In the best story ever written about the divine mutants that work in sports media, one particular moment stands out. This is saying something, because this story also includes Chris “Mad Dog” Russo barking an approving scouting report to his wife on the chicken she cooked for dinner and a description of the shitty art hanging in Mike Francesa’s Long Island home. All great, all important in a supremely trivial way, but not in the same universe as the moment, in Nick Paumgarten’s August 2004 New Yorker story “The Boys,” in which Francesa and Russo watch and parse the end of the gauzy Robert Redford weeper The Horse Whisperer together in a hotel room.
I will not spoil it for you, except to note that both Francesa and Russo, with their characteristic and respective lugubrious self-seriousness and yipping mania, agree that Redford’s character did what he had to do, difficult though it was to do it. It is not and should not be surprising that sports radio’s premier estranged Master Blaster duo reflexively snapped-to and started in with the takes when watching some definitionally whatever-grade shit on television, whatever it was. That is the better part of the job, and also the part that comes most naturally. This is both the hardest and funniest thing to comprehend, when it comes to assessing the piping-hot, utility-grade opinions extruded around the clock by sports media’s hissing, belching take-press—the realization that so much of this puddle-deep purpose and righteous overstatement and poker-faced self-satire is in earnest. Once you understand that, you understand…well, that you’d probably do well to listen to less sports-talk radio and read fewer sports columns, for starters.
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But it also makes it easier to understand how we wind up with the sports conversation we have, and how that conversation wound up with the values that it has. This is a different thing from the shills and sociopaths who both-sides their way through non-discussions about legitimate scandals like the horrifically inverted culture at Baylor, where administrators and coaches excused and concealed an epidemic of sexual assault that spanned years because they wanted to make the fucking Fiesta Bowl so bad. The turds who would make this story about them or their stupid hobbyhorse hashtags will always be with us, but also we have built sewers expressly for turds, and reasonable people generally don’t spend much time talking sports down there.
Anyway, what happened at Baylor seems to belong to a different conversation than the one that burbles and yips and Quite Frankly’s along on the surface. The blank cowardice and system-spanning cynicism involved at Baylor is staggering and dispiritingly familiar, and if assessing or addressing this is beyond the reach of scolding local columnists and regional Loafman And The Cramp sports-radio types, it’s also true that they have never cared about this sort of thing. That they so resolutely do not care about it surely goes some way towards creating the conditions that allow for this to keep happening; once you have made the decision to forget that there are actual people involved, you are playing by a different set of rules. Mostly, though, you are playing—glossing and pretend-fighting about things that don’t matter—who’s better and who’s best, what someone should have done instead of the thing they did—and so creating a man-toned noisewash for people who are looking only for that.
But what about the things that this segment of the sports conversation does care about? Given that this portion of the discourse is supposed to be the Fun Stuff Clubhouse, it’s striking how much of it winds up either creepy—there is much unseemly lingering on how you would discipline some young black athlete for insubordination—or earnestly, urgently angry. It’s really only surprising that this is what passes as fun if you’re not up on what the rest of our cultural life looks like at the moment, and how edgy and self-righteous and desperate and otherwise on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown everything and everyone seems much of the time. The reasons for all this have to do with things bigger and more stubborn than sports, but they are, on balance, pretty good reasons to feel anxious. Whether they’re good reasons to get mad at Matt Harvey is another thing.
When you are basically Mike Tyson, at that moment. Photo by Noah K. Murray-USA TODAY Sports
And there are some good reasons to be frustrated with Harvey, whether you’re a Mets fan, a fantasy baseball GM with a long position that is abruptly deep underwater, or someone emotionally invested in the proposition that an elite athlete can also look like a stressed-out junior associate at a big law firm who has been living on pizza-flavored Combos from the vending machine since early April. I won’t pretend that I don’t have at least some stock in all three, but it’s hard to feel anything harsher than a certain sadness at the way that Harvey has struggled after pitching both bravely and brilliantly, if perhaps a bit too long, in his 2015 return from Tommy John surgery. He was great, and right now he really, really is not.
When Harvey was torched in his second straight outing earlier this week against Washington—the killshot was a towering homer by former Met imp-of-the-perverse Daniel Murphy—he declined to address the assembled media afterwards; his pitching coach did the same. There is likely nothing that Harvey could have said that would have dispelled the impression that he is presently dead-armed and utterly out of answers. Nothing he said to the media after his previous loss, a two-and-two-third-inning real-time batting practice session in which he was charged with nine earned runs, suggested anything but that. “It’s my job to go out there and pitch,” he told the assembled media after that game. “I’m going to start over tomorrow and try to figure this out.” There is nothing else to say, really—that is his job, and that is indeed the only thing he can really do in an attempt to do it better.
It’s hard to imagine what else he might have said after his latest loss, but for his refusal to say it—and for being, by all accounts, a prickly and high-handed grouch even when his fastball is fast and his breaking pitches are breaking—Harvey spent much of the week getting kicked around the back pages of New York’s worst newspapers. One New York Post writer called him a gutless “phony” and stopped just shy of calling him a coward; another…well, about the same, but also compared him to Mike Tyson somehow. Mike Francesa, taking a break from his film criticism and award-winning soccer coverage, called Harvey’s decision not to talk to the press “a sin.”
The concern, which was vigorously expressed across the board, was Accountability. If there is something to this, it amounts mostly to office politics—someone has to give the anodyne “it’s my job to go out there and pitch” quotes to fill in the QUOTE TK portions of writers’ otherwise finished game stories, and when Harvey declines to do so it creates a downstream pain in the ass for whoever goes out to do it instead, and for the PR staff. How much of a sin this seems like probably depends on when your deadline is. It’s probably more correct to say that it is, in the narrow and transactional relationship between professional athletes and the people covering them, something more on the order of a dick move. It is also a good guess, just based on the scoldy aftershocks, that it wasn’t the first.
At some level, this is just everyone doing their wearying, stressful, and repetitive jobs, fairly poorly. But for all the tangy bad vibes and general unconvincing tough-guying, there is a deeper dissatisfaction that’s only barely buried. Accountability can mean any number of things, and it is indeed a pretty good one-word mission statement for journalism. But on the journalistic spectrum that runs from Ignoring/Missing Massive Institutional Criminality Over A Period Of Years to The Guy Wouldn’t Come Out And Admit He Pitched Badly, this offense and all the stern accountability talk that followed is all decidedly on the play-fighting side of things. No one really got hurt—honestly, even I knew to bench Harvey in fantasy going into that game—and it’s hard to believe that anyone was even sincerely offended. So what are we even talking about, here?
I think that we are talking about accountability, but mostly talking around it. Reporting of the kind that brought Baylor’s administrative heinousness to light is difficult and risky, and there’s no sense in kicking around the one-sentence-paragraph jockeys of New York’s tabloids around for doing their sillier jobs instead. But we’re again dealing with two different and notably unequal tiers. There is accountability and then there is accountability, and there is the journalism that looks to hold institutions and individuals accountable and there is the bassed-up simulacrum of it that clomps around in daddy’s shoes and makes a lot of noise.
Ordinarily, this is more darkly funny than anything else—this is Stephen A. Smith blacking out with rage over violations of The Bro Code and turning into a starstruck goofus around an unrepentant abuser like Floyd Mayweather. But when we see how unaccountable powerful institutions can be, and the dark consequences, all this priggishly macho play-fighting looks even more like a like a waste. Yeah, all this huffy scolding and faux-accountability is fundamentally a joke, or at least somewhere well short of serious. But when there’s so much of this cheap accountability here and so little of the real stuff where it belongs, it can be hard to laugh.
