By DSR Staff
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
January 2, 2013
[Editor’s Note: After a one-year hiatus, the DSR has revived our year-end awards given out to the Detroit Media. Instead of one long article presenting all of the recipients at once, we will be rolling these out over the next few days. And yes, the Raggie Trophy is a Detroit snow globe, a “Made in Detroit” coffee cozy and one of Moss’s wife’s unused tampons.]
Worst Article or Column
Pat Caputo — “By Any Standard Morris and Trammell Belong in Hall of Fame”
The DSR Raggies selection committee had a very difficult time declaring only one recipient worthy of this award.
There were several excellent candidates from 2013 that could have easily won the Raggie. Hell, there had even been some discussion about giving the “honor” to Mitch Albom for this third-trimester abortion from November of 2012 due to the Raggies not having been presented a year ago.
We’re pretty sure Mumford and Sons are still winning Grammy Awards for the 2009 album, “Sigh No More,” so it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if Frodo Albom took the prize for his inane, flat-earth, caveman thinking when it comes to baseball sabermetrics.
In the end, Condescending Baggins’ horrendous entry was disqualified from consideration, much to the dismay of Moss. Actually, the site’s paterfamilias™ (Evert McGill) didn’t have much luck at all in swaying the electorate in this category.
You may remember Ashley Dunkak’s article in which she attempted to rewrite history by asserting that Grant Hill was actually trying to HELP the Pistons when he bolted Detroit for Orlando years ago. Going further, she imagines that the eventual sign-and-trade was Hill’s “last gift” to Detroit — and not Gimpy Albatross’ way of squeezing every penny out of his new deal.
Moss went so apoplectic over this trash that he wrote one of his vilest hit pieces ever, which is like labeling one Quentin Tarantino movie as more violent than another.
[Editor’s Note: If you are new to the site and really want to know what Moss is capable of on his worst day, you should really read that Dunkak article. It’s the written form of the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry encourages George to share all of his inner thoughts. “I think you scared me straight.”]
This site’s founder lost his mind to such a degree that he went on a maniacal Twitter rant during which he called this poor girl — who had only been in town for a cup of coffee — a cunt and compared the woman who brought her to Detroit to the Joker because it looked as though the CBS Radio executive applied her makeup with a bazooka.
It was a total shit show, which led one of the rare breed of Moss Twitter followers who work at 97.1 to go from following the pyscho to blocking him.
Anyway, Moss is still so angry about that blog post that he campaigned for this garbage to win this category. Even though NOBODY knows who Ashley Dunkak is. Like, she works for a radio station and never even appears on the air. She blogs. For a RADIO STATION.
The committee also considered every single article written by the Detroit Sports Media blowing Jim Leyland after he retired, except there were so many of them (Albom, Chris Iott, Tom Gage, Matthew Mowery, etc.) that they split the vote.
Dave Birkett’s 50th anniversary retrospective of the William Clay Ford, Sr. ownership — in which he played the role of a Nazi sympathizer glossing over the Holocaust — received ample consideration but didn’t muster enough votes. SPOILER ALERT!!!!!! The article did disqualify Birkett from “Beat Writer of the Year” though.
The Meryl Streep of this category, Lynn Henning, had plenty of noteworthy entries (including his epic gymnastics routine where he went from defending the Tigers naming Bruce Rondon the Tigers closer in the offseason, to championing the Jose Valverde signing to ….. ah, who knows …we lost count of the many angles he took on this subject).
And finally, Frank Beckmann’s Op-Ed piece in the Detroit News in which he suggested that Tiger Woods and other African-Americans should embrace the “fried chicken” stereotype also had supporters. (We’d provide a hyperlink to the wildly offensive column, but the News deleted it.)
The committee decided that Beckmann wasn’t a sports writer, so he was removed from consideration. Losing his gig as the U of M football play-by-play announcer over his racist nonsense was a little more punitive than a Raggie anyway.
(Oh right, Frank, you chose to retire on your own. Uh huh. It had nothing to do with the university rebuking you or with Brady Hoke wanting your ass gone. Okay. Pull this leg … it plays “Jingle Bells.”)
The Raggie winner ended up being Pat Caputo’s December column lamenting the fact that Jack Morris hasn’t been inducted into Cooperstown.
The article was so startling in its ignorance that it created a volcano of disdain on Twitter from just about every member of the Society of American Baseball Research.
It is one thing to deny the importance of advanced metrics in baseball; it is another matter entirely to display a fundamental lack ofknowledge about what sabermetrics are, and that is exactly what Caputo did when he wrote the following:
Sabermetrics have greatly benefitted the game. The advanced math should count in matters of evaluation, whether it be an organization accessing talent, or media and fans ranking player performance.
But Sabermetrics has its flaws. One of them, for evaluation purposes regarding the Hall, is not accounting enough for statistics era to era. A 3.00 ERA in 1968 didn’t mean nearly as much as a 3.00 ERA in 1995, for example.
Those two paragraphs are the equivalent of writing that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was really good for a lot of things, but that it wasn’t good for curing polio.
But Caputo wasn’t done.
His ERA was higher because much of his career took place during the height of the so-called steroids era. Offensive numbers were inflated across the board.
The height of the so-called steroids era??!?!?!??!? Jack Morris pitched from 1977 to 1994. That’s almost as ludicrous ash saying that Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers during the American Slavery era.
Caputo also went Hillary Rodham Clinton and blamed a vast anti-Detroit Tigers conspiracy as the real reason why Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker and Morris haven’t been inducted, theorizing that the Motown Haters were in cahoots with the sabermetric crowd.
And as awful as Caputo’s article happened to be — and it was Hurricane Katrina-level bad — Caputo’s post-article behavior was even worse. NATIONAL baseball writers were trying to have a dialogue with him about it on Twitter, but “The Pamphlet” refused to engage.
Of course, if I were Caputo, I probably wouldn’t want to get into a discussion with Dan Szymborski or Rob Neyer about sabermetrics or when the steroid era took place.
Honorable Mention: We listed them all in the main body of this article. Were you not paying attention? Well, except Chris McCosky’s article on Jim Schwartz that was decimated here
Best Sports Talk Radio Show — “The Discussion” with Matt Dery
Worst Sports Talk Radio Show — “The Drew Lane Show”
Best Local TV Anchor — Lindsey Hayes — Fox Sports Detroit
Best Media Twitter Account — Tony Paul — @TonyPaul1984
Worst Media Twitter Account — TIE (@TerryFoster971 and @VGoodwill)
Worst Article/Column of the Year — Pat Caputo — Oakland Press
Best Article/Column of the Year — John Niyo — Detroit News
Best TV Broadcast Team – George Blaha and Greg Kelser — Fox Sports Detroit
Worst TV Broadcast Team – Mario Impemba and Rod Allen — Fox Sports Detroit
Best Radio Broadcast Team – Dan Miller and Jim Brandstatter — 97.1
Worst Radio Broadcast Team – Dan Dickerson and Jim Price — 97.1 Best Beat Writer – David Mayo — MLive.com
Worst Beat Writer – John Lowe — Detroit Free Press
Worst Columnist – Jeff Seidel — Detroit Free Press
Worst Media-Related Restaurant Disaster – Coming Soon
The Jamie Samuelsen Award – Jamie Samuelsen — 97.1 and Detroit Free Press
Craig Monroe Memorial Award — Bill Shea — Crain’s Detroit
Best Columnist – John Niyo — Detroit News