While readers wait for ESPN's Grantland to provide a space for comments and corrections, Deadspin continues to help the startup by accepting and publishing feedback. Comments below reflect the opinions of Grantland readers and are not necessarily the views of Deadspin. Readers who have additional corrections or comments for Grantland can send them to [email protected], subject line "Dear Grantland."
Al:
Though I feel like a bit of a douche for doing so, I thought I'd pass this along. In his piece on Grantland yesterday. Simmons writes the following paragraph about Jacoby Ellsbury:
And here's where it gets really tough, because the Red Sox handled Ellsbury's situation perfectly last winter; unlike the Crawford signing, they didn't panic. They knew Ellsbury's trade value (coming off a lousy season, with free agency looming in a year) wasn't anything close to his actual value, so they kept him. Smartly, as it turned out. So even though they handled Ellsbury's situation perfectly, they're probably losing him because they panicked and splurged on another outfielder one year too early. It's impossible not to think about this every single day as you watch both of them play baseball on the same team. Yet another reason why the 2011 Red Sox have been so fascinating to follow.
Ellsbury is under Sox control for another two seasons - he will become a free agent after the 2013 season.
What bugs me about this is that it's not just the factual error, but then running with that and devoting a whole paragraph to this vexing situation that does not exist - it is not " impossible not to think about this every single day as you watch both of them play baseball on the same team". THEY WILL BE ON THE SAME TEAM FOR THE NEXT 2.5 YEARS YOU JACKASS SIMMONS.
Ok, I have vented. Keep up the good work.
Luke:
Eagerly awaiting your next round of Grantland corrections. Here are two from Simmons's Red Sox Report Card today:
- Clay Buchholz married a Deal or No Deal Model named Lindsay Clubine, not Lindsay Buchine, as Simmons reports.
- In his closing section on Jacoby Ellsbury, Simmons asserts that the Carl Crawford contract will probably cost the Red Sox Jacoby Ellsbury who, heading into this year, was "coming off a lousy year, with free agency looming in a year." He also says he "can't remember a Boston athlete coming up bigger in a contract year" than Ellsbury has this year.
In reality, Ellsbury is under the Red Sox' control until 2013. He certainly will command large numbers in arbitration, so I suppose in that sense, you could consider this a contract year. But Simmons's whole theory about why the Crawford contract will end up costing the Sox Ellsbury seems to indicate that he (Simmons) thinks Ellsbury is due to hit the free agent market at the end of this year and will command a seven- or eight-year deal which the Red Sox will not be able to afford. This is most certainly not the case. Ellsbury cannot become a free agent, as I said, until 2013.
Brendan:
Over in the National League, the Giants (Lincecum/Bumgardner/Cain) and Phillies (Halladay/Lee/Hamels) could obviously match them.
BUMGARDNER.
So fucking lazy.
Tony:
I am sure someone has reported this one already, but in the Red Sox Report Card from Simmons, if you Google "Clay Buchholz" the first suggestion on the autofill is "Clay Buchholz wife," which reminds us that Clay Buchholz married to a former "Deal or No Deal" model named Lindsay Buchine, which means that there's always a chance Buchholz could struggle down the stretch and instead of thinking to himself, "How can I get better?" he might think, "Who cares? I'm gonna go home and have sex with my hot wife."
Lindsay "Buchine" is better known as Lindsay Clubine, former "Deal or No Deal" model and host of HDNet's bikini adventure program "Get Out!" I now hate Clay Buchholz.
Yitzchok:
In Simmons's Red Sox column of 7-27-11, he identifies Clay Buchholz's wife as Lindsay Buchine. Her name is actually Lindsay Clubine.
Joe:
Error in the Bill Barnwell piece about the perils of NFL free agents:
Again, there aren't many examples of players breaking the mold. Ed McCaffrey broke out after the Broncos signed him away from the Giants in 1994.
McCaffrey was on the 49ers Super Bowl XXIX team in 1994. The 49ers offensive coordinator that year was Mike Shanahan, which is one reason he likely followed to Denver, making it likely that the signing was not the result of some bender thrown by the Broncos front office, but just typical "player following a coach he likes to the new destination for more playing time," which happens all the time.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a columnist's desire to spin everything his own way. Nice fact-checking by Sellout Simmons and Co.
Michael:
Mathias Kiwanuka started the 2010 season with four sacks in 3 games before getting a herniated disc, not the 2009 season as stated.
Jack:
Today's newest article by Bill Barnwell incorrectly stated that Rob Ryan was the former D-Coordinator for the Ravens (silly Bill, that was his twin brother Rex!). Thought you'd enjoy this.
He's been linked to Dallas after former Ravens defensive coordinator Rob Ryan signed there, but a more likely landing point for him would be St. Louis, where Steve Spagnuolo needs to replace the departed O.J. Atogwe.
Enjoy, fellas.
Ed. note: The error has been corrected by strikethrough.
Adam:
This paragraph appears in Bill Barnwell's Day 3 NFL Free Agency recap:
Rodgers may end up being the closest comparable for Kolb, contractually. The Packers locked up him up in October of 2008 after just 280 career pass attempts. Unfortunately for Cardinals fans, the similarities really end there. Rodgers had already shown glimpses of the star he would be come, having completed 64.3 percent of his passes while averaging 7.1 yards per attempt and producing a touchdown-to-interception ratio of nearly 3:1. Kolb has completed a reasonable 60.8 percent of his throws, but he's averaged just 6.3 yards per pass and has thrown more interceptions (14) than touchdown passes (11).
In addition to printing "locked up him up" and "become" as two words, it lists Kevin Kolb's career yards per attempt as 6.3. That was his 2010 number. His career number is 6.5. The rest of the numbers listed in that sentence are his career totals so you'd think that one should be too.
Fred:
In Simmons' latest Grantland column about wrestling entrance songs, he refers to Triple-H's song "The Game" by Motorhead as follows:
I'm torn on this one. The song itself is appalling - just someone screaming in a raspy voice, "It's all about the Game" over and over again and making you feel like you're trapped in the cellar during a Saw movie. Your eyes start glazing over after about 25 seconds.
Someone?! Only the most badass motherfucker in rock history? With one of the most recognizable voices in hard rock? It's especially funny because earlier in the column he's talking about how awesome Metallica are...a band who worships Lemmy and claims that without him they never would have existed.
Phillyabe:
Forget for a minute that it's a wrestling column and Deadspin's wrestling columnist can't exactly question his other master's column. (No shot at Dave, as I'm a huge Masked Man fan). These aren't "wrestling" mistakes but sports and pop-culture mistakes, which is Grantland's whole reason for existence, is it not? The typos and brutal editing are one thing but can one person at their home office read through these before they are posted?
Sandman's entrance gets additional points for eliciting such a frenzied response from those ECW crowds, for incorporating props such as sticks and beer, for ripping off Mariano Rivera . . .
Yea um, Sandman was wrestling and coming out to Metallica before Mariano Rivera sniffed the big leagues. In fact, Sandman had almost moved on to WCW before the Yankee Stadium scoreboard operators began using the song. Of course this is something that an AL East fan via the Red Sox and admitted ECW aficionado would obviously know . . . right? Especially if you admit to closing the bars as a wild man in the 90's then flipping on ECW when you got home.
I'm torn on this one. The song itself is appalling-just someone screaming in a raspy voice, "It's all about the Game" over and over again and making you feel like you're trapped in the cellar during a Saw movie.
While I am in no way comparing Motorhead to every as seen on MTV band that Simmons cites from the 90's-including but not limited to his embarrassing attempts at breaking down the social meanings of Tupac and Biggie. (I may be white, upper middle-class and attended the same boarding school as the Kennedy's, but I have many black friends. Just ask Whitlock and Adande.) But I don't think it's a stretch to say that Motorhead has been a significantly influential metal act for the past 30-plus years, including playing live on the very Jimmy Kimmel Show where Bill used to work. Sorry, Jimmy I'm not sure Bill still watches. I know they won't be invited to Coachella, but they have a pretty distinctive, recognizable sound, no? (Not to mention the fact that Lemmy has performed at Wrestlemania twice, which Bill still admits to faithfully ordering despite how embarrassing he pretends it is to his readers. "I watch a grown man give a rose to 12 fame-whores once a week and drunk Guido juiceheads fighting in Seaside Heights but watch wrestling? Only in my man-cave.") We get it. You dumb yourself down sometimes to be like the rest of us.
Kyle:
In the initial posting of today's Bill Simmons column on wrestler theme music, he wrote that the Midnight Express's theme music was from the movie American Gigolo.. It was of course from the movie Midnight Express. It has been corrected without comment. You can find many tweets to Bill about his mistake as proof.
Daniel:
In Simmons' piece today on wrestling entrance music, he makes a big deal about how great a song Real American is, how it should be the national anthem, and says it's a "patriotic ditty that the White House should consider blaring before every Obama speech." (Footnote: "After Obama appoints me the Czar of Sports, I'm replacing the 'Star-Spangled Banner' with 'Real American' immediately.")
That's a great idea, so much so that Obama already did it months ago as the intro to his Correspondents' Dinner:
Jason:
The world's biggest douche, Bill Simmons, cites a Jimi Hendrix tune as follows: "Voodoo Child."
Fucking cocksucker has only cursory knowledge of the popular culture he ignorantly and incessantly references.
It's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)."
The longer studio version is "Voodoo Chile."
HRW:
This one's just crazy obvious:
As of 09:30 AM (EST), the first sentence begins: "He flirted with villainhood as a robber in A River Runs Through It and a dancing miscreant in Footloose, but now Kevin Bacon seems to have fully embraced unlikability..."
Aside from the fact that he was a good-hearted hero in Footloose, Kevin Bacon was not in A River Runs Through It. As any character. He was in the The River Wild, with Meryl Streep, as a robber.
Someone stop these morons from ruining the good name of KatieBakes.
Thanks.
Ed. note: The error has been corrected by strikethrough.
Steven:
From this: .
Borders such as 8 Mile, the road snaking between the city and the suburbs, are famous for the metaphor they carry.
8 Mile only snakes as much as something that runs straight as an arrow for 42 miles can be said to snake.
Patrick:
Two errors in [Andy] Greenwald's piece on Julianne Moore: She and Jack were German partners, not Russian partners, on 30 Rock, and Moore was not nominated for The Kids are All Right.
Ben:
Mark Harris has this to say in his column regarding the MPAA:
In the last four weeks of its run, the grosses for the R-rated version of The King's Speech had dropped by an average of 32 percent a week. In the first four weeks of its run, the PG-13 version actually accelerated that fall, dropping by 38 percent a week. In other words, the movie would have reached a slightly larger audience if they'd just left it alone.
He's employing the old "A, B, therefore C" logical construction.
Eric:
In this Mark Harris article on the MPAA, towards the end:
"But the most logical assumption is that the very people the ratings board is designed to assist have, in the case of this particular word, ceased to give a flying f—- about hether their teenagers hear it or not."
Excellent copy editors over there... "hether" should be "whether"
John K.:
In Kate Hasler Steinen's article on the Women's World Cup, she states:
Although the panic must have been swirling on the bench, the USWNT stuck with its trusted starters. This steady hand was what set up the final goal. Wambach's equalizer came off an incredible whip from Rapinoe — Rapinoe, beyond Solo and Wambach, was the best player, integral throughout.
Rapinoe was a substitute, not a starter. So I'm pretty sure that whole point is...wrong.
Also, when discussing the penalty Marta drew, she writes, "There is little doubt she would have scored that goal if Buehler had not made contact." Most observers thought it wasn't even a penalty; indeed, it looked like Marta did a starjump in the air and fell on the ground. I suppose this is a matter of opinion, not a factual inaccuracy, but the whole piece was such shit I just had to point it out.
Jewish Okoye:
In today's Grantland piece on the WWC by Kate Hasler Steilen, she writes:
Wambach's equalizer came off an incredible whip from Rapinoe - Rapinoe, beyond Solo and Wambach, was the best player, integral throughout, and had almost created an earlier goal by serving Lloyd, whose header hit crossbar in the 63rd.
This implies that Rapinoe played the whole game...except she didn't. She subbed in at the 55' mark.
Also, Steilen doesn't include Megan Rapinoe's first name upon first mention, which is just weak writing.
Andy:
Just wanted to weigh in with a few (sort of minor) tweaks to Molly Lambert's True Blood recaps.
(Arlene's devil baby was mercifully absent this week)
The "devil baby" in question makes a brief but foreshadowing appearance in the episode playing with Jessica's creepy doll-that-won't-die
(This one is probably most important)
Nevertheless, he listens to some other hot lady's proposition about how the smartest most powerful people in town should be doing each other. She tells him that if it doesn't work out it won't impact their friendship (IT'S A TRAP) and he says it's cool as long as she can accept that he'll never love her. She says whatever.
She neglects to mention that the "hot lady" in question is "Portia Bellefleur" who is slated to appear in at least 5 of this season's episodes, and is of some relation to a power family in town of the same name. The "research" it took to figure this out was a) watching the show and b)looking up imdb. It seems like, since the character is recurring, it is more than just a passing "it's a trap" and a hint to a later plot development.
I mean, not exactly horrible writing here, but pretty shoddy, as per usual.
John:
Footnote 12 in Bill Simmons's draft diary misspells Petteri Koponen as "Poetteri Koponen." The error has not been corrected.
Andrew:
From Simmons's NBA column:
My only idea: Maybe any NBA franchise that allows an ex-player, a coach, a former scout, or basically anyone without genuine business and/or legal training to negotiate with some of the smartest legal/business minds in the entire world should be fined $10 million by the commissioner's office. Do you realize that agents laugh about this behind closed doors? They can't believe they were allowed to negotiate deals with the likes of Mike Dunleavy, Joe Dumars, Kevin McHale, David Kahn, Isiah Thomas, Danny Ferry and the Paxson brothers over the years. It makes them giggle and giggle. Maybe we DO deserve to lose $340 million every year.
David Kahn went to NYU for law school, worked at Proskauer Rose, and spent 9 years working in the business end of the Pacers.
Dan:
In Mr. Simmons's latest article, he states:
They can't believe they were allowed to negotiate deals with the likes of Mike Dunleavy, Joe Dumars, Kevin McHale, David Kahn, Isiah Thomas, Danny Ferry and the Paxson brothers over the years. It makes them giggle and giggle. Maybe we DO deserve to lose $340 million every year.
This is in regards to NBA executives who are former players and lack business or law backgrounds.
Incompetent as he may be, Mr. David Kahn possesses no playing experience in professional basketball. However, he does have a law degree from NYU.
Furthermore, he states:
Why do you think rich dudes weren't exactly lining up to purchase the Hornets, Kings, Pistons, Bucks or Sixers?
The 76ers are planning to be sold to a group in the coming days.
Jeff:
In his absolutely awful column on fixing the NBA, Bill Simmons states that NBA "Rookie contracts last for five years, but the team is protected with outs after the second and fourth year." Rookie contracts last two years with options for a third and fourth year, followed by a qualifying offer for a fifth year in restricted free agency. Anyone who has played NBA 2k or can do a basic google search knows this.
Michael:
In EIC Bill Simmons's column on fixing the NBA, titled "If I Ruled the (NBA) World", Mr. Simmons closes Item 5 with the following foot/side note:
I tried to leave the door open as wide as possible here for a snarky blogger to pick that entire section apart without trying to come up with a better alternative.
I'm neither snarky, nor a blogger, so I'll just point out the obvious. He starts with:
We settle on a $52 million hard cap.
Then he spends the rest of the section carving out exceptions to the hard cap; specifically, his discussion of franchise players who:
automatically gets a $17 million cap figure, but can be paid $500,000 per years of service beyond that number without it counting on the cap. [emphasis in original]
Sooo... He's highlighting and emphasizing a point that payments can exceed and not count towards a salary cap figure.
I believe they call that a "Soft Cap" system.
Matthew:
Simmons quotes Bill Parcells
As Bill Parcells always said, "You are who you are."
Isn't a quote supposed to be something you said? Cause Parcells said "You are what your record says you are."
Kevin:
[Bill Simmons] from 2005...
I'm making it my mission in life to bring this league down before my daughter is old enough to watch a game
From 2011...
I get the reasons for having the WNBA - my 6-year-old daughter loves basketball and is begging me to take her to a Sparks game
Long live the WNBA!
Max:
Hey,
So it's a small thing, but in Chris Ryan's Grantland essay "Upstairs, Downstairs" the financial windfall of being promoted from the Championship League to the Premiership is initially stated to be "up to £90 million." At the end of the article Scott Sinclair is mentioned as completing a £90 hat trick. I believe it is a typo (not the fact that he attributes the victory, and the loss, to a single player, but the difference in amounts). The error has not yet been corrected.
In a way though, it's not so small of a thing. There is a tacit, and sometimes not-so-tacit, conceit inherent in the site (which derives, I imagine, from its editor-in-chief) that the relationship between creative non fiction writing and reporting is conflicted, uneasy or at odds with itself, as though one really needs to get away from sport to say something pretty or deep. ("Sports and Pop Culture" suggests that sports are naturally independent of the culture in which they reside, a remarkably odd position to take, but one which is reinforced by the separation of sports writing and "pop culture" writing on the site). By focusing on "writing" and "writers" and their writer-ly proclivities, Grantland has managed some pretty moments: a result of this conceit is the memoir-ization of sports writing, which may not be a bad thing in itself since a looseness of rules allows style to come through in spades. Some pieces I have liked very much. But more often than not I find that the essays begin well and then stumble: memoir as a literary form is pretty short on plot. And this is where the errors (and overabundance of metaphor) really become a problem. The blasé attitude towards editing is also a blasé attitude towards writing, and sport: the obsequiousness to sport and athletes and "pop culture" is a veil: the real genuflection is inward.
I know I am not the first to suggest this, but I am startled by the fact that the site continues to put out (some) unedited, seriously under-edited and under-researched pieces. The reason I think this is worth repeating is that there is a potential for the difference between sports reporting and sports opinion to start to resemble the relationship between reporting and opinion in politics, a now increasingly vague and increasingly unhelpful relationship. This seems related to the conceit that there is some inherent conflict between grabbing attention (or writing pretty) and heavy reporting/ heavy analysis. I think that the hysteria in the reporting (and opinion, though not necessarily in that order) of the NBA Finals showed that vagueness in its full, suffocating force with bizarrely inappropriate statistical analysis, character analysis and incomplete narrative lines, particularly from the Grantland writers. (I think the "Stay Soft, Dirk Nowitzki" was a fine antithesis to that hysteria). That vagueness, the attitude towards both writing and reading and the subsequent vitriolic commentary (e.g. the oddly banal vitriol of [Jonah Lehrer's "The Math Problem"] and the subsequent backlash, which was justified, but as a defense not as effective as it might have been otherwise) are all bad for sports writing, reading and thinking. What's more, everyone at Grantland seems to have their hearts in the right place: they love sports, love writing and are pouring money into long form sports writing. But a lot of those hearts seem to have lost their heads.
Jordan:
The following sentence appears in Chris Ryan's relegation story:
For almost 20 minutes, Reading fought for a goal, for survival, for promotion, for money, for glory, for the chance to get treated like a speed bag by Chelsea and battle it out with the Wigan's and Blackburn's next season.
"Wigan's" and "Blackburn's" should be plural instead of possessive.
David:
In his "Movie Star" column, Simmons misspells Gyllenhaal as "Gyllenhall"; yet to be corrected.
Samer:
In the movie star column, and I can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet, Simmons lists the names of who he thinks are movie stars at the end. He spells Jake Gyllenhaal's last name as "Gyllenhall." Also, when I first read the article, Galifianakis was spelled Galafanakis or something like that, but I guess it's fixed now. How about a qualification for being a movie star means that you can spell their name right? Yeah it's nitpicky, but is there really no one who can fucking open up Wikipedia/Google and type in a name to verify spelling? A majority of these errors can be solved by typing them in and doing roughly 10 seconds of research. Is it really going to kill your thought flow as you type your rambling? Seriously, fuck. I'll edit for you. Here are my qualifications: I'm not too fucking good for search engines. Done.
Paul:
Damn, I was hoping today's "Dear Grantland" would call out this clunker of a sentence (shortened for emphasis) in Simmons' "The Movie Star" column:
Any sports fan knows he or she will be in situations...in which they'll get into friendly arguments about things...and they'll sound like a fool if you aren't prepared.
Simmons can't seem to decide which is the preferred gender-neutral third person singular, "he or she" or "they". So he mixes the sentence with both. Then at the end he inexplicably changes to second person
singular. Who edits this shit?
Nate:
I once watched a speech by a Canadian philosopher named Steven Pinker, and he argued that the world is continually becoming less violent. He wasn't talking about urban crime as much as war and disasters, but I'm wondering if you agree with that thesis: Is the world less violent than it used to be?
Steven Pinker is not a philosopher; he is an evolutionary psychologist / linguist. And in his talk he discusses human-caused per capita mortality and morbidity rates, not "disasters" whatever that may mean.
George:
While I enjoyed Mr. Klosterman's piece on Led Zeppelin, I can't help but get caught on an incorrect song title that is so ridiculously wrong it must be ironic.
In the 2:20 to 3:25 paragraph, Mr. Klosterman talks about the song "Achillie's Last Stand." Of course, any Zeppelin fan would know that
a. There's no possessive apostrophe in the title and
b. That spelling is wrong — it's spelled "Achilles"
I shudder to think what my 8th (6th?) grade English teacher would have done in submitting such an error. Maybe Mr. Simmons should take some of that Subway/Klondike money and hire himself an editor.
Seth:
[In Chuck Klosterman's VORM piece]
1. For some reason in the band ranking chart Canadian rock duo Japandroids is referred to as "the Japandroids."
2. It's never explicitly stated what the acronym "VORM" stands for. I assume "Value Over Replacement Musician," but I shouldn't have to assume with acronyms.
Anonymous:
In Chuck Klosterman's article "Bad Decisions" (in which he claims Breaking Bad is now his favorite show) he writes this in a side-note:
Case in point: The print advertisements hyping the premiere of Season 4. Have you seen these portraits? The only thing missing is a swastika on Cranson's forehead.
I actually like Klosterman so I was a little surprised that he does know how to spell the name of the lead actor in his favorite show. It's Bryan CransTon.
Ed. note: The name is spelled correctly in the main text of the story.
AB:
In Chuck Klosterman's article on Usain Bolt, his footnote No. 3 misspells author Chris McDougall's name as "McDougnall".
Steve P.
Today's piece by Wesley Morris featured a glaring error in an oddly structured sentence.
And while it's worth complaining about the Fourth of July uniforms he and the rest of the team wore (where there's uncertainty about Djokovic, there's no argument about the jerseys: uncool), all those feelings of blech should be aimed, like a nuclear arsenal, at the Yankees' owner, Brian Cashman.
Brian Cashman — whose last name is not Steinbrenner — is the Yankees GM.
Anonymous:
(please don't use my name with this tip)
Ed. note: The error has been corrected by strikethrough, though the piece still describes Jeter as "one of [Cashman's] most prized possessions."
Anonymous:
The first time I heard "Rehab," I was sitting in a bar in the Mission District of San Francisco. I was with an old friend of mine, who, for some unknown reason, refuses to listen to music recorded after 1975. ... I don't remember what we were talking about, but at some point, after about an hour of Sam Cooke and Steve Earle, someone got tired of our lame, hipster-dinosaur choices and put on "Rehab."
Steve Earle's first studio album was released in 1986.
Anonymous:
Man, Grantland's entertainment coverage is just—
"In the first episode of the new season, there's a cameo by the star of a popular CBS sitcom," —referring to Scott Caan of Hawaii Five-0, an action drama
"the Carrie Sadshaws (TM Emily Gould)" —it was actually "Scary Sadshaws"
if you use these petty things, don't say I sent 'em
UPDATE, from reader Tom:
I actually think their cameo comment was referring to Johnny Galecki from Big Bang Theory, who had a cameo in that episode. Caan's a recurring cast member.
Matt:
This game opened up, as derby's tend to do, tensely
I think he meant "derbies"?
Arthur:
In Simmons's "Painting The NBA Trade Picture" under "TRADE NO. 16," he says "Miami gets ... an extra banger (Hill)," but trade 16 doesn't have Jordan Hill changing teams.
Colin:
There were a couple of things that jumped out at me from Rany Jazayerli's "Undervalued Sluggers."
He claims the Brewers traded four prospects for CC Sabathia. The Brewers traded four players. One of them was Rob Bryson, a 31st round draft pick who had never played above low-A ball. Hardly a prospect.
When talking about the Brewers' poor defensive infield he says, "At second base, Rickie Weeks, who has faced questions about whether he should move to the outfield since the moment he was drafted in 2003." Nowhere does he mention that Weeks has played above average defense since the start of 2007 with a UZR/150 of 1.1.
FrankensteinsFatFoot:
From today's article on the Brewers:
He pushed all his chips into the pot last December, making a pair of trades to strengthen Milwaukee's rotation, which already had a pair of viable starters in Yovani Gallardo Randy Wolf.
I guess using conjunctions would put them over their 40,000 word limit.
Aaron:
In "Undervalued Sluggers," Rany Jazayerli writes:
He pushed all his chips into the pot last December, making a pair of trades to strengthen Milwaukee's rotation, which already had a pair of viable starters in Yovani Gallardo Randy Wolf.
I was taught the proper way to use conjunctions in grade school. Granted, typos happen. But if any literate person edited the article, this error wouldn't be there.
Chris:
Andy Greenwald's pseudo-psychological analysis of Colin Farrell's desire to be a woman (I think that was the point?) includes a mention of Bullseye, a comic book villain portrayed by Farrell in Daredevil. More specifically, Greenwald writes:
Perhaps it was more than acting. Both Farrell and Bullseye were Irishmen with terrified eyes brought to America by rich men thanks to lethal skills and an equally lethal inability to control them.
Bullseye is actually from New York and is most renowned for a precise ability to control his lethal skills (hence the "he never misses" thing). I also have no idea how that line could feasibly apply to Farrell, but I'm a comics nerd, not a film expert.
On a less factual note, Greenwald also completely omits any mention of Farrell's work in Tigerland, possibly because it single-handedly undermines the notion that Farrell's early-career acting consisted of "little but a pair of eyes."
Bill:
In his July 14 piece "The Roger Clemens Fiasco: What the Hell Just Happened?" Dan McLaughlin describes Andy Pettitte as "one of the few people to escape an admission of steroid use with his reputation largely intact." Pettitte has never acknowledged steroid use, and this AP story says he "emphasized he never used steroids" and "was not linked to steroids in the [Mitchell] report."
Bob:
Apparently, reviving long-form sports journalism means never having to hire a Copy Editor.
From the epilogue of Grantland's suck-job annotated reprint of a 1980 Nolan Ryan profile by Tony Kornheiser (aka "The Only Man Who Hates Dave McKenna More Than Danny Snyder Does"):
As Kornheiser's popularity increased, through PTI and Monday Night Football, his writing slowed and then finally, in 1999, stopped altogether.
Since PTI debuted in 2001 and Kornheiser's MNF cup of coffee lasted from 2006 to 2008, the statement can't possibly be correct unless a time machine was employed.
David:
In the recently posted "Goodbye Solo," the story says the Americans played Brazil in the semifinals. They beat France in the semis, Brazil in the quarterfinal.
Bring Back BJ:
The Photoshop user responsible for masking the backgrounds out of the writers' headshots should be euthanized immediately.
Don't let Jim Cooke see these; he would certainly cry.
Tex:
I don't want ESPN folks to get too big a head, and someone mentioned that these kind of Grantland mistakes aren't seen on ESPN, but the second sentence of Gene Wojciechowski's Oregon story, Gene is leading with a big point about Oregon's Joey Harrington billboard:
And not just any billboard, but an audacious, first-of-its-kind, quarter-million dollar piece of advertising placed in the middle of Times Square.
Gene clearly went to Wikipedia and other incorrect internet accounts since the billboard ‹as a photo search and contemporary accounts show‹ was across from MSG, well south of anyone's definition of Times Square. Not in Times Square at all, and most assuredly not in the "middle" of Times Square.
Sign him up for Grantland!
Anonymous:
In Simmons' "Proud to be an NHL front-runner" column, he writes about the teams that would make up his "The Top Half Of
North America Conference" and drops the following at the start of a sentence: "Throw in Minnesota and Detroit (right on the Canadian border)..."Can someone get Bill a map and explain that, while Minnesota does indeed border Canada, the Wild play in St. Paul and the Twin Cities are about 300 miles from the border. Everything north of Minneapolis might as well be the True North, but St. Paul is a long way from being "right on the Canadian border." (Boston, for what it's worth, is about 225 miles from Canada. Does that mean his Bruins also might as well be Canadian?)
You could say it's not technically a fact error, in the sense that it was done in jest, but as someone who lives in the upper Midwest, people like Bill who think everything north of Chicago is some sort of frozen Canadian hinterland piss me off.
The writing on Grantland is good — great at times — but they desperately need real reporters and editors.
Jay:
Not a tip but a thought: Is B.S. beginning to drown in the S. California entertainment swamp? In his last podcast with Chris Connelly, he tells a story about going to Transformers 3 with the staff as a "bonding thing" and then walking out 25 minutes into the film WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE because he doesn't like 3D. The phrase he used was "exit, stage right".
Either he didn't know it was in 3D going in (not likely) or decided that a "bonding thing" with his staff wasn't worth it. Methinks that some of the less glamorous aspects of Hollywood are rubbing off on our boy.
Greg:
I can't help but think that an unattached Bill Simmons would really dislike/make fun of/hate the whole tone of Grantland. The lack of commentary is suffocating and a little high-horsey or at best chicken shit.
Arlen in Worcester:
Dear Grantland,
Congratulations, you've managed to make reading about sports (and occasionally movies and music) more and more boring each time I trick myself into clicking on one of your links. I don't care how many books Colson Whitehead has had published — this windbag spent 11 paragraphs describing what took place before he reached the poker table in today's "Dispatches" from whatever that inane word you made up to describe Las Vegas. Now we understand why there's a presumably excruciating "Part 2" on the way. The over-reliance on waxing poetic over stupid statistics that no one cares about has brought sports writing to a new low — and Chuck Klosterman's cutesy piece relating VORP to rock music even made his own insipid Fargo Rock City exciting by comparison. I've really tried to appreciate your website, but please stop telling us about the "great So and So" you have on staff and start telling them to write more simply, coherently and just more interestingly. Otherwise, please go back to posting readers' mailbags, because yep, your readers are funnier and more insightful than your award-winning writers.
Daniel:
If I want pop culture stuff, i'll go to TMZ. if i want to hear pseudo-reporters pretend to analyze real sporting events, i'll watch skip bayless in the morning or read random tweets by other people. In all seriousness, I thoroughly enjoyed Simmons' Book of Basketball, bias, errors and all. Since then, I feel like he has mailed it in. he's no longer the sports guy. He's the hollywood guy who used to be the underdog that has now lost touch. He doesn't even do freaking mailbags. That was the SHIT! best columns were his mailbags. he used to whine about about not being "connected". all that was bullshit. when you call the houston rockets GM your friend, and genuinely mean it, you're connected. when you can walk into staples and get courtside seats, you're connected. when you rub elbows with half of hollywood because you were a writer for the jimmy kimmel show, you're connected. maybe age has changed him, maybe having a family has changed him, maybe having money and influence and espn wrapped around his cock has changed him. maybe i am foolish for thinking he would always be the same guy. all these fucking writers have massive egos that rival the athletes they're SUPPOSED to be covering. Jason whitlock takes the cake. the d-bags from yahoo are up there as well. anyway, fuck grantland. the best articles on there are the ones written by Jacoby about the fantasy reality league. that's why i love deadspin. you guys just don't give a fuck. and that's how it's supposed to be. if athletes don't want their cocks on the internet, quit taking fucking pics and sending them to skanks. done and done. if athletes don't want to look bad in public, don't go whoring around town shit-faced. either way, back to my point. grantland is a twisted gay version of entourage with sports writers. the errors are comical. i know this email has turned into a ramble. oh fucking well. i've become that guy now, that emails instead of moving on like a normal person.
Scott:
Hey Guys,
This isn't a correction, but a complaint. The idea of Grantland excited me, initially — I like Bill Simmons and his sensibility, and the notion of him a bunch of the best writers all covering sports and pop culture was appealling. But I cannot, and will not, read Chris Jones's baseball columns. I don't care if he's writing Pulitzer worthy pieces — when he had the audacity to write in his first article that "it had been decided that I was going to write about the American League East, the best and toughest division in sports," I had one thought — Fuck you, Chris Jones, and fuck you for letting this happen, Bill Simmons. And also, fuck me for not expecting this from Bill Simmons. The one downside to reading Simmons was putting up with all the Boston crap, and now this? They have one baseball writer, and they arrogantly decide the the AL East is so goddamn good that 93% of the rest of the country won't mind you ignoring us? This is the same reason I can't watch Baseball Tonight anymore, because every Yankees or Red Sox highlight is followed by 20 minutes to talking heads breaking down everything thrice. I am calling for a boycott of Chris Jones's articles until he or Grantland recognize that there are other teams and cities that matter. If you are not an AL East fan, this is the only way to get ESPN and its subsidiaries to notice, or you'll be stuck with this provincial arrogant B.S. report of a baseball column. And yes, I would have written this to Chris Jones and Simmons directly, but of course there are no comments or email addresses listed on Grantland; thank you Deadspin for providing one.
Thanks,
An angry Non-AL East fan.
John:
Of course there's no way this will be posted.
I can't wait until every commenter on here shows the perfect work they all do at their jobs. Get a life and lighten up.
Use us as the Grantland comments section that doesn't yet exist. Send complaints and praise alike to [email protected].