Besmirchment

I’m new to Joe Posnanski’s blog -- he writes a lot about sports and a little about pop culture -- but I’m getting to like it. Today, he had me swooning with this paragraph, tucked into a thoughtful piece on the ubiquitous A-Rod sitch:

I will say: I’ve never been entirely sure when the Yankees became the bastion of purity. That seemed to be at least one of the themes of the early A-Rod coverage -- that somehow he had besmirched the impeccable history of the New York Yankees. As far as I can tell, the Yankees tradition began with Babe Ruth, who would get chased on trains by naked women wielding knives. Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic; Whitey Ford was his carousing partner. George Steinbrenner pled guilty to obstruction of justice and later paid a gambler for dirt on Dave Winfield. Billy Martin was a five-tool rogue. Even just talking steroids: Brian McNamee was the Yankees strength coach, Roger Clemens was a Yankees pitcher, and we know at least one of them is lying. And so on. Not a knock -- every team has its past. Just saying I’m not sure that A-Rod betrayed some sort of saintly Yankees code.

Hear, hear!

Joe also recently did a nice little post after watching George Carlin’s brilliant take on the language of football versus the language of baseball. Joe’s post ain’t Carlin, but some of it is lovely (like how the language of the game “sounds like something a small child came up with long ago”) and it’s always cool to see what happens at the intersection of “baseball” and “words.”

Semi-relatedly: If you haven’t yet seen the PBS broadcast of the Mark Twain Prize being awarded (posthumously) to Mr. Carlin, it’s definitely worthy. And yes, the football-versus-baseball bit -- part of Carlin’s opening monologue in the first-ever episode of “SNL” -- is included.