy come on and tell me which players are producing the most for fantasy teams is simply annoying, because those are the same guys who are producing for real teams!

Even more annoying is the segment where some guy emails in "I just got offered Mark Teixeira for Justin Morneau. What should I do?" (answer below). The "experts" read this question on-air, and then debate that fantasy trade for a couple minutes... and unless you are one of the half-dozen viewers in the entire world who have had this particular trade suggested to you, those will be the most frustratingly wasted and useless minutes of your entire life.

Again, I blame ESPN. What follows was going to be the conclusion to Pet Peeve #2, but it went on long enough that I've just made it Pet Peeve #3: ESPN.

There was a time when ESPN was pretty much neck-and-neck with Milwaukee's Best as The Best Thing In the Universe. I left it on for three or four hours every morning... it had all the sports highlights from every game, and it was awesome. But something has happened, and like a lot of once-awesome things (like Milwaukee's Best), it now completely sucks. The evidence for this is practically overwhelming, and part of me feels like I should not even have to list the reasons why ESPN sucks so badly, but when I get talking about bottom-of-the-barrel journalism and ridiculous fantasy sports analysis segments, it becomes clear that ESPN continues to fill a much-needed void.

Imaginary, nonsense sports (X Games, arena football, poker, WNBA) have long had a home on ESPN, but now the network is covering the way people follow sports, rather than simply covering the sports themselves. It's idiotic. Combine this recent trend with the following:

• NASCAR gets more coverage than hockey. Hockey gets Barry Melrose, and that's it.
• "Brett Favre's birthday should be a national holiday." -- Chris Berman, ESPN
• You'll have to wait through 45 minutes of NBA highlights to see any baseball recap that doesn't involve the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, or Phillies
• Joe Morgan
• Stuart Scott and every other on-air dingus who thinks that bludgeoning the English language with a "catchphrase" every 15 seconds is what creates interest in their stories
• They inexplicably give Mel Kiper -- a guy with no quantifiable ability or skill whatsoever -- continued employment. Seriously, of what possible use is a Mock Draft?

...put all these together, and I've found it extremely easy to ignore ESPN lately. I rarely even turn it on, in fact. This morning, though, was a particularly bleak day for me, as I saw a Fantasy Baseball segment on my new Best Thing In the Universe channel: MLB Network. After an awesome start, they have become more and more ESPN-y as time has gone by, and with this latest development, I feel like I just saw my long-time sweetheart holding hands with my worst enemy. We've lost something that could have been very special... and so ESPN's ability to not only suck, but to influence the suckness of others, wins them the final spot on today's Pet Peeve list. Burn in Hell, ESPN!

The correct answer to the Teixeira/Morneau trade question is, "Who gives a shit? Go get yourself a girlfriend."