We've been rehashing, over and over again, the fact that a) Peter Gammons doesn't seem to care much for using the English language well, or even correctly; and b) either his editors don't care that his columns contain repeated errors, or he doesn't have editors at all.
What we have only hinted at, however, is that, more and more, Gammons has built entire columns around a theory or idea that is either poorly substantiated, obvious, or thoroughly uninteresting. Let's take a look at his main ideas in the recent columns that we've attacked:
3/13: Either "Twins will be bad this year" or "Twins will be learning from Hall of Famers". The first point is obvious, since the Twins were mediocre last year and then lost the "best pitcher on the planet" (a previous Gammons title); the second point is both obvious (nearly every team has former excellent players who serve as coaches and/or mentors) and uninteresting (who cares?).
3/3: "Torii Hunter is worth what the Angels paid him." I would categorize this idea as poorly substantiated, for a number of reasons (see the link for details), but what really stands out is that Hunter himself admitted he would have signed with the Angels for less than $70 million. Even though the Angels had no way of knowing this fact, I'm relatively certain that it defines the term "overpaid".
2/25: "The Giants are different without Barry Bonds." Obvious.
2/18: "The Mariners are attempting to compete in the AL West...but don't rule out the Angels." This idea is special in that it falls under all three categories:
1. This point was poorly substantiated because Gammons' support for the M's boils down to their acquisition of Erik Bedard, who, while an excellent pitcher, likely will not compensate for the fact that their Pythagorean W-L Record suggests that they were extremely lucky to win 88 games (a fact that Gammons himself mentions, thus undermining his own argument). His first statement in favor of the Angels suggests that Jon Garland is better than (or at least equal to) Erik Bedard, a statement that is patently absurd. (He does go on to make a semi-valid point, which is that most of the rest of their rotation is also pretty good.)
2. The point was obvious, because if a team trades away four minor leaguers to get one pitcher, that is usually a good indication that they are trying to win their division.
3. It was uninteresting because predicting that one of the two best teams in a particular division will likely win it isn't really a prediction at all. What's vexing to me is that Gammons could have tweaked his column ever so slightly and it would have been significantly more interesting. All he had to write was, "M's have a significant chance to win the AL West." That would have been an interesting argument, because everybody and his mother thinks the Angels are the prohibitive favorites. Instead, Gammons wusses out by just titling his column, "M's making a run at the Angels", and then, just in case some reader got the idea that maybe he was actually predicting that Seattle would win the division, hedges his bet even more by later writing, "But don't rule out the Angels." I mean...why else would he write that?
I will now quote from Foist's first post to this blog (emphasis mine):
The Gammons we yearn for -- let's call him Fantasy Gammons -- is a writer with Gammons's scoops, Gammons's insight, Gammons's experience, and Gammons's baseball knowledge who can convey all this goodness to us in a comprehensible form, perhaps entertaining us a bit along the way.
I quote it to point out that when we started this blog, we (or at least I, and Foist seems to imply it as well) weren't really aware of just how egregious Gammons' writing really is. Five months later, we're raising the possibility that Gammons is not only a shoddy writer, but a shoddy writer who really has nothing interesting to say. I doubt this has always been the case; Bill Simmons often waxes nostalgic about his eagerness to open the Sunday Boston Globe so he could read Gammons' weekly "Baseball Notes" column. I also doubt that Gammons would have gotten to the position he's in today if he were this bad at his job from day 1.
Nevertheless, going forward, I will pay close attention not only to the bad writing (which is a sure bet to continue), but also to whether Gammons compensates for his subpar writing skills with the kind of insight one would expect from such a prestigious and renowned writer. So far, to quote my Magic 8 Ball, outlook not so good.
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