You wanna see some petty shit? Here’s some extremely petty shit:
The beef here, for those who do not closely follow sports media comings and goings, is that for many years Bill Simmons wrote what he called the Annual NBA Trade Value column. The groundbreaking idea behind this column was Simmons ranking NBA players based on their trade value. It was a truly next-level concept.
Anyway, in his former capacity as Editor-In-Chief of Grantland—a now defunct sports and pop culture website that was shuttered shortly after Simmons orchestrated a coup in which four top editors at the site (Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin, and Chris Ryan) all quit on the same day to join Simmons at The Ringer—Simmons hired Jonah Keri to write about baseball for the site. Keri, who has been writing about sports on the internet for as long as such a thing has existed and was enjoying a successful career before Grantland was even an idea on a whiteboard, began writing an annual MLB Trade Value column for the site.
Keri, who lost his job after Grantland was shut down in the wake of Simmons convincing four top editors to quit on the same day, now writes for a variety of outlets. One of the places he writes is Sports Illustrated, and he has continued to publish his MLB Trade Value column there. In the column, Keri credits Simmons with giving him the idea:
So, Bill Simmons is mad that Jonah Keri—one of the best sportswriters in the business and a guy who did more for Simmons’s and Grantland’s reputations than Simmons or Grantland ever did for his—has the audacity to continue ranking MLB players by their trade value even though he no longer works for Bill Simmons. Bill sure seems like a great guy to work for.