Albert Pujols carestatstsL

BA: .328 HR: 445 SO: 704

Jim Rice is another overrated Boston choke! His batting average in the post season: ..225
Albert Pujols post season batting average: .331

Jim Rice can’t even hold Albert Pujol’s jockstrap.

Does anyone think for a moment that if Pujols had the game winning hit, he wouldn’t have been out there front and center telling everyone how great he is? He can’t have it both ways. Typical multimillion dollar hypocrite.

LaRussa is offended? I’m offended he thinks everyone is so stupid to believe their lame excuses.

Along with this shift in focus our sports media became possessed of the odd notion that they were moral voices, social critics, and most noxious, judges juries and executioners of a ballplayer’s conduct if not his very right to exist. It doesn’t take much of a semiotic analysis of the average sports column, blog or tawrk raydeeo blather to realize that these clowns are barely qualified to write or emote properly structured sentences, much less complex analytics of social and moral concerns. The media’s odd conviction that it is entitled to an athlete’s time is really the least of it.

Matter of fact, a brief exposure to the vast majority of their pronouncements discloses that they are puckered, shuttered, ideologically constipated nincompoops. Most of them are barely even functionally literate. I think the end of my interest in the entire genre came when some utter drooling idiot wrote recently that some ballplayer’s duty was to be on the field, not at the bedside of his wife in labor. Nobody blinkered and stupid enough to write that could possibly write about anything else that deserved our interest and attention. Nothing. ZZzzzzzipppp. Beep.

Ballgames are narratives, mythologies in motion and in the making for as long as it takes to get that 27th and final out. Even the most atrociously played of them are rich narratives at that. Bart Giamatti, in Take Time for Paradise – in his characteristically elegant prose, something of which I doubt a fraction of a percent of our current sportswriters are capable of generating anymore – is worth reading if only because he restores our focus to the mythopoeic grandeur of the game itself. Our sports press, with its chronic inability to grasp the intrinsic narrative of baseball and to illuminate it in any meaningful way anymore, goes for the easy mark – the cliches, the irrelevancies, the trivia at the game’s periphery.

No thanks.

Albert responded by playing dumb… paraphrasing: “I was in the kitchen. You mean someone wanted to talk to me? How would I know that?”

Whatever you say, big Al.

Berkman on the other hand was more straight forward: “That won’t happen again. I’ll make sure — if I have to stand in there — that one of us is available for comment, win or lose.”

Bingo.

I think the blanket condemnation of media is just as misguided as the assumption that we are getting the whole truth from them. They are another avenue of information/opinion, and it is incumbent upon the audience to be critical readers and viewers. As a matter of fact, many reporters and columnists are intelligent, well-educated professionals who provide a valuable service, and the fact that some have become hacks does not mean they are all useless any more than a few quack doctors reflect the entire profession.

I read the local sportswriters in my community and am very impressed by their skills and insights. I like some better than others, and some I find banal or hidebound. But others provide interesting analysis based both on their sources and their professional training in crafting columns.

Perhaps traditional media, especially newspapers, will be superseded by other modes of delivering information and opinion, but whatever replaces them will have to adopt some of the skills and values that made them so vital for many years.

In any case, while you may be uninterested in the question, I do think there are larger questions involved, at least by implication. No need to exaggerate the importance of the question, but for many it is interesting to consider whether athletes are obligated to be available to their fans via the media.

http://footer.mlblogs.com/2011/10/21/ballplayers-and-reporters-cant-we-just-all-get-along/

This is a player that continually gets a free pass for a lack of fundamentals, and wants 30 million dollars per year? Give me a break! Pujols left his teammates holding the bag last night. It was clear that he did not want to be questioned about his critical mistake, and just took off. Instead of saying that he made a mistake today,…..Pujols and LaRussa turn it into a joke. Blaming everyone else but himself.

Pujols in a major market would be a P.R. disaster for him and the club. Pujols would be the Jim Rice of this era. The media would hold him accountable, and it would get ugly.