Frank Deford does a weekly sports rant on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and it’s rather sad. Sad because it presents us with a guy who has a body of sportswriting work that is virtually unmatched offering little contrarian rants that seldom make any sense, internal or otherwise, and are filled more with curmudgeonly bile than anything else.
Today’s rant is a great example. You can read it here or you can listen to it here. Short version: society has changed, other sports do dumb things with the length of their season and the culture has lost its attention span so baseball should change to adapt to it.
He claims he wants a 140-game season, more playoff teams and some round robin format. He offers no argument for why any of that would be good for baseball. He simply says, in effect, “baseball has to get with the times, baby” and offers his radical little plan, most likely as a means of riling people up.
Well, mission accomplished. But I’m not riled at his ideas, which are patently ridiculous for a dozen reasons. I’m riled that a guy who was once one of the more thoughtful and genuinely (as opposed to gimmickly) provocative voices in sports commentary has been reduced to this kind of garbage.