By Jeff Moss
July 4, 2011
DetroitSportsRag@gmail.com
“This town needs an enema.” – The Joker
I am so sick of the Detroit sports media in this pathetic ass city and the lemmings (Detroit sports fans) who gobble up their tepid garbage on a daily basis with a spoon.
Where are the scathing articles or columns from the so-called “journalists” who are paid to monitor the teams they cover? Where is the outrage from the fans of the Tigers?
God damn, I wish I lived in Philadelphia or Chicago or New York where I could pick up a daily newspaper and read ACTUAL criticism from a columnist on a regular basis.
But Detroit gets what it deserves. There is no outrage because there is no demand. There is no criticism because the provincial fucksticks in the Motor City don’t want to read the negativity. The masses want a bunch of dicksuckers who defend the company line because they don’t want the ugly truth. Their daily lives are bad enough™ (LeBron James) and they don’t want confrontation and angst in their selected form of entertainment.
Look, there are the four types of sports fans in any given city and here they are:
- The people who live up to the name and are actually FANATICAL. The losers who live and die with their teams 365 days a year. The ones who have very little life outside of professional athletics. I proudly consider myself a member of this group.
- Fans who watch a majority of their favorite teams games, but believe it is disloyal to ever criticize the team’s management or players.
- The bandwagon types who jump aboard during the NHL conference finals or the MLB divisional playoffs when the media grabs its’ pompons and whips the non-sports fans into a frenzy.
- Chicks.
And I would maintain that the fans who fall into Category #2 are the absolute worst. Way more disgusting than the bandwagon fans because these FUCKING LOSERS should know better.
I would also suggest that if you total ALL four categories of fans, Detroit by percentage is on-par with a Chicago or Philadelphia. The ratings for the Wings, Pistons and Tigers on Fox Sports Detroit support that opinion and we all know the Lions are still a draw even with their pathetic history.
We are just HORRIBLY lacking in Detroit when it comes to Category #1. There just aren’t many people like us around. (I am guessing if you are a regular reader of this website you are either a fellow nutjob or you are a member of the media and probably part of the problem.)
By now you might be wondering where this rant is coming from. Why all of the sudden is Moss losing it on Detroit fans and the media that shapes their opinions? Well here are few good reasons:
A) I went to my first Tigers game of the season on Saturday night. I really don’t enjoy going down to Comerica Park on a regular basis because I despise the huddled retards who attend. And sure enough I was enraged by the number of Brandon Inge jerseys I witnessed. There were clearly more #15 uniforms in the crowd than ANY other. By far.
In what other SERIOUS sports town would the scourge of the franchise have the most popular uniform in the stands? A whiny piece of shit with a career batting average of .235!!!!
The guy is batting .199 as I write this article. What kind of fan goes into their closet before a game and says, “Let me wear the jersey tonight of a guy batting under the Mendoza Line.”
If Inge played for the Phillies, fans wouldn’t be wearing his jersey, they would be BURNING it in the fucking concourse.
B) Jim Leyland continues to start Ryan Raburn at second base with NOBODY calling for his scalp for doing so. It is now July FOURTH and the worthless journeyman has splits of .206/.241/.345. I would call those numbers anemic, but I wouldn’t want to offend the African-American population.
To make matters worse , on Sunday Raburn went 0-for-3 at the plate, but because he made a LUCKY catch in leftfield in the eighth inning, the morons at Comerica Park gave the guy a standing ovation.
Wild applause for a guy who can’t hit, can’t run the bases and NORMALLY can’t field. Because of one catch.
It would be like the Jews in Germany giving Heinrich Himmler a standing ovation because he came to one of their camps and handed out fresh bars of Zest to the people he was ordering into the showers.
It would be bad enough if a guy with a .586 OPS was actually decent at another facet of the game. But we are talking about a piece of shit who botched a play in the field on Saturday night opening up the floodgates to a five run first inning and who last month GOT PICKED OFF AT THIRD BASE BY A CATCHER WHO DID EVERYTHING BUT SEND SMOKE-SIGNALS THAT HE WAS ABOUT TO THROW THE BALL IN THAT DIRECTION!!!!!!
But the complete detriment to the team makes ONE PLAY and Tigers’ fans treat him like Jose Reyes.
C) On Sunday afternoon former Tigers prospect Scott Sizemore went 3-for-4 with a double and a home run. Unfortunately, Sizemore was doing it 2,394 miles away in an Oakland A’s uniform.
Just over a month ago Dave Dombrowski decided it was a good idea to trade away a quality prospect at 2nd and 3rd base for a situational lefty reliever. The dumbfuck GM made the conscious decision to send Sizemore to Oakland for David Purcey even though the team had about five lefty relievers to already choose from.
A GM who employs Brandon Inge and Ryan Raburn thought it was a capital idea to trade away a kid who had a career on-base percentage in the minors of .388 for a LEFTY RELIEVER.
So what has Sizemore done since getting traded to Oakland? Well, he has a batting average of .343. His on-base percentage is .395 and his OPS is a whopping .895.
He has been so freaking good that his manager has given him the #2 slot in the A’s batting order.
“This certainly wasn’t anything Penny (Cliff Pennington) did to get pulled out of the ‘2’ hole,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “But Scotty’s on-base (percentage), .375, .380. “… He hits the ball the other way. It was more about what he was doing and not what Penny was doing.”
DOES ANYBODY KNOW OF A TEAM THAT COULD USE A 2ND OR 3RD BASEMAN WHO GETS ON-BASE, HITS TO THE OPPOSITE FIELD AND IS A PERFECT #2 HITTER IN A LINEUP? ANYONE??????
And the Dombrowski apologists probably will tell you that he wasn’t putting up THOSE type of splits in Detroit. Which is true.
But he still had a higher batting average and OBP than both Inge and Raburn AT THE TIME he was dealt!!!!
D) Oh, and did I mention Purcey’s stats for the Tigers? Yeah, he has a 4.91 ERA with a WHIP of 1.91!! Do ya know how bad a WHIP of 1.91 is for a relief pitcher? Shit, I am guessing the morons who were giving Raburn a standing ovation on Sunday afternoon don’t even know what WHIP is!!!!!!
And as bad as that trade was …..
E) Jair Jurjjens continues to be the best starting pitcher in the National League. Better than Roy Halladay and better than Cliff Lee.
The former Tigers pitcher has an ERA of 1.89 and a WHIP of 1.06. And oh, he is 11-3.
But why get aggravated that the team traded away a kid who is having a as good a season as Justin Verlander for Edgar Renteria?
F) So what did Leyland and Dombrowski do on Sunday afternoon to fix all of the problems they have created? Well, they found their scapegoat in pitching coach Rick Knapp.
In an absolutely gutless move, the guy who continues to play Ryan Raburn and Brandon Inge and who sits Brennan Boesch against lefties even though he is hitting over .350 against them decided to throw his pitching coach to the wolves.
Now, this isn’t going to be some long defense of Knapp. I have no clue how effective he was or wasn’t. I have always felt that the contribution of hitting and pitching coaches was wildly overrated.
(If you are going to blame Knapp for Max Scherzer and Rick Porcello are you going to give him credit for Justin Verlander, Al Alburquerque and Jose Valverde?)
What I find morally reprehensible about the whole ordeal is that Leyland SACRIFICED the guy who wasn’t his boy.
Unfortunately for Knapp, he was never a member of Leyland’s “Pittsburgh Posse.” Knapp was the outsider who was hired from the Minnesota Twins organization a few years back.
You see, Cancer Stick collects former managers of the Pirates like I used to accumulate Star Wars action figures.
And while Lloyd McClendon is Leyland’s Boba Fett and Gene Lamont is his Luke Skywalker in a Storm Trooper outfit, Rick Knapp was his Mas Amedda. Easily dispensable.
What do you think would have occurred if Dombrowski went to Leyland and told him that he needed to get rid of Fasto Lamont?
If Dombrowski ordered the emaciated windbag to can the third base coach because he failed to send a runner home from third on a fly ball to the warning track in Boston? Or if DD ordered Lamont’s dismissal because he recently he got another runner thrown out at home WITH NOBODY OUT?!?!!
Lamont is quite possibly the worst base coach I have ever seen in 30 plus years of watching this organization, but there was no fucking way in hell that Leyland would have gotten rid of the obese former manager of the Pirates.
The same goes for his buddy McClendon. Why wasn’t Lloyd axed for his “work” with Raburn and Inge and others? Why didn’t Dombrowski ask Leyland how it is possible that Sizemore is hitting the shit out of the ball in Oakland or why Curtis Granderson mysteriously discovered how to hit lefty pitching in NYC?
Because if Dombrowski would have even suggested 86’ing either of his Pittsburgh cronies, the Tigers GM would have gotten the Jeff Riger/Jason Beck treatment.
Leyland would have QUIT the team before using Lamont or McClendon as a scapegoat. And we couldn’t get that lucky.
These are all juicy storylines for the media and virtual red meat to real journalists. But not in Detroit where everyone wants to play nice and joke about what kind of ice cream they are serving in the Comerica Park press box.
And while the media doesn’t want to make any waves, a majority of Tigers fans are probably reading this and thinking, “Shut up already, we are only a ½ game out of first.”
You two fucking deserve each other.