Cowherd hates sports blogs because you can get infinitely better information from them than ESPN or CNNSI.com. Actually, who the fuck knows why. The guy doesn't have any talent, so stunts like this is all he has left. He tried to get his listeners to take down a website called www.thebiglead.com recently. It worked for a while, but now The Big Lead is back up.
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Steve Phillips is a one-time failure of a general manager for the New York Mets. He has become a baseball analyst. I don't really watch ESPN any more and we no longer have a radio station affiliated with ESPN Radio out here, so I no longer have this stupid cretin's opinions invading my life. Steve Phillips and I disagree on everything I've ever heard him say. The last time I remember his name coming up was during the World Baseball Championship. Some people were protesting the fact that Cuba is an oppressive regime that isn't big on human rights. You know, that sort of thing. Phillips took fucking Cuba's side.
These two people sort of came together today, as The Big Lead had an interview with Mike Vaccaro of the NY Post today -- something I would have never found, had Cowherd not desperately tried to, I don't know, break the Internet or something. That being said: is [ulr=http://thebiglead.com/?p=2091#more-2091]this[/url] the state of sports "blogs" these days? Because the interview is amazing. It's immediately the best piece of sportswriting I've seen in a year. Sports have suddenly become interesting again.
Vaccaro had the following answer to a question about assholes in sports:
Ha ha ha! I know when it looks like I'm going to be fired, I bring some newspaper writer in and yell at them. That always works.Q: We’re fascinated when athletes are dicks to sportswriters. Any athletes step to you? Blow their nose on your sleeve? Attack you, Raul Mondesi-style?
The ugliest incident I ever took part in happened in the Mets clubhouse in Miller Park in Milwaukee a few years ago. This was when the Mets had Roberto Alomar and Mo Vaughn, that group. I’d been in Milwaukee covering a Nets-Bucks playoff series and my boss suggested I stay the weekend because the Mets were falling apart already and it was only May. So I did. And in the Saturday paper I wrote a column that basically said the Mets weren’t just a lousy team, they were one of the most impossible-to-like teams New York had seen since … well, since the last time the Mets had gotten a bunch of stooges in the Bobby Bo/Vince Coleman era. In the column I’d been especially critical of the GM, Steve Phillips, whom I never thought very highly of and had occasionally been somewhat vicious in saying so.
Well, Phillips blew his stack, and he had the PR guy, Jay Horwitz, bring me into an office off the clubhouse, made sure he kept the door open and started to curse me at the top of his lungs, a show that was clearly designed to make him look like a tough-guy in front of his players and an act that, to me, is the height of insecure foolishness. I let him rant and rant and rant. Finally he said, “My wife read that piece of junk! You made her cry!” After which I’d had enough and said, “That makes two of us, doesn’t it Steve,” a not-terribly-subtle reference to his past life as an admitted adulterer. I thought he was going to take a swing at me. He didn’t. About two weeks later he was fired.
(Having Alomar as part of that unlikeable Mets team is also fantastic. As a Jays fan, let me tell you that I can't wait to live in a reality where this weeping little prissy-assed, ump-spitting bitch is our first representative into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He'll be the first guy so honored in the Era of Me Following Sports. I'll be buying the Cooperstown Commemorative Spittoon honoring his induction, no doubt.)
