Tuesday, October 03, 2006

TNR Baseball Blog

The New Republic has a new baseball blog, "Deep in the Count," with quite a contributor list. Although a few of the contributors seem underqualified, which brings me to one of my standard lamentations: getting one's foot in the door. Here is the bio line of one of the contributors:
Erin Simpson is a PhD candidate in Government at Harvard University. She is one of those truly terrible people who becomes a Red Sox fan after moving to Boston for school, finding it a good way to pass the fall until her beloved Jayhawks began playing basketball again. She does not own a pink Varitek T-shirt.

So let me get this straight -- one of the contributors to the TNR baseball blog is such a piss-poor fan that she changed or developed her baseball loyalties as a function of going to college in Boston, and in any case, her true loyalties lie with Kansas basketball, and so baseball is just a placeholder for her? Why does it seem to me that at places like TNR the fact that she is at the Kennedy School trumps any actual qualifications for her to have the profile she has been given? Does this sound like sour grapes? Well, hell yeah -- I would guess that I (and the same could be said for Tom, or Donny Baseball, or the Thunderstick) am approximately 300 times more qualified to write for TNR's baseball blog than Erin Simpson, though I am sure she is brilliant. The difference between her and me? The Kennedy School and the fact that I'm lucky if someone at TNR answers my emails.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Try spotting a Marty Peretz article that does not mention either Harvard or Israel. It's tough, believe me!

dcat said...

Anon --
True. I like the New Republic a lot, have been a longtime subscriber, and probably link to it as much as anything else here. I agree with TNR's Israel views. But yes, Peretz tends to range from the insufferable to the self important (which is, I admit, not a lot of range).
I supose there is a level of insecurity on my part -- I have Williams in my pocket, to be sure, but from there I did grad work at state institutions and have taught at state universities and branch campouses, with a few lucky forays in fellowships at bigger schools. So I do not really fit into TNR's mindset because they too often trust the pedigree and not the work. The Ivies are fine schools. They still can and do produce crap. And we folks toiling in the hinterlands, believe it or not, sometimes produce very fine work. Rather than read the bio, I'd rather people read the product. I do not know why that is too much to ask.

dcat