After 40 years in the newspaper biz, Steve Bisheff hung up his toupee and switched to blogging.
So how is The Bisheff Blog? Well it is better than reading Mark Whicker steal borrow anecdotes from websites without attribution, but all that vaunted experience of Steve Combover adds up to him sounding like an average-at-best Halos Heaven poster.
Bisheff went ballistic on the Angels in his blog on Sunday, exactly one day before the predictable TJ Slimefucker attack on Scioscia and the Angels in the LA Tribune (no link to Chicago carpet of bagger).
Summary of Bisheff's Rant:
- Went apeshit over Maicer batting 4th - but with 1% of the intellect as analyzed here on HH by Matt Welch.
- Goes hysterical over Shields still being on the roster (and of course, pathetically ill-informed of the team's minor league relief options, he offers no option, not even a throwaway line like "Bobby Cassevah could be up here learning from the vets"). Forty years in the biz and his response to a downhill slide by a clubhouse leader is to whine away like guys on this site who were not born while Gene Mauch was the Angels manager.
- Vents about the Callaspo trade. He asks what exactly was behind it and ...something tells me he'd deliver a blank stare if SUBOP or TURK would spend a half hour teaching him WAR and OPS+ and the improvement of replacing Brandon Wood with just a league average player.
- Having given up on the season, he then questions the wisdom of giving the low batting average Peter Bourjos 200+ PA (not even a hint of comprehending how Bourjos helps our pitchers) in the big leagues and laments that Torii's gold glove will be leaving CF.
Yes you read that last one right, the sportswriting dinosaur stereotypes just can't shake that gold glove. They loves them some gold fraggin glove, voted one for Rafael Palmeiro one year even though he was a DH...
What kind of tone-deaf lack of curiosity in the world do these festering sores of sportswriting's dark ages harbor to have never even browsed a goddamned website with statistical research? I mean just a perusal... are advanced stats that much of a challenge to your self-inflated ego? The shit is mainstream you old coot, Bourjos covers more ground than the gold glover who lost at least a step half a season after we signed him.
Sure, many saber analysts are arrogant pricks, picking Seattle as the 6th best organization in baseball because Jack-Z snorted slideruler dust, but their insufferable personalities are a perfect counterbalance to your insular refusal to look beyond the back of the freakin baseball card for analysis of the game. Sportswriting veterans are cartoonish lampoons of themselves. You know the first scene in the Flintstones when Fred slides down the brontosaurus tail? Print beat writers continue to advertise that they aren't even caricatures as sophisticated as Fred, they're the little dinosaur that Fred's brontosaurus ate for lunch did not notice and stepped on last week.
And even being informed about the team without a statistical foundation... Steve, please, if you want to play the "I believe my eyes" card, well then you did not watch 3B become a black hole with Wood in the lineup prior to the Callaspo trade, you shut your eyes on flyballs to avoid seeing seeing Torii Hunter lose range, and you have blinders on not to notice that every other Angels middle reliever sucks at least as much if not more dick than Scot Shields. But again, you're the vet, you're casually informed and your whim is the rule of the land. Hope being the big dog sportswriter gets you laid at Leisure World or at least cuts in line for the shuffleboard tourney if your Cialis prescription runs out.
Oh, and Bish... white text on a black background in a sanserif font inspires people to not read more than a paragraph.