It's an eye-opener to see how Jays outfielder Alex Rios was received as a participant (and eventual runner-up to former Expos star Vlady Guerrero) in the Home Run Derby tonight at the baseball all-star festivities in San Francisco.First the geniuses at The Big Picture took a particularly feeble cut at satirizing Rios' participation:
"I know I'm not your typical home run hitter. They say chicks dig the long ball. Fuck that shit. Chicks dig gap hitters. Cuz they fuckin' dig me, all right. And I prefer singles and doubles to home runs and, ugh, home runs."
Ho, ho. For pity's sake, (a) would anyone with half a brain who's seen Rios play on a semi-regular basis -- or seen his stats -- call him a gap hitter, even tongue-in-cheek; and (b) the tone of the entire post is a ripoff from Kissing Suzy Kolber (see their original spoof of Rex Grossman) from a few months back, and it's not one-10th as funny.
Talk about missing the big picture. Thankfully, The Tao of Stieb delivered a short and sweet smackdown to these misinformed souls.
ESPN's Dusty Baker and Joe Morgan weren't much better. Morgan: "I saw him (Rios) at the batting cage and I said, 'Who is that guy?' " Baker said something about Rios not being well-known since he plays in Canada. Who cares?
Now, Joe Morgan being wilfully ignorant is nothing new, but it's still kind of amazing in 2007 to see Rios get that kind of reception in the blogosphere and from a national broadcaster. There's really no excuse not to be up on what a ballplayer's all about. In one instance, Someone cares enough to write a well-received sports blog but can't be bothered to learn anything about Alex Rios, so the joke falls kind of flat.
Not finding it funny has little to do with not having a sense of humour. Some of us like to remember the "sense" comes before the "humour" part.
Jays fans are not surprised in the least our Alex did so well -- co-blogger Neil Acharya, no word of a lie, thought he might start slow, then get his power stroke going. That's pretty much how it went -- he hit five homers in the first round, then hit 12 in the second before running out of gas in the final round vs. Vlady, who won 3-2.
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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2 comments:
I had a good feeling that Rios was going to put on a show because a)he apparently does crazy thing in bp and b) that pretty,pretty swing.
As for that post on the Big Picture, I thought it was lame too. Another reason it isn't funny is because it doesn't sound like Alex Rios. I think part of why something is funny is the recognition of truth by the listener/reader. Like some of those posts on other blogs that are pretending to be Ozzie Guillen. The funny ones are funny because you can imagine Ozzie saying it. It's just further illustration of ignorance/arrogance on the subject of Rios.
True, Joanna, very true...
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