The dumbest thing Bob Elliot has written (this week)

We must somehow be immune to the charms of longtime Toronto Sun scribbler Bob Elliot.

We'll hear people wax rhapsodic about him and his skills, and how he's sure to eventually win the Spink Award and gain entrance into the Hall of Fame, and we were left at a loss. We heard people talk about what a fantastic read his A Northern Game was, but we struggled to make it much more than halfway through, literally falling asleep almost every time that we endeavoured to dust off a chapter.

(Really, after one or two chapters, a book emphasizing just how goshdarned friggin' Canadian these Canadian baseballers are loses it's appeal for those of us who don't particularly care about the provenance of our favourite athletes.)

We'll confess that there may be a chance that he is a better reporter than writer (not a bad thing at all), although we often wonder about his comic overuse of the "Anonymous NL Scout". (This is especially the case since this unknown baseball birddog seemed to be trotted out whenever Elliot needed a blunt object with which to bludgeon the former administration.)

Whatever the reason that we don't seem to get Elliot's work, we generally don't see him come up with anything particularly awful either, so maybe his worst crime is that he is bland. Hard to believe, we know, considering the electrically vibrant personality that he puts forth on his appearances on Prime Time Sports.

But in Sunday's Sun, Elliot offered up an absolute howler on the significance of Roy Halladay's departure. And if you'll permit us our moment with the Fire Joe Morgan meme, we'd like to share this bit of work with you.

Plenty of calls, e-mails and texts received in busy week.

Nice to know you're keeping busy. What with the biggest trade of the decade for the Jays going down this week. Hopefully, all that contact with your fellow humans didn't cost you too many naps.

One friend's message was short: "Andrea Bocelli is gone. So am I."

Andrea Bocelli is dead? And you're friend is going to commit suicide out of grief?

My friend is not a ball fan.

Nor is he a music fan. But go on...

He appreciates excellence. Over the years he has paid to hear Colin Powell speak, although he disagrees with his politics; watched Mikhail Baryshnikov while disliking ballet, heard Bocelli sing, although he does not like opera and watched Roy Halladay pitch.

Okay, I see where you're going with this. You're trying to say that your friend appreciates only the finest things in life, and Roy Halladay is one of those fine things. And this is supposed to mean something profound to me, although all I can think when I read this is "Andrea Bocelli was not so much a singer as a hoary hollering novelty act, and he really sucked, and now he's dead. So maybe I should show some respect."

(Wait! Hold the phone! A quick Google search tells me that Bocelli is alive. So Elliot's friend is clearly full of shit. If only he'd realized it before he went and hung himself in the shower.)

He would only go to the Rogers Centre to see Halladay face the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox.

Okay, let's stop the charade right here. Elliot is trying to use this expression of disinterest in the Blue Jays as bad omen, and an example of how people are going to abandon this team because of the loss of one key player.

Except that the truth is that Elliot's friend is not some sort of connoisseur, but rather, he is a dilettante, a tourist and an interloper who is only interested in his own self-aggrandizement through his broad demonstrations of his aestheticism. And if that fey bastard doesn't want to come watch the Jays next year, then that's just fine by me.

Steve Simmons is a smug cheapshot artist

Actually, to call the Sun Media hack an artist of any sort is to give him way more credit than he deserves. But we couldn't help but get enraged by his lazy swipe at A.J. Burnett's Friday night performance against the Rays.

In his Sunday column, Simmons spat out the following bile: "This is why A.J. Burnett makes people scream: He is pitching brilliantly. He has a one-run lead against a Tampa team that has lost seven straight. And he gives up a home run to a nobody ninth-place hitter to lose the game."

Well, Steve-O, here's the thing about "nobody ninth-place hitters": they still let them step up to the plate with a bat in hand, and they still let them swing away at pitches. Sometimes, those swings connect just right, and the results aren't always favorable to the defense, regardless of who the pitcher is.

And it might even be worth noting that Ben Zobrist, the nobody in question, has twice as many homers this season (4) as Aaron Hill did before he went down...in approximately one-third as many at bats.

Moreover, isn't is pretty weak to single out that one pitch to the "nobody" when A.J. had otherwise pitched well enough to win, but was once again betrayed by the sputtering Jays offense?

To pick up on a meme that the Drunks like to trot out: If Roy Halladay had tossed out that same pitching line as A.J., he's be regarded as a gutsy gamer who was failed by his team. But because it's A.J., he's a punk .500 pitcher with no heart. What bullshit.

And not to engage in the same cheapshot artistry that Simmons seems to prefer, but we wonder what is the appeal of the horsefaced, smug, crayon-eater's scribblings and rantings. The only significant contribution that Simmons makes to the Canadian media landscape is to remind us in his appearances on TSN that male pattern baldness and hair gel are a really tragically bad combination.

More from the Sun
When the whole lot of coaches from the 1990's joined Cito on the Jays' staff, someone joked about Mel Queen joining the team. Turns out (as Bob Elliot writes today) that it wasn't such a stretch after all.

Blue Jays Fans Not Served Well By Toronto Media

Ok. So we have come to accept the fact that Toronto is a hockey town (although we think that it is not in line with the Leaf saturation in the media). But that is a poor excuse for providing subpar coverage of the only other major league sport in town (and possibly the only true major league sport in town). Here's a rundown of the players and how they rate in their coverage:

Newspapers (Online versions):

1. The Globe & Mail - The Globe does a pretty decent job of covering the Jays and baseball in general. Jeff Blair provides good analysis of the Jays and, when applicable, other major baseball stories. Blogs by Blair and MacLeod have rounded out the coverage nicely. Probably the best in this list.

2. The Toronto Sun - The Toronto Sun is probably a bit underrated. They do have unique angles in their stories on occasion but the columnists are not on par with Blair from the Globe.

3. The Toronto Star - Alan Ryan is adequate as a beat writer, but The Star is doing a disservice to its readers with Dick Griffin as their main baseball columnist. Griffin fancies himself a serious baseball writer so he often focuses on the "bigger" baseball stories such as the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry (God knows we need more articles on that subject). In the Internet Era we can read about any team we want to with the click of a mouse. So we're not sure why The Star would employ someone that has nothing but disdain for the local team as evidenced by his columns -- when he writes about them at all (5 of his last 6 columns are about teams other than the Jays). But his readers love him--- apparently.

Television:

1. Rogers Sportsnet - I suppose the channel owned by the company that also happens to own the Jays has more than a little self-interest in covering the team. To push the product, they broadcast 120 games, run Jays ads non-stop and produce a weekly kid oriented show where we see Greg Zaun eating breakfast or Aaron Hill playing guitar. Despite the favourable airtime, we don't get the kind of in depth analysis of the team and the game in general that we see for Hockey. If someone in a Leafs jersey gets a blister in July, there are 3-4-5 member panels assembled to analyze it and re-analyze it. We don't get more than a passing mention of what takes place with the Jays. This isn't covered off in the booth either by the broadcast team of Eagle Scout Jamie Campbell and whoever the dullest ex-Jay they can find to fill the other seat.

2. TSN - These guys only carry 20 games and offer no other coverage of the team apart from highlights on Sportscentre. Outdated onscreen graphics (what's up with those grey, faceless 3D figures occupying the field) and the team of Rod Black and Pat Tabler does not help their bleak situation. But the ratings are better than Sportsnet's for some reason.

3. CBC - Canada's public broadcaster signed on to carry 8 games this season with more in the works for next year. The team of former TSN and EA's Triple Play baseball's play by play guy Jim Highson, Jesse Barfield, and Rance "Mr. Excitement" Mullinks are the best of the three networks (not saying a lot). Ratings for Jays games on CBC have been the highest of all three networks. CBC doesn't carry any other Jays coverage other than these games.

Blogs:

Too many to name but it's clear that they are needed to fill the void for we, the baseball info starved fans in the Great White North.