The fans’ will be done: Looks like Mike Rizzo, the anti-Vinny Cerrato in that his team’s followers really, really like him, will get the Nationals general manager’s job after all.
Yesterday, rumors broke that the team was going to boot Rizzo and hire the Diamondbacks’ Jerry DiPoto. Nats fan boards lit up with pleas for management to keep Rizzo, who’d only just completed the Stephen Strasburg signing.
The Lerners are known for never giving a hoot about public opinion, but, coincidentally or not, it appears their decision and the fans’ wishes will mesh here.
Then again, it could just be that Rizzo, already on staff as an assistant, comes cheaper than DiPoto would have.
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In case you missed it: I wrote my own special Groundhog Column, about Spingarn football’s newest new football coach, a piece I’ve written again and again over the years. The newest new guy to run the long-troubled program, Charlie McKie, takes over with clear eyes and a full heart. He’s been coaching youth football in the city for nearly three decades, the last several years at Brown Middle School, so McKie knows Spingarn hasn’t competed for the Turkey Bowl in a generation.
But someday, that’s going to happen.
(AFTER THE JUMP: Madden dumps the Great Hoyas Hope? Are the Olympics ready for gender-non-specific track and field? Yandamonium™ returns already? Erin Andrews gets muddy?)
McKie, like all his predecessors at Spingarn and pretty much every D.C. public school coach I’ve ever interviewed, is a superhero to me. The stuff they put up with, well, don’t get me started…
Full disclosure: We’re pulling for Coach McKie and Spingarn!
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I’m not the only one thinking Georgetown U’s dry spell in the NFL will go on.
In their weekly updates, the game producers of Madden 10, while adding Michael Vick to the Eagles’ roster and Brett Favre to the Vikings’, have just taken the digital version of defensive lineman Alex Buzbee off the roster of the digital Redskins —- even though the real Buzbee hasn’t yet been cut by the real Redskins.
“Too low on the depth chart” was the reason given for the move. On the web site of the real Redskins, Buzbee is currently listed as the fourth-team tackle.
No Hoya has played in the NFL since Jim Ricca, who was signed by the Redskins in 1951.
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How would sportstalker Brendan Haywood deal with this story?
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I have been feeling sorry for Steve Yanda, the Washington Post sportswriter who’s been taking it in every orifice since last week, when he wrote the most viral lede in the history of the sports section: “In the coda of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, composer Johann Sebastian Bach repeats the same chord sequence over and over again, leading the listener to anticipate one resolution, only to provide a tone completely different.”
That was for a story about the Nationals beating the Diamondbacks for their 8th win in a row. Bet you couldn’t tell!
But, anyway, that story created complete Yandamonium™. I usually only get emails about mortgage rates and penile implants, but three people sent me Yanda’s Bach piece. He got ripped everywhere, even in his own paper, for his fuguing around in a game story.
Edward L. Jaffee of Springfield was among those whose Yanda-bashing letter-to-the-editor made it to print:
Steve Yanda took The Post’s sportswriting to a new low. Not only did the reader have to go to the continuation on Page D6 to find out how the Nationals won, but Yanda’s lead was, in effect, a tutorial on baroque music and has nothing at all to do with sports. My wife, a classical pianist, shared my perplexity at the report, saying it sounds as if the writer was simply strutting his knowledge of Bach. I agree. Not only that, but his analogy was tortured and wrong. The Nats had just won their eighth straight, coming from down 5-0 and 6-0 in the two previous games, so to hang the story on a hook of trailing by 1-0 after one inning was a stretch. Why not return to the cleaner writing of great Post sportswriters of the past, such as Shirley Povich, and at least give us the result and key factors in the game before going off on a feature writer’s excursion?
The out-of-house treatment was rougher. Even Gary Williams had to cringe as he read former City Paper mastermind Tom Scocca show up on Deadspin to ground and pound on Yanda, who I’ve never met but I hear is as nice as he is young.
So, again, I’ve been feeling sorry for Yanda.
Then I read this in yesterday’s Post. I was a few hundred words in before the story and the headline (“Long Journey Brings Morse Back to Majors”) connected at all.
“Can’t be Steve Yanda! Not so soon after FugueinCminorGate™,!” I said to myself, hoping against hope. “Steve Yanda,” said the byline.
And, to twist Chrissy Hynde, my pity was gone.
(Hynde references are much more acceptable in sporting circles than Bach. Right, editors? What? No editors? Really? Oh…FugueinCminorGate™’s all starting to make sense! There but for the grace of god and any clue about classical music go I…)
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Deadspin writes up Erin Andrews’ new GQ spread. A genius commenter points out a conceptual flaw in the layout: “Q: How did her shoulder pads get so muddy?”