Hilarious fisking of ESPN.com's Gene Wojwhatever's eye-roller "What If Jeter Took Steroids?" essay

The guys of "Fire Joe Morgan" were (and are) hilarious, terrific writers and smart. Sadly, they also rolled up their blog on November 13, 2008 for what appears to be the foreseeable future, based on their saying "FJM has gone dark for the foreseeable future." However. Deadspin, the Gawker Network's sportsblog, recently invited the FJM crew back for a series of reunion posts, all of which are hilarious, terrific and smart, but the hilarious-est, terrific-est and smart-est is one written by Ken Tremendous about my favorite Yankee and favorite player, Derek Jeter. Or rather, about ESPN.com's Gene Wojciechowski's ridiculous, knob-gobbling column about Jeter, entitled "Jeter the name that matters: If Yankees' captain ever ended up on positive test list, baseball's done."

Now, I love Derek's attitude, I love his game, I love what he brings to the field -- even when he's not the best player on his own team, much less in baseball. But as both a journalist and sports fan, reading Wojciewchowski's slobberingly effusive, poorly argued and even more poorly written hagiography of the Captain was simply put, embarrassing. And KT's line-by-line takedown of the column is brilliant. I laughed out loud, repeatedly, even when he's mocking No. 2 with lines like this: 

Oh – right. Derek Jeter exists on a higher spiritual, moral, and dare I even say yes I think I do dare say physical plane than the rest of humanity. Derek Jeter's face is carved into the side of Egyptian sarcophagi that predate him by thousands of years. Derek Jeter floats eleven inches off the ground. Derek Jeter's urine is legal tender currency in Asia.  

I believe it might be. But I digress. The point Ken makes is not that Jeter isn't a great player, because he is, or that Jeter is at all likely to have taken PEDs, which he isn't -- but rather that no single player is bigger than the game, and we love the game, so much that the litany of great players who've dumped a steaming cloud of chemically enhanced feces on it with their cheating hasn't stopped us from watching it. And one more, no matter how awesome, will not stop us from watching it either. Especially if, like Gene, we're watching it and then writing about it and then getting paid for our writing about it. Or, as Ken says:

I call bullshit on this, frankly, because: although I personally hate steroids, and all they have done to tarnish the game I love, a pretty fucking hefty amount of famous and popular players have done steroids, and Wojo, like the rest of us, is still watching baseball. Because it's baseball, and baseball is awesome, even if every single player worth a damn since 1992 has been jamming llama testicle suppositories up his butt to make himself run faster. It's baseball. It's fun. Baseball!!!!!!

Of course, Ken does have a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the Bombers:

Here's the thing, you guys. The Yankees are just better than other players. That's the deal. They're better. They're better. Just accept it. There should be two Halls of Fame, I think. One for human players who excel at baseball, and one for Yankees. And maybe a third for True Yankees Who Knew How To Win. Paul O'Neill, Tino, Brosius, Chad Curtis, Ramiro Mendoza, Jeter, Rivera, Girardi, Posada, Pettitte, Bernie, Wells, Cone, and that's fucking it. (And somehow Don Mattingly, even though he won exactly nothing, but fuck you, he was a winner.) They would be housed in a separate building, and admission would be $10,000. They would have gold-plated plaques, and visitors would have to take off their shoes out of respect for the True Yankees and would also have to view the plaques through special like astronomy glasses so as to avoid their retinas being burned out by the sheer beauty of the True Yankees' memorialized visages. 

Even though this is kind of sacrilegious, it's still funny as hell. Go read the rest of it. 

Also, don't miss the followup fisking Kenny does of a similarly saliva-drenched piece by MLB.com's Hal Bodley, pimping DJ for the AL MVP. Which he does not deserve. But he's had a great season and I think he'll get another ring this year, and the man is a handsome multimillionaire who can make the clothing of supermodels drop off by staring hard in their direction. So, I think he'll be OK.

(hat-tip, my man Derek Stubbs, who knows his funny, but is a Red Sox fan so he sucks by association, eternally, forever)

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