No Need To Get Snippy

For almost twenty years now, I have been a loyal subscriber to Baseball Digest (frame of reference: the very first issue I ever received featured a cover touting the New York Mets hot new prospect...Gregg Jefferies). It's no Baseball Prospectus or The Hardball Times in terms of hard-hitting analysis, but there are definitely worse publications from which to glean one's baseball knowledge. Besides, the subscription costs like $10 a year.

My favorite section has always been "The Fans Speak Out", a 15-20 page letters segment at the front of the magazine. Many of the questions have lost their relevance over the years (most people don't realize how easy it is, in the year 2007, to find a box score from 1974 or Lefty O'Doul's career batting statistics) due to the availability of information on the Internet, but it's always worth a look for those handful of interesting nuggets that the editors manage to turn up.

The Fans Speak Out is also highly entertaining for the fact that the editors (or whoever is answering the questions) often seem to lack the patience to deal with those questions that could be easily answered. Answers tend to be brief and slightly brusque, lending a tone of "Why are you bothering me with this?" to the proceedings. (Full disclosure: Baseball Digest published one of my questions when I was about twelve, and the response couldn't have been nicer. So either I didn't notice this back then or it's a more recent trend.)

In the August 2007 issue, that editorial angst boiled over in a way that amused the hell out of me. A reader from Connecticut wrote in and raised an interesting question: since the Black Sox threw the World Series in 1919, baseball has watched its players very closely for impropriety and dealt with those who partake in gambling very seriously. But, he asked, is anyone watching and evaluating the umpires to assure that they aren't being "bought off"?

I thought it was a reasonable question. Baseball Digest, not so much - the first sentence of their answer reads:

"Your question lacks common sense and is an insult to the umpiring profession."

Thanks for reading!

The rest of the answer was good, explaining that all umpires are subject to reviews and no umpire has ever been found guilty of intentionally making incorrect calls. They could have left it at that and spared Rollo Gliannini the insult.

THAT should have been saved for the guy a few pages later who thinks that the career records of Sandy Koufax and Greg Maddux are "comparable in all aspects except for strikeouts." Maybe he meant per season, because the career records of the two? Kind of not similar at all.