ilh has the best posting style, i'll admit
― rebel yelp (gbx), Thursday, 23 June 2011 02:31 (thirteen years ago) link
simmons has written as much in the last week as he has in the previous tow years two years, its clearly taking a toll
― ice cr?m, Thursday, 23 June 2011 03:37 (thirteen years ago) link
eh hem, me too
the k-lost piece on the epic junior ND basketball game is good!
― goole, Thursday, 23 June 2011 03:49 (thirteen years ago) link
The plug for this column on his Twitter was "I can't believe how much time I spent on today's column. It's a staggering opus of inanity. "
Also you all should read the thing where Mike Schur and another dude watch Pakistan and India play Cricket and write a 12,000 word liveblog on it. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6657523/so-cricket-maybe
― C-L, Thursday, 23 June 2011 03:52 (thirteen years ago) link
With labor trouble threatening the seasons of two of our four major sports, a pair of red-blooded Americans look overseas to fill the potential gap.
― rebel yelp (gbx), Thursday, 23 June 2011 03:54 (thirteen years ago) link
i watched some cricket when i was in india, its p fn tedious imho, theyre nuts abt it tho, like there are no other popular sports there as far as i could tell, children walking around w/cricket bats everywhere etc
― ice cr?m, Thursday, 23 June 2011 03:59 (thirteen years ago) link
a programmer i work with was basically useless during that shit!! it was really endearing tbh
― goole, Thursday, 23 June 2011 04:02 (thirteen years ago) link
oh he's from india, is the point.
apparently there were some crazy upsets but i forget who over whom. the dutch over the jamaicans? or something
When I was in college, I made a friend from Kenya who had never seen a baseball game, and when I asked him what he knew about baseball, he said that there was something called a catcher, and that there was "a man named Griffith Junior" who was supposed to be quite good. I found it endearing.
― rebel yelp (gbx), Thursday, 23 June 2011 04:04 (thirteen years ago) link
he tried to explain what was going on and what the drama was -- apparently it's a beat-your-own averages kind of game. the batting order is stacked from best to worst, and uhh you keep hitting for some set amount of balls (6?). so basically you expect your best dudes to knock out all 6... i forget what this means for the running back and forth bit. so it's all about expected pace as the hours go by. i guess.
in the final match india had some top guys really blow it early (i think), so the middle-tier dudes had to step up and play much better. like, we have x balls left and need x(y) runs which isn't usually possible, but they did it.
anyway what i just wrote there is probably about as good as the grantland bit
― goole, Thursday, 23 June 2011 04:09 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah india made an improbable comeback
― ice cr?m, Thursday, 23 June 2011 04:11 (thirteen years ago) link
foreign stuff, man, what a trip
― ☂ (max), Thursday, 23 June 2011 04:13 (thirteen years ago) link
I imagine how cricket comes across to us is how baseball comes across to foreigners xp
― dayo, Thursday, 23 June 2011 11:23 (thirteen years ago) link
i'll admit that that piece made me read a bunch about cricket on wikipedia
― rebel yelp (gbx), Thursday, 23 June 2011 13:30 (thirteen years ago) link
The big upset was Ireland over England iirc - I enjoyed that cricket piece but I suppose I would. Is there anything else worth reading on Grantland? I imagine it as a terrible wasteland.
― Gravel Puzzleworth, Thursday, 23 June 2011 14:42 (thirteen years ago) link
wait wtf is this trade value in silver dollars piece really
it's just the trade value column (usually good, and a comprehensible gimmick) rewritten four months later with an incomprehensible gimmick
also, almost every "dime" player he calls "fundamentally untradeable" has been traded in the past 0-24 months
― a slight case of joe johnsonitis (agent hibachi), Thursday, 23 June 2011 18:29 (thirteen years ago) link
uhhhhh David Kahn on the podcast? uhhhhh
2 minutes in and it is already AWKWARD.
― polyphonic, Tuesday, 28 June 2011 02:22 (thirteen years ago) link
*tunes in*
― Clay, Tuesday, 28 June 2011 02:24 (thirteen years ago) link
saw that but i'm too scared to listen.
― circles, Tuesday, 28 June 2011 03:02 (thirteen years ago) link
The piece about the writer who used his garage hoop to help get over his dad's suicide felt like it should have been so much better, but that's about par for Grantland - okay writing, but without anything interesting to say.
(also, Skip Bayless is a cunt)
― bill magill (milo z), Tuesday, 28 June 2011 03:53 (thirteen years ago) link
They prove to all middle-American sports fans that "Soccer really IS the beautiful game, a-holes!" (This belief is actually 70 percent of the spirit that has driven the great Northwest Soccer Explosion in MLS.)
i have had this thought, tbh
― rebel yelp (gbx), Tuesday, 28 June 2011 04:02 (thirteen years ago) link
could someone do a clusterfuck summary of the simmons-kahn podcast? i'm not good with high levels of awkwardness
― get at me frog (symsymsym), Tuesday, 28 June 2011 09:00 (thirteen years ago) link
This is how I heard it, though to be honest I wasn't listening super close after the first few minutes because there was a lack of expected fireworks:
Simmons, when confronted, backs down as always, saying he didn't really say all these horrible things or mean them at any rate. Kahn is professional (and semi-delusional) throughout, backing his statements with plausible if not always defensible outside of his mind reasons. Bill awkwardly tries to rebut a few of them but basically concedes almost everything. What could - and should - have been a somewhat hostile encounter ends up being like him and Isiah Thomas in his book; Bill is cowed and afraid to end in disagreement.
If you want a peak into Kahn's thought process it's interesting. If you want a real discussion of long-term disagreements between the two parties or Kahn to challenge Bill's caricature of him than not really.
It's not as clusterfucky as the podcast with the guy who wrote the ESPN book. That was comedy gold if you wanted to see Simmons unhinged.
― EZ Snappin, Tuesday, 28 June 2011 11:09 (thirteen years ago) link
thanks!
― get at me frog (symsymsym), Tuesday, 28 June 2011 17:08 (thirteen years ago) link
kahn is a creepy mix of corporate dronespeak and smarminess.
― call all destroyer, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 19:46 (thirteen years ago) link
lol so his master plan is to create a smallball team without defined roles
― call all destroyer, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 19:52 (thirteen years ago) link
excuse me while i skip back aways but...oh man, americans talking about cricket is always first rate entertainment. i mean, understandably so, it is a truly odd 'game', but that doesn't diminish the fun. you will get closer to the byzantine truth if you just forget baseball at the outset, it is no help here. but then, why bother, cricket will never ever convert anyone that hasn't had it culturally beaten into them. it truly is the sport that defies you to like it.
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
while i am here i will say that although i was finally done with simmons a while ago now, despite my boston-biased efforts to hang in there, i kinda did want grantland to come off but it seems pretty terrible so far and i have decided i would at least enjoy a crash and burn if not actively root for it.
― Roberto Spiralli, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 19:59 (thirteen years ago) link
hey man i tried, gimme a break.
and believe me 'forgetting about baseball' is not hard for me to do
― ~edgy~ (goole), Wednesday, 29 June 2011 20:01 (thirteen years ago) link
in conclusion, as a guy who works in a large corporate environment i am extremely glad i do not work with david kahn.
i have run into guys like that and they are deeply uncool.
― call all destroyer, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 20:15 (thirteen years ago) link
huh, one of the founders of the awl (the publisher david cho) is going to grantland
― ☂ (max), Wednesday, 29 June 2011 20:57 (thirteen years ago) link
i feel like for every person he hires that i like hes planning on hiring another person that i hate
― ☂ (max), Wednesday, 29 June 2011 20:58 (thirteen years ago) link
The Lorne Michaels theory
― polyphonic, Wednesday, 29 June 2011 21:13 (thirteen years ago) link
wow theres a buttload of people writing for this site huh
― ice cr?m, Thursday, 30 June 2011 00:16 (thirteen years ago) link
bill simmons on ryan reynolds
― get at me frog (symsymsym), Thursday, 30 June 2011 17:37 (thirteen years ago) link
thought that was a pretty interesting article
― dirty deathdrone boys (J0rdan S.), Thursday, 30 June 2011 17:38 (thirteen years ago) link
even if you need to strip away the "how hollywood is like the nba" arc
― dirty deathdrone boys (J0rdan S.), Thursday, 30 June 2011 17:40 (thirteen years ago) link
i do not need a ryan renolds themed bill simmons think pece in my life, i do not need it!
― ice cr?m, Thursday, 30 June 2011 17:48 (thirteen years ago) link
the will smith part is pretty otm actually
― a slight case of joe johnsonitis (agent hibachi), Thursday, 30 June 2011 20:01 (thirteen years ago) link
Grantland.com succinctly summarized
― Clay, Thursday, 30 June 2011 20:56 (thirteen years ago) link
i feel like for every person he hires that i like hes planning on hiring another person that i hate― ☂ (max), Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:58 PM
http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmhb7goxVB1qa9bmvo1_400.png LaBeouf
― rip nyc chicken (am0n), Thursday, 30 June 2011 21:09 (thirteen years ago) link
lol
― dirty deathdrone boys (J0rdan S.), Thursday, 30 June 2011 22:52 (thirteen years ago) link
muniz
― ☂ (max), Friday, 1 July 2011 12:39 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6708682/the-math-problem
too easy i guess but i'm surprised we didn't take a doodoo on this one
― bros -izing bros (k3vin k.), Friday, 8 July 2011 14:39 (thirteen years ago) link
it was way, way too easy
― call all destroyer, Friday, 8 July 2011 15:45 (thirteen years ago) link
i mean, i'm sympathetic to the position but it was just a dumb article.
― call all destroyer, Friday, 8 July 2011 15:46 (thirteen years ago) link
that piece has been savaged all over the place
― gucci mande (J0rdan S.), Friday, 8 July 2011 15:54 (thirteen years ago) link
http://deadspin.com/5819051/dear-grantland-your-motto-is-wrong
this is really damning & unbelievable -- i can tell you from experience that editing is really not that hard, and even less hard is setting up a system so that you don't have a myriad of typos in your articles, especially when you have an unlimited budget and especially when you're posting like 3 stories a day, most of which aren't even much more than 1,000 words long. some of this shit is just embarrassing.
― gucci mande (J0rdan S.), Friday, 8 July 2011 15:57 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah agreed
― call all destroyer, Friday, 8 July 2011 15:59 (thirteen years ago) link