Sir, neither of those are questions, both are instructions

This isn't the first time we've had this discussion and won't be the last, and I must admit: I'm now in the school of people who don't think it's a very big deal, or indicative of a lost art.

It's an open-ended attempt to get somebody to elaborate on a particular subject, and it often works. And if it doesn't, the subject probably isn't going to have anything much better in reply to a specific question.

As far it being rude, that might seem the case when you see it written, but there's obviously an approach and tone that can make it a very civil inquiry, and if that's the case -- and it usually is -- again, I don't see the problem.

 

Really, is it any different from the SID asking the coach to open the post-game presser with comments about the win/loss?

 

Batting .1000 isn't very good.

 

Yep, that's well below the Mendoza Line.

 

Besides, a much worse question has become prevalent in our profession, generally posed by the sound-bite set. I'm sure most have you had heard it, possibly enough times to want to vomit. It goes like this:

"What's it going to be like to finally to play in front of your home fans Sunday [after having to open the season on the road]?"

Or: "What do you think your stadium's going to be like Sunday, as big as this game is?"

All for the purpose of pandering to the fans. All for the purpose of eliciting greatest-fans-in-America quotes. (What else is a coach/player going to say?) Just a disgrace.

 

And the dude just said to Jimmy Rollins tell me about the HR and tell me about what the World Series will be like, or something like that.

 

Nice...

 

I do not neccesarily mind phrasing a "question" with "talk about" -- so long as what you want them to talk about is specific.

"Talk about your offense" is incredibly vague and lame.

"Talk a little about what you were thinking calling for a suicide squeeze in the seventh inning" -- that I don't have as much problem with.

 

Ding, ding, ding!!!!!

It's not the ``talk about" that should piss you off, it's the vague and/or too-general subject.

 

Really? Really?

So should we speak slowly and in short words and offer cookies for correct answers, or little sticker stars for their foreheads?

I don't find coaches that dumb at all. Usually, such a question is answered with an, ahem, assessment that usually comes with the qualifier (in the case of football) of "I'll have to watch the film to know for sure, but..."

 

True. But the "talk about" form allows someone, much more easily, to go for something vague and too-general. Hard to do that, to that degree, in a properly phrased question. ("What did you think of your offense tonight?" would be pretty damn lame.)

Elliotte, you make quite a leap in contending that someone would have to be a complete idiot if they believed this was strictly a broadcasting thing. Tread carefully with those absolutes. Still, my experience has been that the preponderence of instances in which I saw and heard it used -- certainly five, 10 years ago -- it was coming from a broadcast type who used it to elicit a longer, sound-bitish reponse.

Don't recall, for example, Jerome Holtzman ever sitting down next to Whitey Herzog and saying, "Talk about ..." Print people generally asked questions, until this became so common and, yes, quite often, worked well enough.