Quote of the Day

Mark Purdy of the San Jose Mercury-News, lamenting the fact that the Selena Roberts book isn’t selling all that well:

It does confirm one of my beliefs, however. There’s a perception that fans love to read dirt about famous athletes. Maybe they do, on salacious Web sites full of half-truths — but not in well-reported books that rely on facts.

Right now it’s just a hypothesis, however. It can’t be tested until there is actually a well-reported book about Rodriguez that relies on the facts.


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J.W.
14 years ago

I like this quote even better: “But on the Amazon list, people must believe 961 other books are better.” Um, yes Mr. Purdy, there ARE 961 books that are better than Ms. Roberts’ book, unless you want to suggest that she has written one of the one thousand greatest books of all time. Frankly, there’s probably 961,000 books that are better, but let’s not get carried away. The Purdy piece is pretty ridiculous though. After admitting in an aside that he deserved criticism for looking the other way while Barry Bonds injected and homered and walked his way through the early part of this decade, he spent the rest of the article implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) criticizing fans for not wanting to learn bad things about the players they watch. Purdy: people aren’t burnt out on steroids stories because they don’t want to see the “warts,” they’re burnt out on them because they’ve been over-reported and poorly reported.

David
14 years ago

So ESPN, Costas, the NY Times, and countless other mainstream media outlets all credulously and reverently cover a book that every halfway intelligent observer can see is utterly worthless, slanderous crap.

Lots of the old timers are lamenting the fall of newspapers and TV.  This whole ARod debacle is another example of why I have nothing to miss: I’ve been alternative media exclusive (BP, THT, and Fangraphs for baseball; Infowars.com for news-news) for my entire adult life.

The mainstream media is dumb, dishonest, destructive, and altogether useless to every serious person.  As soon as FoxNews and their 59 year-old demographic dies out, civilization will be purified of the old media and their corruption.

Slugger O'Toole
14 years ago

Purdy couldn’t be further off-base with his take on this if he were Ryan Church. The Robert’s book is selling poorly because the subject is uninteresting (both steroids and A-Rod) and because every intelligent critic has pointed out the huge number of flaws in her methodology here and throughout her career. When he compares Pearlman’s Bonds book to Game of Shadows he further shows just how out of touch he is with sports readers. Game of Shadows was a great read not because it was a “detective story” or because it was about Bonds but because it was the first major book to detail the culture of steroid sale and use as it relates to trainers and top atheletes. A book about why we should love or hate Bonds has little to tell us in comparison. Pearlman’s fantastic “The Bad Guys Won” is very different, telling the story of a team, a season and related that to the booze, cocaine and amphetamine environment of the day. Here is the perfect example of a non-economic reason for the death of newspaper-based sports reporting: a writer arrogantly out of touch with the readers and childishly blaming his own failures (and those of his colleauges) on “salacious Web sites full of half-truths” I hope his pink slip is quickly forthcoming.

Jim Casey
14 years ago

When it comes to steroids, I would be willing to bet that the first seerious abuser in MLB was Dave Kingman. I have no eveidence other than the career he had, just a feeling, because of the kind of player and person he was.

mkd
14 years ago

I wonder how much of the book’s flat-out-of-the-gates sales are linked to the Manny suspension. The world seemed to be gearing up for the mid-May ARod return/Slander book release party and then suddenly the Manny thing hits and it all just sort of fizzled away. 

ARod is old news? Dare I dream the impossible dream?

MJ
14 years ago

Purdy couldn’t be further off-base with his take on this if he were Ryan Church.

OUCH!

Tim
14 years ago

Hey now, it is #2 in baseball biographies on Amazon, just ahead of Straw: Finding My Way…