The Masses Are Asses (Or Another Reason Why I Hate ESPN)

Hear that? The gunshot that went off in the background? That was Hitman and the rest of Cubbydom blowing their collective brains out. We’re right there with you – I don’t think ANYONE was rooting for the White Sox, save for the 43 people that actually call themselves White Sox fans and the predictable horde of morons that jumped on the bandwagon. Nielsen announced that the 2005 World Series was the lowest-rated in history. The amazing thing about that is that Chicago and Houston represent the nation’s third and tenth largest television markets, respectively. Wow. If you can’t pull viewers from two top-10 markets, you clearly have a charisma problem.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about any of that, I’m here to talk about a silly poll that ESPN is running today. They’re asking ESPN SportsNation to rank the last 20 World Series Champs. Predictably, the demographic of the respondents skews young since the 1985 Royals finished 20th in the poll. Obviously most of these people don’t remember the Royals of that year. I do. George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, Lonnie “Skates” Smith, young phenom Bret Saberhagen and closer extraordinaire, Dan Quisenberry. In my opinion, they’re better than 20th. They’re probably better than the 1987 or 1991 Twins.

The real disaster in this stupid poll is that the 2004 Red Sox ranked ahead of the 1998 Yankees. Now that’s just plain dumb. No one needs to be reminded of the Yankee dominance of 1998. As good as the ’04 Sox were, there’s no convincing me that they were better than the ’98 Yanks, a team that finished the year with a 125-50 record (.714%) including the playoffs. Equally ridiculous is that the 2005 White Sox, a team that barely won its own division, ranked 5th, ahead of the 1986 Mets, the 1995 Braves, the 1990 Reds and the 1988 Dodgers. As far as I’m concerned, any of those four teams would’ve had the ’05 White Sox for lunch.

I know it’s just a fan poll. I know it doesn’t mean anything. But I also know that ESPN has fed so much garbage into the minds of the automatons that our entire sports dialogue has been reduced to rubble. I’m not the most political animal but I guess the same is true in politics. We have too many idiots running around in this country speaking about things they know nothing about. My only solution is that we create a system of sports eugenics. A good starting point would be to rid ourselves of anyone that actually believes the 2005 White Sox are a good team. They beat a patsy, 'nuff said.