There’s a common thread to bad writing: the writer tries too hard, writes some bad shit, but mistakenly believes he’s committed Poetry or Literature or Truth. That this happens to sportswriters is both puzzling and hilarious, given their feeble grasp of the language, but it does provide an opening for hypercritical jerks like me. Today’s offering comes from outside of Northeast Florida, but indulge me. It’s baseball playoff time, and there are few things ol’ Budge likes more than hunkering down in the basement and crunching stats and watching a four-hour playoff game. One of the things I like more is the sycophantic faux-poetic baseball column. Ladies and gentleman, ESPN’s Howard Bryant wants to gush about Dusty Baker. It will be painful.
"Light a candle," Dusty Baker says, his lone voice softly skimming the looming silence of the empty church. "I'm sure there's someone out there you want to pray for."
I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything by Mr. Bryant, and I clicked on his column to see if there was anything enlightening about Baker, who has been successful as a manager but holds some odd baseball opinions (denigrating on-base percentage, for example, which is wrong, but let’s move on). Dusty can be nutty, but Bryant instantly vaulted past him in the first paragraph. Not a bad quote, but look at the dreck in between. A voice is skimming the looming silence? No. No.
He lights a candle, points the flickering matchstick downward in his large hands, the athlete's hands, dousing it into the cool sand. It is here in the solitude of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral -- funded by Ohio Catholics who donated 12 cents per month toward its construction in 1841 -- where Johnnie B. Baker, born Baptist in California, raised in the traditions of the southern black church, kneels alone among the long pews and nourishes his spirituality.
A little history lesson, eh? OK, fine. I’ve got all night -- really, all night, the playoffs don’t start until tomorrow. But I’m already wondering how much it cost to build this church funded by 12-cent donations. Seventy-three dollars? Twelve hundred lire? And I’m afraid you won’t tell me and that you’ll come back to this old-church reference in a lame and predictable way.
After several moments of prayer, he rises and walks gingerly toward the altar, marveling at the Greek architecture, the Corinthian columns and stained glass mosaics, comforted, despite its bruises, by the sanctuary and the ritual of the church.
Things that might be bruised, based on how this sentence reads: Greek architecture, Corinthian columns, the sanctuary or the ritual of the church. Don’t ask me how the ritual (sic) could be bruised.
"I come in here before homestands, sometimes a couple of times a week during the season," said Baker.
OK, this is Journalism 101: your attribution should be in the same tense (past, if you’re wondering). The first quote is followed by ‘Baker says,’ this one by ‘Baker said.’
"I pray for my family, for my team, and for Barack Obama, because I've never seen people try to take a president down like this, never seen such anger. I mean, what did he do to anybody?"
(wondering angrily why Howard Bryant won’t start writing about baseball): Note From Your Apparently Imaginary Editors: Drop the politics, write about baseball.
History surrounds Baker this morning, as it does every morning. He is humbled by its density,
The density of history makes me itchy, or at least it would if the density of history had a meaning.
energized by its lineage and his place in it. The ghosts are touching him.
This is where it starts to go off the rails. Bad writing is one thing, invoking ghosts, unless you’re writing a piece of fiction that has ghosts, is awful in a new way. Also, where are these ghosts touching him?
History is not something that happened to others a long time ago,
Yes. That’s exactly what history is.
but alive as the river upon whose banks his team plays.
Are the Reds actually playing on the banks of the... oh, never mind.
His baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, the original professional ballclub in America, proud but down and dowdy in an era of big money, is on the cusp of a first playoff series since 1995, revived by a man who has won three Manager of the Year Awards but was run out of two big jobs in San Francisco and Chicago, and out of baseball in 2007.
‘Proud but down and dowdy?’ I think these failed stabs at poetry by Howie (I’m going to call him Howie because he writes like a precocious eight-year-old) are the result of him running a hip-hop beat through his head as he writes his column. I have zero evidence for this, but then he has zero evidence for ghosts that molest Dusty Baker.
Thirty-eight years ago, Baker had just completed his fifth season in the major leagues when Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series between the Reds and Oakland A's at old Riverfront Stadium.
Um, OK. Weird transition, but let’s see where he goes with this.
Robinson would be dead nine days later, but before he passed, he said famously he hoped there would one day be a black third-base coach or field manager in the major leagues. The National League, first to integrate, would not integrate the managerial ranks until 10 years after Robinson's death. Robinson died in 1972, and Baker, 36 years after, became the Reds' first African-American manager.
(slapping my face to stay awake) Jesus, that’s a bad paragraph. Here, I’ll help by rewriting that first sentence. “Robinson made headlines by saying he hoped one day to see a black manager in the majors. He died nine days later.” Short, succinct, not awkward. You’re welcome, Howie. The rest of your paragraph is even worse.
"I think about that. He said that here," Baker said of Robinson. "Imagine being able to win a World Series in the place where Jackie Robinson made his last public appearance, where he said that."
You would have to imagine it, Dusty, since the stadium where Jackie spoke in 1972 was torn down in 2002.
Baker lurches his silver Toyota Tundra
Baker is a bad driver? Why else would you use that verb? (the verb, in that sentence, was ‘lurches’). Also, weird transition.
along West 8th Street south, toward the Ohio River and the Great American Ballpark. The river stirs more ghosts.
Fuck. Again with the ghosts.
In September 1841, when the region's Irish Catholics donated their pennies to build St. Peter's, where moments earlier Baker's hands waded through holy water, black and Irish dockworkers engaged in three days of rioting, quelled only when the city dispatched the military.
My amusement is starting to curdle into anger: that sentence suggests that Baker’s hands waded (really, goddammit? his hands waded?) through holy water moments before something ethnic and violent went down in 1841.
The fighting took place above ground ("Riots and Mobs, Confusion and Blood Shed," wrote the Sept. 6, 1841, Cincinnati Daily Gazette) but under the streets, at the grassroots, whites and blacks conspired to subvert the system. Baker -- known since his playing days as a bridge between black, white and Latino players -- feels these ghosts, too, understanding that he, as the poet Maya Angelou once wrote, is the dream of the slave.
(throwing up my hands in confusion) What the hell, Howie? 19th century whites and blacks gathered in a subterranean clubhouse to subvert the system ... Latino ghosts ... Maya Angelou. Does no one read your copy before it’s posted?
He points directly in front of him, at the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, situated next door to the ballpark, a museum that displays portions of the original Underground Railroad. He mentions that behind him, in the deep basement of the watering hole O'Malley's in the Alley off of Vine Street, just under his feet, remnants of other tunnels that weaved from the south to Canada, to freedom, still remain.
Five commas in one sentence. Bad idea.
"You have to remember that Ohio was a free state and Kentucky was a slave state," Baker says. "The Underground Railroad was right here. Sometimes I close my eyes and think about that, about what that must have been like. 'Just get across the river and you're free. Just get across the river.'"
Forget all the details of everything that happened in San Francisco to turn a baseball renaissance into the bitterest memory: from former Giants managing partner Peter Magowan attempting to diminish Baker's achievements (as the walls closed in, Magowan once said that Baker's Manager of the Year awards had less to do with him and more with the organization), to the 5-0 lead and nine outs from the first World Series championship in San Francisco Giants history to the runaway envy that led club executives to privately refer to Baker derisively as their "celebrity manager."
Another weird transition, but even worse: a 96-word sentence.
Forget Chicago 2003, when Baker was a hair from taking the Cubs to the World Series, up three games to one on the Florida Marlins, coming home with Kerry Wood and Mark Prior on the mound to close out the National League Championship Series. Forget Steve Bartman.
"Chicago wasn't good to me at the end, but it was good for me," Baker said. "You don't want it to end like that, because everybody wants to be the one to do it, to win the World Series. I still think I was the one to do it. Didn't happen."
Chicago was mean to Dusty, but it was good for him in the long run. Can you elaborate on that? No? Sigh.
Think instead first about him being a kid, and the promise of having your entire life in front of you, 19 years old, protected by the great Henry Aaron. It was Henry who promised Johnnie and Christine Baker back in 1967 to always look out for their son. It was Henry who introduced Dusty to the world, jazz clubs and civil rights and the big leagues. It was Dusty who was on deck when Henry hit home run No. 715 that night in April 1974. It was Dusty -- oldest child, Marines platoon leader, big league manager but always heir to Aaron and his dad and the dreams of Robinson -- who was always the prodigy.
Wait, Dusty was not just a Marine but a platoon leader, and maybe, based on the timing, in Vietnam? I would be much more interested in the Dusty Baker Story, and a little less dismissive of Howie’s shitty writing, if he gave me some details about that.
Today, the prodigy is gone. Only the adult remains. Dusty Baker is 61 years old and the hell of aging conflicts with his boyish fire for baseball.
‘The hell of aging ... the boyish fire.’ Lame.
His dad, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., always a signature presence in the dugouts pregame where his son managed, died in 2009 at the age of 84 from, as Dusty says, "diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia, everything."
To be the adult means looking ahead and seeing no one ahead of him, no one leading the way. It means walking to the mound to remove a pitcher while talking to your father, who is gone physically, as Baker has done this season.
If I were a Reds fan, I would be alarmed by the fact that our manager talks to dead guys while making pitching changes.
In November 2001, after a routine checkup, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The doctors were aggressive, immediately removing the prostate -- no radiation treatments, no chemotherapy.
You didn’t think this piece could get worse, did you? Just wait.
"They told me I had to have a PSA [prostate-specific antigen].
You should say ‘test’ here, even if Dusty didn’t. You could put it in brackets or something.
They had been charting me, told me it was 1.0, 2.1 and then they told me I spiked to 4.0 [PSA levels under four nanograms per millileter generally indicate the absence of cancer]. It wasn't a huge surprise because all the Baker-Russell men died early," Baker said. "They took out the entire prostate."
Information I don’t need: Dusty Baker’s prostatectomy. By the way, who are they facing in the playoffs that start Wednesday? Have you named a single player on the 2010 Reds?
The 242 home runs he hit as a player, the three World Series appearances, all the years he walked into a bar and the place -- the women, especially --
Dusty, you scamp
went wild, all those years in the clubhouse as a member of the world-class athlete fraternity, all disappeared in the face of his mortality. Baker was the leader of a group of men whose identities are forged on the physical, and accepting the withering effects of cancer -- being unable to maintain an erection, for one -- was a difficult reality to confront.
‘Forged on the physical’? Christ, you’re bad. Here’s a difficult reality to confront: an ESPN columnist getting way too specific about the effects of prostate cancer.
"It changes your idea of your own manhood. You think you're this macho cat, but you're not," he said. "With some patients, the nerves never come back and you lose your erection permanently.
Make it stop. Please?
With others, it can come back on its own. I was lucky, some of the nerves returned. Luckily, they have those blue pills these days, knock on wood.
Pun! If I was listening to this I would either change the channel or, if I heard it in person, rip my ears off to avoid hearing any more.
People may laugh, but these things mess with your head, make you rethink how you see yourself. You question your whole sense of being.
"Some of the guys used to make fun of me back then -- I'm not ashamed to say it -- because one of the side effects is incontinence.
Oh. Oh no.
I was walking around wearing a diaper because I couldn't stop peeing all the time. The guys would see those things in my office, look at me and say, 'Are these your diapers?'"
Howie, wtf?
Still, don't forget the slights because they are unimportant. Forget them because, they are today, in the face of disease attacking his body and age taking his family from him, unimportant gnats to be brushed aside.
That last sentence was so bad, Howie, I’ve shifted from feeling sorry for Dusty to hating your writing again. In like 5 seconds.
Still, Baker remembers them all, and at times in his office, hours before the Reds will clinch a division title, it requires enormous concentration for him not to think about the member of the Giants ownership team who once sat him down and told him he needed to learn to be "more of a company man." To not think about the fact that he has taken three different teams to the postseason, could win a fourth manager of the year award and yet finds himself constantly hounded by the criticisms of what he supposedly cannot do, that he cannot win with young players or handle pitching staffs.
That last string of words is not a sentence, sir. Return to your high school and seek out a competent English teacher. Apologize.
The article goes on for another 50,000 words, but it’s about players and teams and playoff-relevant stuff, rather than ghosts and prostates, and who gives a shit about that when we can leave with the image of Dusty Baker walking around a major league clubhouse in a diaper?
"Light a candle," Dusty Baker says, his lone voice softly skimming the looming silence of the empty church. "I'm sure there's someone out there you want to pray for."
I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything by Mr. Bryant, and I clicked on his column to see if there was anything enlightening about Baker, who has been successful as a manager but holds some odd baseball opinions (denigrating on-base percentage, for example, which is wrong, but let’s move on). Dusty can be nutty, but Bryant instantly vaulted past him in the first paragraph. Not a bad quote, but look at the dreck in between. A voice is skimming the looming silence? No. No.
He lights a candle, points the flickering matchstick downward in his large hands, the athlete's hands, dousing it into the cool sand. It is here in the solitude of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral -- funded by Ohio Catholics who donated 12 cents per month toward its construction in 1841 -- where Johnnie B. Baker, born Baptist in California, raised in the traditions of the southern black church, kneels alone among the long pews and nourishes his spirituality.
A little history lesson, eh? OK, fine. I’ve got all night -- really, all night, the playoffs don’t start until tomorrow. But I’m already wondering how much it cost to build this church funded by 12-cent donations. Seventy-three dollars? Twelve hundred lire? And I’m afraid you won’t tell me and that you’ll come back to this old-church reference in a lame and predictable way.
After several moments of prayer, he rises and walks gingerly toward the altar, marveling at the Greek architecture, the Corinthian columns and stained glass mosaics, comforted, despite its bruises, by the sanctuary and the ritual of the church.
Things that might be bruised, based on how this sentence reads: Greek architecture, Corinthian columns, the sanctuary or the ritual of the church. Don’t ask me how the ritual (sic) could be bruised.
"I come in here before homestands, sometimes a couple of times a week during the season," said Baker.
OK, this is Journalism 101: your attribution should be in the same tense (past, if you’re wondering). The first quote is followed by ‘Baker says,’ this one by ‘Baker said.’
"I pray for my family, for my team, and for Barack Obama, because I've never seen people try to take a president down like this, never seen such anger. I mean, what did he do to anybody?"
(wondering angrily why Howard Bryant won’t start writing about baseball): Note From Your Apparently Imaginary Editors: Drop the politics, write about baseball.
History surrounds Baker this morning, as it does every morning. He is humbled by its density,
The density of history makes me itchy, or at least it would if the density of history had a meaning.
energized by its lineage and his place in it. The ghosts are touching him.
This is where it starts to go off the rails. Bad writing is one thing, invoking ghosts, unless you’re writing a piece of fiction that has ghosts, is awful in a new way. Also, where are these ghosts touching him?
History is not something that happened to others a long time ago,
Yes. That’s exactly what history is.
but alive as the river upon whose banks his team plays.
Are the Reds actually playing on the banks of the... oh, never mind.
His baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, the original professional ballclub in America, proud but down and dowdy in an era of big money, is on the cusp of a first playoff series since 1995, revived by a man who has won three Manager of the Year Awards but was run out of two big jobs in San Francisco and Chicago, and out of baseball in 2007.
‘Proud but down and dowdy?’ I think these failed stabs at poetry by Howie (I’m going to call him Howie because he writes like a precocious eight-year-old) are the result of him running a hip-hop beat through his head as he writes his column. I have zero evidence for this, but then he has zero evidence for ghosts that molest Dusty Baker.
Thirty-eight years ago, Baker had just completed his fifth season in the major leagues when Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series between the Reds and Oakland A's at old Riverfront Stadium.
Um, OK. Weird transition, but let’s see where he goes with this.
Robinson would be dead nine days later, but before he passed, he said famously he hoped there would one day be a black third-base coach or field manager in the major leagues. The National League, first to integrate, would not integrate the managerial ranks until 10 years after Robinson's death. Robinson died in 1972, and Baker, 36 years after, became the Reds' first African-American manager.
(slapping my face to stay awake) Jesus, that’s a bad paragraph. Here, I’ll help by rewriting that first sentence. “Robinson made headlines by saying he hoped one day to see a black manager in the majors. He died nine days later.” Short, succinct, not awkward. You’re welcome, Howie. The rest of your paragraph is even worse.
"I think about that. He said that here," Baker said of Robinson. "Imagine being able to win a World Series in the place where Jackie Robinson made his last public appearance, where he said that."
You would have to imagine it, Dusty, since the stadium where Jackie spoke in 1972 was torn down in 2002.
Baker lurches his silver Toyota Tundra
Baker is a bad driver? Why else would you use that verb? (the verb, in that sentence, was ‘lurches’). Also, weird transition.
along West 8th Street south, toward the Ohio River and the Great American Ballpark. The river stirs more ghosts.
Fuck. Again with the ghosts.
In September 1841, when the region's Irish Catholics donated their pennies to build St. Peter's, where moments earlier Baker's hands waded through holy water, black and Irish dockworkers engaged in three days of rioting, quelled only when the city dispatched the military.
My amusement is starting to curdle into anger: that sentence suggests that Baker’s hands waded (really, goddammit? his hands waded?) through holy water moments before something ethnic and violent went down in 1841.
The fighting took place above ground ("Riots and Mobs, Confusion and Blood Shed," wrote the Sept. 6, 1841, Cincinnati Daily Gazette) but under the streets, at the grassroots, whites and blacks conspired to subvert the system. Baker -- known since his playing days as a bridge between black, white and Latino players -- feels these ghosts, too, understanding that he, as the poet Maya Angelou once wrote, is the dream of the slave.
(throwing up my hands in confusion) What the hell, Howie? 19th century whites and blacks gathered in a subterranean clubhouse to subvert the system ... Latino ghosts ... Maya Angelou. Does no one read your copy before it’s posted?
He points directly in front of him, at the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, situated next door to the ballpark, a museum that displays portions of the original Underground Railroad. He mentions that behind him, in the deep basement of the watering hole O'Malley's in the Alley off of Vine Street, just under his feet, remnants of other tunnels that weaved from the south to Canada, to freedom, still remain.
Five commas in one sentence. Bad idea.
"You have to remember that Ohio was a free state and Kentucky was a slave state," Baker says. "The Underground Railroad was right here. Sometimes I close my eyes and think about that, about what that must have been like. 'Just get across the river and you're free. Just get across the river.'"
Forget all the details of everything that happened in San Francisco to turn a baseball renaissance into the bitterest memory: from former Giants managing partner Peter Magowan attempting to diminish Baker's achievements (as the walls closed in, Magowan once said that Baker's Manager of the Year awards had less to do with him and more with the organization), to the 5-0 lead and nine outs from the first World Series championship in San Francisco Giants history to the runaway envy that led club executives to privately refer to Baker derisively as their "celebrity manager."
Another weird transition, but even worse: a 96-word sentence.
Forget Chicago 2003, when Baker was a hair from taking the Cubs to the World Series, up three games to one on the Florida Marlins, coming home with Kerry Wood and Mark Prior on the mound to close out the National League Championship Series. Forget Steve Bartman.
"Chicago wasn't good to me at the end, but it was good for me," Baker said. "You don't want it to end like that, because everybody wants to be the one to do it, to win the World Series. I still think I was the one to do it. Didn't happen."
Chicago was mean to Dusty, but it was good for him in the long run. Can you elaborate on that? No? Sigh.
Think instead first about him being a kid, and the promise of having your entire life in front of you, 19 years old, protected by the great Henry Aaron. It was Henry who promised Johnnie and Christine Baker back in 1967 to always look out for their son. It was Henry who introduced Dusty to the world, jazz clubs and civil rights and the big leagues. It was Dusty who was on deck when Henry hit home run No. 715 that night in April 1974. It was Dusty -- oldest child, Marines platoon leader, big league manager but always heir to Aaron and his dad and the dreams of Robinson -- who was always the prodigy.
Wait, Dusty was not just a Marine but a platoon leader, and maybe, based on the timing, in Vietnam? I would be much more interested in the Dusty Baker Story, and a little less dismissive of Howie’s shitty writing, if he gave me some details about that.
Today, the prodigy is gone. Only the adult remains. Dusty Baker is 61 years old and the hell of aging conflicts with his boyish fire for baseball.
‘The hell of aging ... the boyish fire.’ Lame.
His dad, Johnnie B. Baker Sr., always a signature presence in the dugouts pregame where his son managed, died in 2009 at the age of 84 from, as Dusty says, "diabetes, high blood pressure, dementia, everything."
To be the adult means looking ahead and seeing no one ahead of him, no one leading the way. It means walking to the mound to remove a pitcher while talking to your father, who is gone physically, as Baker has done this season.
If I were a Reds fan, I would be alarmed by the fact that our manager talks to dead guys while making pitching changes.
In November 2001, after a routine checkup, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The doctors were aggressive, immediately removing the prostate -- no radiation treatments, no chemotherapy.
You didn’t think this piece could get worse, did you? Just wait.
"They told me I had to have a PSA [prostate-specific antigen].
You should say ‘test’ here, even if Dusty didn’t. You could put it in brackets or something.
They had been charting me, told me it was 1.0, 2.1 and then they told me I spiked to 4.0 [PSA levels under four nanograms per millileter generally indicate the absence of cancer]. It wasn't a huge surprise because all the Baker-Russell men died early," Baker said. "They took out the entire prostate."
Information I don’t need: Dusty Baker’s prostatectomy. By the way, who are they facing in the playoffs that start Wednesday? Have you named a single player on the 2010 Reds?
The 242 home runs he hit as a player, the three World Series appearances, all the years he walked into a bar and the place -- the women, especially --
Dusty, you scamp
went wild, all those years in the clubhouse as a member of the world-class athlete fraternity, all disappeared in the face of his mortality. Baker was the leader of a group of men whose identities are forged on the physical, and accepting the withering effects of cancer -- being unable to maintain an erection, for one -- was a difficult reality to confront.
‘Forged on the physical’? Christ, you’re bad. Here’s a difficult reality to confront: an ESPN columnist getting way too specific about the effects of prostate cancer.
"It changes your idea of your own manhood. You think you're this macho cat, but you're not," he said. "With some patients, the nerves never come back and you lose your erection permanently.
Make it stop. Please?
With others, it can come back on its own. I was lucky, some of the nerves returned. Luckily, they have those blue pills these days, knock on wood.
Pun! If I was listening to this I would either change the channel or, if I heard it in person, rip my ears off to avoid hearing any more.
People may laugh, but these things mess with your head, make you rethink how you see yourself. You question your whole sense of being.
"Some of the guys used to make fun of me back then -- I'm not ashamed to say it -- because one of the side effects is incontinence.
Oh. Oh no.
I was walking around wearing a diaper because I couldn't stop peeing all the time. The guys would see those things in my office, look at me and say, 'Are these your diapers?'"
Howie, wtf?
Still, don't forget the slights because they are unimportant. Forget them because, they are today, in the face of disease attacking his body and age taking his family from him, unimportant gnats to be brushed aside.
That last sentence was so bad, Howie, I’ve shifted from feeling sorry for Dusty to hating your writing again. In like 5 seconds.
Still, Baker remembers them all, and at times in his office, hours before the Reds will clinch a division title, it requires enormous concentration for him not to think about the member of the Giants ownership team who once sat him down and told him he needed to learn to be "more of a company man." To not think about the fact that he has taken three different teams to the postseason, could win a fourth manager of the year award and yet finds himself constantly hounded by the criticisms of what he supposedly cannot do, that he cannot win with young players or handle pitching staffs.
That last string of words is not a sentence, sir. Return to your high school and seek out a competent English teacher. Apologize.
The article goes on for another 50,000 words, but it’s about players and teams and playoff-relevant stuff, rather than ghosts and prostates, and who gives a shit about that when we can leave with the image of Dusty Baker walking around a major league clubhouse in a diaper?
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