Wallace Matthews to give up writing

Good news! Newsday’s Wallace Matthews — a truly awful columnist if ever there was one — has announced that he is no longer going to follow or write about baseball:

In the week since I spoke with Bud Selig, I have thought long and hard about what the Omissioner can do to right the dreadful wrong he, his players and the players association have committed upon baseball.

After much contemplation, I came up with the answer.

Nothing.

For all the tough talk from Selig and for all the hand-wringing and mea culpas coming lately from Rodriguez, the fact is, this game is rigged so that nothing of, um, substance, can be done about it.

Well, he didn’t actually say that he was giving up on the game, but he truly thinks it is now an illegitimate pursuit and he has no love left for it all, if indeed he ever had any. Surely that means that he can’t lend his own integrity and that of his august newspaper to the corrupt spectacle that is Major League Baseball, can he? Surely he has written his last word on this hopelessly rigged pursuit, right? And even if he doesn’t give it up entirely — say, if he has mouths to feed at home and must absolutely have his paycheck — surely his journalistic standards will demand that he point out, in every column he writes and every word he utters about the game, that baseball is a phony and disgraced institution and that about which he opines should be considered commentary on a malignant fiction, yes?

If the answer to that is no, and you find Matthews right back into the swing of things covering baseball this summer as if nothing has happened, I suppose the only conclusion you can draw from that is that his stated disgust with the national pastime is mere theater. Faux outrage designed to rile people up and sell newspapers and to place himself in the middle of a big story.

Imagine.


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Frank
15 years ago

And these comments are coming from a man who previously wrote extensively about that bastion of honesty, boxing.  I live in NY and read Newsday a lot – Matthews is terrible.

Aaron Moreno
15 years ago

This kind of denigrates that one time where baseball was actually, you know, rigged.

Kinda like when people say that some recent event has cost America its innocence, while ignoring the fact that stuff happened in the past 200 years.

Andrew Vazzano
15 years ago

I would throw a party.  Everyone would be invited.

NoPepperGames
15 years ago

Sadly, this won’t happen.  For proof, I offer up every single Stephen A. Smith article written that didn’t have to do with the Knicks.

ditmars1929`
15 years ago

Truly awful columnist?  Mabye, but he’s got nothing on Lupica, who is so bad he can’t even be called a columnist.