Porn Valley- If you read the LA Times sports section- and there’s no reason that you should, given that it’s probably the worst in the country next to the LA Daily News’- you’ll come across the name T.J. Simers.
For want of a better name Simers, a meatball, who looks like a squint-eyed pig farmer and writes like one, is a columnist. This past Thursday, Simers, whose commentary is generally hard to navigate anyway for it’s cheap hillbilly wisdom and dizzying lack of focus, began ripping Philadelphia as a town in the upcoming Dodgers-Phillies series.
Insistent in his use of the word “Angryville” to describe Philadelphia, Simers’ piece was a demonstration of the power of one idea when the idea no longer works.
Working off ancient press clippings in which he probably read that Philadelphia fans once booed Santa Claus, and then using an Ex-Phillie now a Dodger, Larry Bowa, to make his case about Philadelphia fans being “sad clowns,” Simers’ unprofessional column was plastered all over the Philly media.
If you’re going to wake a sleeping giant, nothing like a carbide-tipped anal probe to do it. Yet how this venal and inflammatory sampling of modern day sports reporting at its worst was permitted to escape the hog tunnel into the light of day is beyond a capable answer.
In any event, Simers began receiving death threats and whined about it in his Friday piece. Meanwhile, Philadelphia took it to Los Angeles and Derek Lowe with a 3-2 victory.
In his pre-series analysis, [quote Simers: “a sweep is not out of the question”], Simers all but sucked Lowe’s cock for being a focused athlete with a big contract on the line, when, in fact, Lowe’s more concentrated bedroom athletics wrecked his marriage with a scandal involving a bimbo newscaster from the Fox Channel.
In a masterpiece of backpeddling, Simers, then on Friday threw Lowe under the bus and wrote: “for those trying to look on the bright side of things, the Dodgers don’t figure to spend the money to bring Lowe back next season.”
If Mike South needs another blogger, I think I found him.
Then, again, on Friday, Simers wrote that the Phillies should, “step aside in the best interests of entertaining baseball.”
Well, it certainly was entertaining Friday afternoon when Phillies’ pitcher Brett Myers, who Simers dismissed the day before like a hump-backed palace servant, got three hits in the middle of another Dodgers fiasco. Tell me that a Philadelphia-Boston series wouldn’t be entertaining as the world’s largest barfight?
To get at least one more shot in before the creatures of the night come for his eyeballs, Simers writes Saturday: “…if the Phillies win the World Series, it will be interesting to see if the locals burn the place down. And if anyone really tries to stop them.”
Ignorant that he is to history, but probably walleyed with shock and confusion as to what’s happening to his beloved Dodgers, homeboy Simers obviously forgot to include the Rodney King riots, the one in East LA in 1970 and the Watts conflagration of 1965 as examples of a city and its government impossibly out of control.
Yeah, to quote this noted historian and master of analysis, a sweep is not out of the question.
One more thing, Simers, in an apparent attempt to be funny, quotes an example of bad writing employed by the Dodgers’ Nic Colletti who used to be a sportswriter for the defunct Philadelphia-Journal.
“Not surprisingly, the paper went out of business the next day,” muses Simers.
What’s that bit about those who don’t learn the lessons of history being doomed to repeat them?