Rob Neyer gets in a jab at sports journalism

From his latest column:

"I screwed up last week. I mean, I really, really screwed up. If there were any accountability in my field, I'd have been fired or (at the very least) been given a good rap on the knuckles. Fortunately for me, sportswriters can get away with murder if we occasionally turn a cute phrase and aren't too blatant about stealing each other's ideas."

A bit tongue in cheek in regards to himself -- he left Willies Mays + McCovey and a few others out of a previous article about greatest 3/4 hitting combos of all time. I wonder if someone stole one of Rob's ideas recently.

 

what does Google toss in if we mention pornography in a thread?

 

that's a pretty stupid shot. ok, he screwed up. but let's pretend we live in a perfect world for a minute. what type of accountability would be appropriate? a correction at most. it's not like he should be suspended or fired, right? it's in the same vein as readers who bitch that columnists who pick winners should also be fired.

 

NEYER is the God of us all!!!!

 

And I'd like to see some accountability for people like Neyer who apparently has gone from making sweeping generalizations about baseball to making sweeping generalizations about journalism.

 

if there was any accountability in his field, he probably would have lost his job for slamming that guy's book on Amazon.

 

Nice.

BTW, where the hell could one look up guys who hit 3 and 4 in the lineup from back in the 1950s?

 

baseball-reference.com, of course.

 

retrosheet has box scores from many years, so that would be a good place to check.

 

How long would THAT take.

Can't spend that sort of time for a standard column.

 

Nice link, John.

Still... man, that would take forever to vacuum every inch of that rug.

 

It's called research. If you don't want to do it, let somebody else write a column.

And no, you wouldn't look at every box score of every game from the 1950s. You would look at teams which had two or three good hitters at the same time. And if you have a column, you should know something about the history of the game.

Columbo, you have to bring more than that to the table.