It is easy to find bad writing at ESPN
Vacuity, mislaid shame, and nonsense. Here are three examples.
Wat? Many headlines are guilty of being little more than a list of nouns, too stingy to use multiple verbs and so ashamed of language they won’t use a verb that actually makes sense. This is no exception, and it’s filled with jargon, too. As a rule, you shouldn’t use a word in the headline if no one knows what it is yet, and yet here we have “k-balls,” which sounds like something Han Solo smuggles and snorts when he’s on Leia’s bad side. What is a “k-ball”? It’s a football…for kicking.
It’s a football.
On top of that, this particular word order invites unnecessary ambiguity. As written, it’s not clear what “got” is supposed to mean. Did the police subsist on k-balls during their strenuous trek to Mt. Gillette, a lifetime infusion of vitamin K in each small gummy sphere, filling up their tires every ten klicks with the indispensable Super Air Gauge 2000?
Air gauges, k-balls got police escort to Gillette
And how is that different from:
Life preservers, EPIRBS got Coast Guard flotilla to Verizon.
[Random safety item], [mystery jargon word] got [emergency responder] to [corporate stadium sponsor].
It’s like they’ve thrown a bunch of words in an editorial blender set to “mysterious-sounding click-gap bullshit.”
This almost has to be intentional. Think of how easy it is to write something better:
- Air gauges, k-balls receive police escort to Gillette
- Gauges for measuring football pressure escorted by police to Gillette
- Police escort air gauges, footballs to Gillette.
What’s astonishing is that these options, which are all better than the original, still fail to convey anything of substance. That’s because the headline basically requires that you already know the story. You have to already know that the NFL is bugging out about the “chain of custody,” aka who touches the balls, before games.
There’s a reason self-referentiality is baked into sports coverage. It makes a self-enclosed universe where the logic of the real world doesn’t apply. On the field men can become heroes, athletes become warriors. Sadly, the same liminality that produces the possibility of transcendence also elides labor struggles; it’s only on the pitch that an employer pay his employees so little so publicly.
I don’t know when the sports “season” became normalized, but its empty circularity feels incredibly representative of the false promise of capitalism: every generation, 29 out of 30 go home with empty pockets and high hopes. It’s a cyclone of nothingness, the ouroboros profaned.
Salary-shaming of professional athletes skeeves me out
I don’t have anything personally against David Schoenfield, but here’s a a crack he recently made that is both a) incredibly revealing and b) entirely unnecessary.
“But, really: Joe Blanton just got $4 million. I think the players will be fine.”
This kind of salary-shaming has followed players since Curt Flood sued baseball in 1969 to allow free agency. As the playing lines of sport are redrawn to accommodate backseat coaches and front-office managers, salaries and performance metrics are coming into the public eye, revealing personal information about athletes to millions of adoring and hating fans. Much of that personal information would otherwise be considered illegal to disclose or simply untoward to ask about—if Joe Blanton were your neighbor and the owner of a small chain of Tex-Mex restaurants, would you expect him to take out a classified in the local paper advising the community of his wages?
Perhaps greater wage transparency across the board would be a good thing. Because what is important here, and what Mr. Schoenfield is leaving out, is the context—of how much ownership is making and how Blanton’s share shapes up when compared with the labor:capital ratio in other industries?
Owners aimed to make $15 billion in 2015, and franchises are on average worth more than $1.2 billion each. That wealth, created by blockbuster local cable deals and higher gate prices as stadiums cater (and move to cater) bourgeois audiences, is not trickling down. As Deadspin wrote before the 2015 MLB season, “Just because there is more money does not mean the players are necessarily doing better.”
Player salaries were estimated by the AP before the 2015 season at around $3.5 billion. That’s about 23% of the total revenue made by MLB clubs. I’m not an expert in economics, but many banks pay more than half their revenue as compensation. These are almost impossibly skilled athletes, most of whose comrades will never make it to the bounties of free agency. Many, like Blanton, have suffered through considerable injuries to their bodies, and are nearing the end of their playing career. After that they face an uncertain future, and while the bleak prospects of retired players are sometimes exaggerated, many do struggle.
Something seems off about shaming them while owners line their pockets with public tax money.
Sports and *~sCiEnCe~*
So, the headline is bad. Big deal—headlines are really hard. And they are especially hard when you have to instill a constant sense of urgency and conspiracy in millions of rabid sports fans while your corporate overseer whips you for views, clicks, likes, and shares.
As for false consciousness, well, that’s a tough one, isn’t it?
One sentence at the end of this piece about the so-called k-balls, though. I mean, this just goes to show how vacuous a) sports coverage can be (pun intended) and b) how poorly we communicate about science in popular media.
“This year, as part of gaining a better understanding of PSI levels in footballs and the impact of science on air pressure, the NFL has been randomly testing footballs at games.”
“the impact of science on air pressure.”
What is that?
Close your eyes.
What is the subject of this sentence?
Science.
What is the object of this sentence?
Air pressure.
How does science impact air pressure? Use your imagination.
I see…scientists in a room. Their backs are turned to their experimental table, upon which sits what appears to be an enormous, slightly flaccid transparent blow-up football. Above the laboratory, behind a glass panel, sits Dr. Science. “Impact the air pressure with science!” he commands. Three white-robed lackeys press on assorted gizmos. Points of light appear on the inside of the football, begin to glow and vibrate, and they begin to bounce around its interior, accelerating and decelerating as cheerleaders begin to chant, from a previously unseen perch alongside Dr. Science, “P! V! NR! T!”
“Science” is not a variable that can impact the air pressure of a football, which would be the air pressure of that football, regardless of the state, kind, and quality of “science.” If we were to take the same football around the world, scientists around the world would surely report its air pressure in different languages, perhaps even different units—atmospheres, Pascals, pounds per square inch, kilograms per square meter—but its air pressure would, assuredly, be its air pressure.
If we were to ask someone whose version of science would today be laughably out of date, yes, we might receive information that would not be very helpful for the purposes of identifying and screening against Deflategate conspirators. But to me the problem isn’t really about this particular example at all—it’s the troubling way that “science” is casually inserted as a quasi-monolithic subject.
“Science” is a method, as well as a corpus of least-bad explanations. And those explanations can lend us new ways of looking at the world.
But it won’t deflate your balls.
