Young sportswriters have just lost a resource as stylistically adept as statistically cognizant, a cornucopia of baseball knowledge, opinion and good humor.
Thankfully, no one had to die. And we’ll always have the archives.
The sports blog Fire Joe Morgan announced last week that it would no longer produce new content, much to the disdain of all those who read blogs, at the very least. Since April 2005, Michael Schur (or Ken Tremendous, his FJM moniker), Alan Yang (Junior) and Dave King (dak) have lampooned baseball writers and reporters from across the country, saving a special brand of venom for the site’s namesake, ESPN baseball analyst and Hall-of-Fame second baseman Joe Morgan.
FJM’s main gripe with mainstream baseball opinion and analysis centered around a repellent attitude toward advanced baseball statistics (or “sabermetrics”). Acronyms such as VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) and OPS (On-base percentage Plus Slugging percentage) are treated with the journalistic integrity of common swear words, FJM argues, and “old-time” baseball fans reject them as a detraction from enjoyment of the game or a mechanism of confusion in determining who is a good baseball player. Joe Morgan is seen as an unwitting figurehead of the crusade against new-age baseball thinking, and his crimes are dutifully and thoroughly listed in various entries. (Archives can be viewed at www.firejoemorgan.com.) The most hilarious of Morgan’s missteps is his consistent reference to Michael Lewis’ 2003 book “Moneyball” – an analysis of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s method of constructing a winning team on a low payroll, using sabermetrics in an effort to gain a statistical edge – as propagandist. Beane, in Morgan’s eyes, wrote a dangerous tome that forces advanced statistics upon the populace for unknown reasons. (Incidentally, “Moneyball” is well worth your time and money – especially yours, Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln.)
It would be remiss, of course, to spend all this time discussing Morgan without mentioning the site’s recurring jokes – tacked-on food metaphors, writers’ obsession with the unquantifiable scrappiness of David Eckstein, the word “consistent,” Morgan’s unintelligible grammar, spelling and logic on ESPN.com chats, and hilariously giddy exaggerations of baseball statheads as unhygienic social misfits living in their mothers’ basements.
Their writing is so good, in fact, that they’re paid for it. Schur, Yang and King are all television writers in real life; Schur is best known as Dwight Schrute’s beet-loving cousin Mose on “The Office” (yes, that “The Office”), and he also holds a producer credit on the show. Mainstream media subtly nodded in the three writers’ directions when Yang wrote a small piece for Sports Illustrated. The FJM brand of wit is elaborately detailed and paced for maximum effect.
Most “amateur” sports blogs waste the nation’s bandwidth. They aren’t funny, informative or insightful – the three possible strikes against a blog. Unchecked stats and flat-out lies permeate the wealth of good information in cyberspace.
I should also admit that, while I enjoy baseball, advanced baseball statistics confuse me. I’m a math major and I feel a lot more comfortable when I see the formula, which isn’t usually as obvious as adding on-base percentage to slugging percentage. Defensive statistics, used to quantify tools such as range and ability to field the position, and advanced pitching statistics specifically bother me.
So what’s the point of spouting off about some sports blog that won’t update because its writers have better things to do in their lives? Fire Joe Morgan served as a check and balance on sportswriters, and the methods of critique that Ken Tremendous, Junior and dak employed were highly sophisticated and wholly verifiable. Delivered with a sardonic wit that I have tried to incorporate into my own personal style, FJM’s underlying purpose doesn’t fall far from the journalistic tree: providing information for the betterment of understanding the games we love. We may not consistently reference a made-up intern named Bill Fremp, whose job is to type Joe Morgan’s chat responses, and we may not consistently overuse words like consistently thanks to copy editors, but the end result is a sense of progress toward a mutual understanding. We can only strive to do our best to bridge the gap.
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