Baseball Writers STILL Don't Get It

Steve Henson of Yahoo Sports is the latest baseball scribe to write an article about criminally overpaid San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito based on the false premise that Zito was ever an elite Major League pitcher. In his article, Mr. Henson claims that Zito, whose spot in the team's postseason rotation has been taken by a 21-year-old rookie being paid $250,000, was signed to his ludicrous $126 million contract "based on his mostly seven stellar seasons with the Oakland Athletics." Furthermore, Henson falsely asserts, Zito stopped pitching well "upon collecting paychecks from the Giants."

Both of those claims are patently untrue, as I pointed out in painstaking detail back in this 2008 blog entry during spring training:

http://argyleghost.blogspot.com/2008/03/barry-zito-poster-child-for-medias-need.html

Mr. Henson's Yahoo article all-too-predictably comes with the obligatory picture of the still young, handsome and white Mr. Zito. After all, as I pointed out over two years ago, those were the real qualities for which the Giants organization paid so dearly before the start of the 2007 season.

Sadly, baseball writers - even with all evidence to the contrary at their disposal - still mistake "young, handsome and white" for "outstanding and consistent," which begs the question: if they don't understand this fallacy now, will they ever understand it?

If Barack Obama predicts the future while everybody watches and nobody notices, did it still happen?

July 30, 2008

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama – an African-American with a non-Anglo surname – said in regards to the type of campaign he expected his Republican rival John McCain to run: "Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me." Obama went on to say that the McCain campaign would also say things such as "he's [Obama] not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making.'' [emphasis added]


July 31, 2008

John McCain's campaign manager, the always historically astute Rick Davis, responded to Obama's comments with these harshly critical words: "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong." [emphasis added]


October 4, 3008

Sarah Palin, Republican John McCain's vice-presidential running mate, said these words in three separate speeches: "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country . . . this is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America." [emphasis added]

It could have been a fluke when Barack Obama predicted the disastrous path of the Iraq War with near-absurd accuracy; then he predicted with near-perfect accuracy the McCain campaign's inevitable descent into dishonest fear-mongering as its tactic of choice. Not that it was a bold prediction on Obama's part – after all, doesn't every Republican campaign eventually come to revolve around dishonest fear-mongering? – but it was nonetheless accurate. That particular statement by Sarah Palin, along with a couple of recent McCain television ads that link Obama to Vietnam-era radical-turned-professor William Ayers, are the only pieces of evidence one needs to see in order to confirm the accuracy of Obama's prediction.

The media's treatment of Obama's prediction, of course, is the problem. When the story first broke, the mainstream media – like a broken record – presented it from the Republican point of view. "Is Obama being fair?" many in the media asked. "Is it a good strategic move?" others asked. "How does McCain respond to the charge?" was another common theme. Stunningly, almost nobody asked the most important and obvious question: "Based on the recent history of Republican campaigns, is Obama correct to make such a prediction?" Sure, the question is so simple it answers itself; nonetheless, this transparency should not have disqualified it from being asked in the media. In other words, the relevance of the question should not have been negated by the ease with which it could be answered. That question is essential to understanding the Republican philosophy of electioneering and needed to be asked. Naturally, it wasn't.

Now that Obama's prediction has proven to be wholly accurate, the media has returned to the story, hasn't it? Right? Umm . . . no. Returning to the story – and thereby acknowledging its severe lack of competency in covering it from an objective point of view – would be responsible of the "liberal" mainstream media. With the 2000 and 2004 elections as sufficient proof, we should all know by now that the mainstream media is not ready to act as an adult just yet.