Archive for the ‘Book of Moron’ Category

If the writers who came up with the laughable pile of horseshit that appeared today at ESPN could kindly take Joe Girardi’s cock out of their mouths for a moment, I’d like to take a minute or two to make sure we’re all clear that they are both a couple of fucking turd-brained imbeciles.

Amy K. Nelson and Peter Keating tell us they have some troubling “evidence” to suggest that the Jays may have been stealing signs. The Jays.

Opposing players say they’ve seen it happening! Jays players sometimes hit home runs at Rogers Centre! Um… also… ahhh… ummm…. go Yankees!!!!

Holy shit, with that kind of evidence against them the Jays must be stealing signs! That’s crazy!

I mean, never mind the fact that Jays must be so fucking terrible at cheating that they’re just 28 and 27 at home this year. Never mind that they’re so bad at cheating that they were fucking no-hit at home this year by Justin Verlander. Never mind that their team OPS at home (.770) is a whopping 11 points higher than the .759 OPS visitors to the Rogers Centre have put up. Clearly, these intrepid reporters have got this sizzling loaf of story locked down: chickenshit anonymous shitbag relievers claim they saw a man in white signalling pitches at the Rogers Centre to Jays hitters, so… case closed, right?

It makes too much sense!

And it’s probably why Jose Bautista is such a piece of shit hitter on the road, compared to when he’s getting all those signals from the “man in white.” A 1.030 OPS outside Rogers Centre and just 17 of his 33 home runs? Pffffft. And I believed in you, Jose!

Ohhhhhhh, but wait! The pair of shitstains is talking about 2010! Um… right?

Sure, they refer to incidents in 2011 involving visits from the Yankees and the Red Sox, and they tell us that “last September” the whispers “started to gain momentum in the mainstream media,” which was taking place “as ESPN began investigating the sign-stealing allegations” (which– along with the fact that we’re four months into a new season, and that the number crunching required here isn’t exactly rocket surgery– kinda suggests to me that their “analysis” probably has a lot of 2011 in it). But the statistical “evidence” they provide is all based on 2010– when the Jays did experience a surprising spike in their power numbers at home… which has since normalized (their .230 home ISO last year is down to .182 in 2011– rather similar to the .180 they put up in 2009, no?)– so that must be the year they’re talking about!

And… I guess maybe what that means they’re suggesting is that the Jays got the brilliant idea to start stealing signs in 2010, and since that went so fucking swimmingly as to rocket the club to a completely fucking expected fourth place in the AL East– the thirteenth best record in baseball!– they decided to keep doing it in 2011, even though Dwayne Murphy was the only holdover from the coaching staff. And also they somehow got even worse at it.

Oh, but they’re still doing it! Don’t kid yourself, you fucking homerish, blind-defenders of everything the Jays do! Your team is still totally stealing signs– totally– they’re just really, really bad at it now.

I mean, that must be the case, otherwise the only explanation I can come up with for this abortion of an article is that the Worldwide Leader employs the kind of fucking morons who’d haplessly fall for conspiracy theories about every single outlier season ever in the history of sports– and that just can’t be! ESPN wouldn’t employ a pair of complete proposterous fucking hack clowns and actually publish whatever mealy shit that dribbles from their keyboards’ assholes, would they???

There are several reasons why I’m loathe to go out of my way to shit on the shittacular, pageview-whoring, shit salad of a dump of a that-horseshit-passes-for-analysis? of a fucking moronic slideshow of a worthless turd stew of a snake oil-covered shitshow fake sports site like Bleacher Report.

For one, it’s a turd-tacular dump of a yogurt-brained piece of unbelievably worthless SEO-pillaging shit-warehouse of bloated ass-content that doesn’t deserve link one from me or anybody else.

For two, what passes for content over there is generally the sharted-out thoughts of casual-fan shlubs with an IQ somewhere below that of the average Wilner caller, so it’s pretty much fish in a barrell.

For three, it just feels kinda wrong to be so dismissive of such a large group of writers like that, because it’s pretty much exactly how mainstream writers responded years ago when bloggers started showing up, stealing their traffic, and basically calling them drunken, talentless hacks– and those drunken, talentless hacks were rightly called out for doing so.

Still, though, what looms above all else is the fact that Bleacher Report is a giant gaping suckhole for anything resembling intelligent commentary for sports. And their “editors” (who I’m sure are as totally real as God, the Keebler elves and David Wells’ “personal trainers”) will actually let whatever poor soul has been granted access to post on their “magnificent,” Google-rapey platform dribble shit like this from his keyboard’s mouth:

“There are about five second basemen that I would rather have than Aaron Hill, namely Robinson Cano, Dustin Pedroia, Rickie Weeks, Ben Zobrist, Brandon Phillips and Ian Kinsler. … If Hill was to hit the free agent market at the end of the year, more than half of the MLB will see Hill as an upgrade at second base and not a downgrade.”

Um… first off, really fucking great job counting to five there, champ.

For two… ahhhh… Aaron Hill ranks 20th of 21 qualified second basemen in WAR according to FanGraphs. [And a big congratulations to the San Francisco Giants for picking up Orlando Cabrera before the trade deadline, the only guy who ranks worse!]

In his astonishingly fucking awful 2010, he was somehow actually marginally better! Hill ranked 13th of 16 second basemen, and put up 1.2 WAR for the season. This year he’s actually below replacement level: -0.2 WAR– again, according to FanGraphs (Baseball reference has him at 1.1 WAR last year and 0.2 this year).

And this will come as a shock to you: over the last two years he’s been two wins worse than Alberto fucking Callaspo and 16th of 20 qualified second basemen. Even if you look at the last three years, and include his 4.1 WAR, 36 home run 2009, and he’s still 17th of 19 qualified second basemen!

That’s how fucking awful he’s been for these last two years!!!!!!!

And– newsflash!– just in case anyone starts getting the idea that maybe his rank among qualified second basemen doesn’t tell the whole story, even if you expand this year’s leaderboard to include guys with as few as 250 plate appearances, Hill stays second last! Thirtieth of 31 second basemen in WAR! Nearly half of whom (14) have fewer plate appearances!

THIS ISN’T COMPLICATED, ESOTERIC, UNIVERSITY-LEVEL STUFF, PEOPLE. I’m sorry, but Aaron Hill is– much like the analysis offered by Bleacher Report– seriously fucking terrible.

“You guys are quite content with mediocrity.. I, on the other hand, like to see more than 80 win seasons.” – Tweetings from the hilariously-misguided high horse of @FarrellBall.

Move over Spencer Kyte (oh, wait, you already did?), because there’s a new fucking moron in town! I kinda hesitate to draw attention to a blog that is so completely out to lunch, or that may just be one giant profanity-laced piss take (homage much?), or to bite down so hard on the bait being offered in the direction of Parkes and I, but… who the fuck is the joker that runs Farrell Ball and what fucking birth defect has made him think he can pull off beating on a straw man in the shape of us, stuffed with misrepresentations, with a turd-stick of his own fucking cluelessness?

Yesterday on Twitter dipshit starts railing against us because he “can’t handle when @dustinparkes and @AndrewStoeten start gushing over Thames and Snider only a week after saying they have no future in MLB.”

“You might want to go back and watch your podcast after the Braves game,” suggests this moronic little grammar-wizard over the span of a couple tweets. “All commenters were calling for the young guys…. to be called up.. and yet you two fucking morons called Snider and Thames ‘DONE’ based on there previous stints in the majors.”

Newsflash– as you like to say– champ, we were talking about Thames and Cooper after that game, and we were hardly calling them “DONE,” we were simply not enthused about their prospects of being anything more than fringe-regular Major Leaguers– which is exactly what we agreed on about Thames yesterday, who Parkes pointed out– as he’d written in a post at Getting Blanked earlier– needs to be better at taking pitches.

And, of course, we’ve been unwavering in our lust for Travis Snider, and it’s fucking absurd that shit-for-brains here would actually attempt to get away with suggesting otherwise.

Of course, I wouldn’t put it past dickless Pete to have mistaken my sarcastic comment about Thames giving the Jays spark as “gushing,” after all, he’s one of the astonishing fucking hysterical cretins who rages about Rogers not pissing away money like they’re the New York Mets or Chicago Cubs.

It takes a serious absence of cerebellum to have missed the fact that Rogers paid $11-million to facilitate the Wells and Halladay trades ($16.25-million if you include the sunk cost that was Juan Rivera), that they were the third-highest spending team in the 2010 draft (only barely behind Washington and Pittsburgh, who had picks like Bryce Harper and Jameson Taillon inflating their totals) and will certainly be up there again this year, that they dramatically expanded the scouting department, that they reinvested a lot of their savings on Wells into Bautista, that they’ve been as active as any club with international free agents (committing $10-million to Adeiny Hechavarria alone, signing Adonis Cardona for more than any Venezuelan amateur ever– $2.8-million– and just this week paying the most for any Latin American infielder signed this year– $1.3-million to Dawel Lugo), etc. et-cocksucking-cetera.

Oh, but hang on, apparently you’re just a sheep if you believe “management’s nonsense.” Apparently Rogers won’t have proven their commitment to winning baseball until they go out and start moronically giving $14-million a year to the husk that used to be Adam Dunn, signing Jayson Werth to the exact same contract as Vernon Wells, or whatever other dumbfuckery it takes to make a big enough splash to ease the tiny minds of morons who won’t believe money is being spent until they see some real long term damage being done to the club for the sake of providing some kind of band-aid short-sighted solution that isn’t even going to be enough to help a roster this thin make the playoffs out of the AL East anyway.

Holy shit-covered donkey balls, what a useless excuse for baseball analysis you’ve provided us, FarrellBall fuckhead. If you’re going to try to make the quick jump to the Jays blog big leagues by shitting all over us, could you please at least have the common courtesy not to be dumb as fuck.

Kisses!

“The question is, is he on some kind of performance enhancer? And I think the answer is something like 90-95% likely.” – Max Kellerman of the Max and Marcellus show on 710 ESPN Los Angeles.

To be blunt, “moron” does not do justice to the raging fucking dumbfuck buffoonery spewed for fifteen minutes into a microphone by Max Kellerman during the second hour of Tuesday’s edition of his Los Angeles radio show with former NFL defensive lineman Marcellus Wiley. (Starts at the 15 minute mark.)

Nor, frankly, does it do justice to anybody who thought it was a reasonable idea to put this fucking clown on the radio, pretending like an asshole that he has some kind of “expertise” on the symptoms and effects of steroid use because he can read the Baseball Reference page of a player who was mediocre for a few years and then got really good.

And how does he demonstrate that “expertise,” you ask? By calmly reading numbers from Bautista’s Pirate days, then going verbally shit ape as he reads his recent numbers.

BECAUSE OBVIOUSLY THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES SOMEONE A GOOD BASEBALL PLAYER IS STEROIDS, EH, YOU FUCKING SIMPLETON?

“When the only thing that changes is production,” he says, referring to the fact that he has head so far up his ass that he doesn’t know that Bautista’s swing has dramatically changed from the time in Pittsburgh, “then you have to start asking questions.”

“Everyone is doing mental gymnastics to explain why Bautista has suddenly become Jimmie Foxx,” says professor dipshit, who apparently hates it when people go to the trouble of actually, you know, thinking. Why??? Why would you bother thinking about something when the answer is right there in your face: anybody who unexpectedly gets really good at something is a cheater, and anybody who doesn’t see it the way Dr. Max Kellerman, PED, does is some naive dupe or an apologist for the game.

“Those are steroid numbers,” says this astonishing fuckface. “It reminds me a lot of what everybody was saying about Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when they started hitting home runs.”

Hey, and that’s totally a fair comparison– y’know, as long as you’re a fucking piece of shit and willingly forget that those two were hardly the only suspected PED users at that time, that they weren’t drug tested, and that Mark McGwire used to look like fucking this!

“If the fact is that he’s natural, then it’s not fair to Jose Bautista and I apologize, I’m sorry. I think it’s a 5% likelihood.”

Jesus, Kellerman, are you really this fucking dumb? Sure, there’s a chance that anybody is on some kind of performance enhancer, but– well, for one, anyone who thinks that turning a mediocre baseball player into a Hall of Famer is a simple as a couple injections obviously is too dumb to know jack shit about the subject to begin with. For two, to act like it’s just this one guy who can get the magical stuff, who can beat the tests, who can do it without any perceptible changes to his body type, and– as I’ve said way to many times already– started doing it at the exact same fucking moment that he made changes to his swing?

Just so incredibly stupid. I wish there were some kind of test for brain cells, because I’d love to see this moron fail.

Oh, wait… I think there actually might be!

“The ball is just jumping off his bat. If you didn’t know any better, you’d say he had a little cork in it.” – Hawk Harrelson, in-fucking-sufferable homer announcer for the Chicago White Sox.

Yesterday, rather than step into the horseshitty murk of making baseless PED accusations in the direction of Jose Bautista, Hawk Harrelson decided to go another, no less horseshitty direction, maybe not quite making the suggestion that Bautista might be corking his bat, but at least legitimizing whichever fucking shitstains among his audience might think the suggestion isn’t ridiculous.

Not only is it utterly fucking baseless to make the suggestion– not to mention unfair, and totally assholish– it’s also rather stupid, since corked bats do shit all. The MythBusters said so!

So, there’s one fucking moron for the day– albeit one who we pretty much knew about anyway, and one who, at least, faced Bautista after the game, though apparently he wasn’t quite man enough to bring up his ridiculous comments. “In a seemingly unrelated event,” writes John Lott of the National Post, “Harrelson made a visit to the Toronto clubhouse after the game, and, wearing a big grin, headed straight to Bautista’s locker. The two chatted amiably for a few minutes. Apparently, the content of Bautista’s bat did not come up.”

As for our second moron? We have the usually-excellent Larry Brown of Larry Brown Sports, whose audio clip of Harrelson’s statements is being passed all over the internet today.

On one hand it’s great to see Hawk’s dumbfuckery being spread and called out far and wide, unfortunately, the accompanying article features statements as completely brainless as anything Harrelson said.

“Many people have suspected Bautista of using PEDs, and given the amount of successful major leaguers who have been busted over time, that wouldn’t totally be unfair,” Larry writes.

Um… wrong. But we’ll get back to that in a moment. Later he lays this on us:

“Now Hawk’s throwing it out there that if you didn’t know any better, you’d say he’s corking his bat. Well Hawk, if you know better, then why did you suggest it? That to me sounds like someone so impressed you don’t believe what you’re seeing, and that you don’t think it’s natural. You might as well say he’s getting injections in the tunnel to the clubhouse between innings. If you don’t think he’s doing it, then don’t throw it out there.”

That actually sounds kinda bang on, until you notice that he concludes the previous paragraph with this statement about Bautista, “Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he were using some substances.”

I’m not sure how the hell that’s any different than Hawk’s comment– which is kinda odd, because I’m pretty sure he just told Hawk that “if you don’t think he’s doing it, then don’t throw it out there.”

All in all, though, I don’t think that would be so incredibly terrible… were it not for what Brown continues saying in the comments. “Plenty of star players who rose to prominence turned out to be juicing,” he writes, dickishly talking down to frequent DJF commenter Mick_In_Ithaca. “It would be naive to not at least consider the possibility. But I understand, you’re a big fan so you don’t want to think of the possibility. I get that.”

Later, he expands on/repeats that, saying that “given the amount of stars in the game who turned out to be using, it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that Bautista were in something. I didn’t say he is, I said it wouldn’t be a surprise. And it really shouldn’t be one for anyone who’s paid attention. You just don’t want to think about it because it takes away from your enjoyment of the game and I understand that.”

Yes, Sigmund Freud. The only reason anyone gets defensive about PED whispers is that they’re forcing themselves to be blind to the possibility in order to save their enjoyment of Bautista’s performance. Nothing at all to do with the fact that it’s horrifically unfair to slag the guy without a fucking shred of anything vaguely resembling evidence. Or the fact that the sluggers of the past you’re grouping him with were many– not just one isolated player. Or that those steroid-era guys physically transformed into cartoonish monsters before our eyes. Or that, y’know, they played in an era where there was no drug testing.

Oh, but we’re the ones being naive. Not the people who think horseshit like: back when they didn’t test for PEDs tonnes of guys pumped themselves full of steroids until their forearms were the size of Jose Bautista’s thighs and hit a shitload of home runs, ergo, anyone who now hits home runs is a suspect, even though he’s passing tests left and right, there have been no perceptible physical changes in him, he started dropping bombs exactly when he changed his swing, and he’s apparently the only one who has found the magic, undetectable potion that makes it all possible.

Not a complete fucking farce of a disgrace of a completely baseless opinion at all, pal. But what else can we expect from a guy who… well… I’m not saying I think Larry Brown is a wife beater, I just wouldn’t be surprised if he is. But hey, if you want to be naive and ignore that possibility because it takes away from your enjoyment of his work, I get that.

This afternoon over at Getting Blanked, Parkes posted a thoroughly enjoyable takedown of some intellectually bankrupt tool from the New York Daily News, replacing the name “Jose Bautista” in John Harper’s lazy Damian Cox impression of a piece of shit with “Curtis Granderson,” the Yankees’ surprising slugger– who we spoke with Ken Davidoff about on the latest episode of the Getting Blanked Podcast!– about whom nobody is whispering moronically.

In the comments of Parkes’s post it was pointed out that Harper’s is hardly the only piece of “gotta ask the question” nonsense spinning out of control from the minds of the laziest of shitty hacks from across the sportswriting universe.

Witness Kirk Minihane of Boston’s WEEI, who lists his top ten hitters in baseball, and gives the following explanation for placing Bautista fourth:

“I’m sorry, it’s hard for me to look at Bautista’s career numbers before and after 2010 and not come to the conclusion that something else other than adjustments in his batting stance and a new attitude might be the reason he’s hitting home runs at this pace. Total baseball McCarthyism, I understand, but this is the real world. But the facts are the facts: The guy has hit 73 home runs since the beginning of the 2010 season and no one else has more than 49 (Paul Konerko).”

Yes, genius. Jose Bautista is the only player in Major League Baseball to have found an undetectable amazing steroid that turns ordinary ballplayers into superhuman baseball Gods without causing any physical changes, and whoever is supplying it to him refuses to sell it to anybody else, Bautista won’t give any to his countless shitty teammates, and he just fucking happened to start taking this magical drug that– again– whatever shady motherfucker he gets it from, for some incompre-fucking-hensible reason refuses to sell to anybody else, at exactly the same time he made noticeable changes to his swing.

That’s probably exactly what the fuck is going on.