Jay The Joke

While Performance Artist Ozzie Guillen really does need to tone down his act, please don't waste any crocodile tears on Jay Mariotti. We mock other writers, such as Dr. Phil or Rick Morrissey, for saying stupid things. Hey, Bob and I are bookending this piece with shots at Morrissey. But Rogers and Morrissey and their ilk are just bad writers. To find Jay Mariotti, you have to sink to the bottom of the barrel.

Check that. To paraphrase Roger Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered, Jay Mariotti doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. Mariotti isn't the bottom of the barrel. Mariotti isn't below the bottom of the barrel. Jay Mariotti doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

If you've read Mariotti's columns or seen his act on tv, here's a towel, go take a shower. If you haven't, I'll spare you the effort. Mariotti is a columnist whose forte is to be rude, antagonistic, and abusive. He's sort of the Ann Coulter of sportwriting. Like Coulter, he doesn't bother with facts or rational discourse, but simply vents whatever crap pops into his tiny mind. Kind of like I'm doing now, I guess. In his view, it seems, the purpose of a columnist is not to inform or educate, but to start fights.

Someone this mean-spirited and smug can't be done justice in a single posting like this. Luckily, someone has picked up the slack with this website. As they put it, this is one thing even Sox and Cubs fans can all agree on.