Sometimes…

3:12 am EST April 9th, 2009 | News | 14 Comments

Don’t you wish George Will would just shut up about baseball?

Related Posts

  • No Related Post
«
»

14 Responses to “Sometimes…”

  1. iamnotstarjones says:
    April 9, 2009 at 3:28 am

    God yes.

  2. Phil Barron says:
    April 9, 2009 at 7:37 am

    Don’t you wish George Will would just shut up? (full stop)

    /fixed it for you

  3. michael says:
    April 9, 2009 at 9:26 am

    Isn’t it better than him talking about climate change?

  4. Something Polish says:
    April 9, 2009 at 9:39 am

    George F. Will actually once wrote:

    Baseball, like Pericles’ Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristocratic: Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.

    Awful on so many levels.

    Quiz:
    As a youngster, George F. Will chose to root root root for the Cubs rather than the Cardinals because he disliked Harry Carey, then the St. Louis play-by-play announcer, who later joined the Cubs and is forever associated with Chicago’s Northside Nine. This is an example of:

    a. irony
    b. coincidence
    c. yet another reason to hate George F. Will

  5. Parthenon says:
    April 9, 2009 at 9:41 am

    In general, sports are a very poor world in which to wax philosophical. It has been done incredibly rarely without sounding like a complete doofus.

    In the end, grown adult multi-millionaires are chasing a ball around. Not much profound going on.

  6. p says:
    April 9, 2009 at 9:45 am

    The only good sports writing is a) about boxing or b) written by Hunter S Thompson

  7. Jamey says:
    April 9, 2009 at 10:18 am

    Try as he might, Will cannot write from experience about the single most elemental part of baseball: Standing in the box, facing a curveball. It’s a microsecond in which a batter puts to use everything he knows about physics AND metaphysics–the faith that he’ll put the bat where he thinks the ball will cross the plate. (For the record, my career stalled at the college level because I had neither the faith nor the devotion–the former lapsed before the latter.)

    I know it’s an awfully high standard to hold baseball chroniclers to, but I think everything Will or Costas or Angell or any of their ilk write about the game is based on the assumption that talking about hitting a curve is the same as actually hitting one. Which is NOT a trifling distinction. No, one needn’t have been a soldier to write about war, or a politician to write about politics–but these are topics where we all are part of either the process or its effects. Baseball? A game. You either know it as a player, or you guess about it. Some are passably good at the latter–they have plaques in the Ford Frick wing of the HoF. Will is not. He makes up for that lack of judgment by pontificating about the game in ridiculously purple prose. Well, that a phony sort of gravitas that comes from being spectacularly wrong and obtuse when commenting about policy in the WaPo.

    Will on baseball? He might as well be writing about bikinis or sunsets.

  8. News Reference says:
    April 9, 2009 at 11:58 am

    What’s sad is that George Will is such a right wing troll that even his extensive knowledge of how statistics operates within the baseball world didn’t translate into an honest recognition of how statistics are the underpinnings for assessing global climate science.

    Classic right winger: ‘if the world goes to hell, so what, I’ve got mine.’

    Between the pompous right wing George Will and the insufferable concern troll Cokie Roberts I’d stopped watching George Stephanopoulos’s show This Week for a very long time.

    At least Stephanopoulos has occasionally been bringing Katrina vanden Heuvel and Paul Krugman.

    While that’s worth watching, George Will’s deceitful manipulations still make it almost insufferable.

    George Will discredits Stephanopoulos almost worse than he does the Washington Post. At least with the Post his writing can be entirely avoided (just don’t read it) but his idiotic intrusions on Stephanopoulos show are unavoidable (if you’re watching).

    It would really be nice to have at least one Sunday show with an honest moderator.

  9. Oy Vey says:
    April 9, 2009 at 12:16 pm

    Sometimes?

  10. jr says:
    April 9, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    “global warming isn’t in the Bible, so it’s not real”-George Will

  11. Something Polish says:
    April 9, 2009 at 12:42 pm

    What’s sad is that George Will is such a right wing troll that even his extensive knowledge of how statistics operates within the baseball world

    George F. Will knows exactly dick about baseball and baseball statistics. As with global warming (and pretty much anything else), just because Will writes about it doesn’t mean he knows about it.

  12. Robert says:
    April 9, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    Actually, I must be contrarian on this. I wish Will wrote ONLY about baseball and nothing else.

    Than we could ignore him completely, as people who liked baseball would know he was a nothinghead pontificating endlessly to no point, and those who did not like baseball would know there was no chance of him writing anything of consequence.

  13. News Reference says:
    April 9, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    Robert: “I wish Will wrote ONLY about baseball and nothing else.”

    FTW!

  14. ed says:
    April 9, 2009 at 7:52 pm

    Robert: “I wish Will wrote ONLY about baseball and nothing else.”

    We’d still be left with:

    Baseball, like Pericles’ Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristocratic: Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.

    No sale.