Thanks for Four Years of Awesome
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Blogged Around Philly: Farewell Edition
Photoist
We hate to mention the guy’s name at all, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the recent T.J. Simers piece in the LA Times lambasting Philadelphia and it’s fans, but giving only a cursory glance at the actual baseball that is scheduled to be played over the next week. We will not link this failure’s column because that is exactly what he wants, and in all fairness, we were conflicted on even giving this ass more publicity, but he needs to be called out.
Simers is not like some of the other awful sports personalities that exist. He is not in the realm of Skip Bayless, who is annoying, dimwitted, but is ultimately a harmless wuss. He is not Tim McCarver, who it seems at this point simply has a learning disability. No, T.J. Simers belongs in the worst, most dangerous, and most teeth-grinding of categories: Jackass sportswriters who take themselves too seriously.
Simers, along with Gregg Easterbrook and Howard Eskin (to name a few) are so caught up with their own cleverness and celebrity that they forget they write about friggin’ GAMES for a living and have the abject arrogance to think that what they write will somehow affect the games themselves. Simers tries to insult and sensationalize his way into controversy so people will read his rag of a column. He’s also a complete blowhard who tries to sound tough but comes across as a petulant child. People in LA even hate this guy.. like, a lot. Easterbrook thought he was actually a private investigator last year when he wrote column after column for ESPN.com basically calling for the New England Patriots to be run from the league and that he, HE, had the damning evidence to indict them. Gregg, you’re not Bob Woodward, you’re just a verbose and rambling windbag who takes eight paragraphs to say what could be said in one. You were the kind of kid who cried and took his ball home when he lost a game as a child. You are to the sports world what Lance Bass was to the Russian Space Program: a lucky mooch happy to be along for the ride. There are better careers for the Holier-Than-Thou, like Senator from Idaho. As for Howard Eskin, what else is there to be said about a pompous bootlicker who would do anything just to cozy up to a local celebrity and make people believe that he helps Jeffery Lurie and Andy Reid make personnel decisions? His verbal molestations of women on the air are not funny in an Opie & Anthony or Howard Stern kind of way, but rather sad and pathetic like an old man lecherously reaching to cop a feel of high-school tit. We’re half expecting to one day see him walk into a room with Yoo-Hoo and condoms while Chris Hansen tells him to “take a seat right over there.”
The point is, a lot of fans (myself included), listen to and read these writers for the sole purpose of being incensed, and that is exactly what they want. It’s all about readers and ratings. We should all make a concentrated effort to ignore these blowhards, because that’s the only way they’re ever truly going to go away. So T.J. Simers can talk all the shit he wants on Philadelphia, but T.J., we’d rather be “obstinate pugs” than stick-up-our-ass LA phonies who don’t show up until the 4th inning. We’d rather have our hockey team be “a bunch of bullies” than completely and utterly irrelevant. And we’d rather have a tough (albeit borderline impotent) football team than an empty stadium and a history of two NFL failures.
Most importantly, we’d rather kick your ass with homegrown talent who love the game rather than with a leftfielder who quits on his team, a manager you flew in from (gasp) New York, and a bunch of fair-weather (literally, it’s nice there) fans who want Dodger Dogs made with tofu. T.J. Simers, jump in front of a moving truck.
Phils in 6.
Image Credit: Flickr user dameetch.
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