Immortals of the Mediocre

Giving awards to yourself and your friends is understandable, I suppose, albeit in a pathetic way. It's like when you see a horribly ugly creature of nature, and you realize that while it has no idea how digusting it is, you sort of feel sorry for it anyway.

Is the blobfish nature's version of the sportswriter?

Last month, as we noted with some ridicule here, The CHB received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. That's the award sportswriters give to other sportswriters for ... well ... we are still not sure. After all, they are sportswriters, right? They aren't exactly known for their talent.

Is this talent? (At least he can breathe underwater.)

But anyway, they dole 'em out, and they (happily) receive them. Call it the peak of a mediocre career.

What that means, however, is The CHB now has his name listed somewhere in Cooperstown. Not that he's learned anything along the way, as Bryan Curtis at The Ringer learns.  The CHB writes long, biased, negative, nasty, racist and possibly untruthful bile-filled columns about men playing kids' games, then claims, “It’s not personal.” He defends his slough by asserting anything approaching civilty is tantamount to rooting.

So much for journalistic reponsibility to truth and fairness.

And it's awesome to see Larry Bird, whom The CHB can't mention enough in his own (shoddy) work, saying about Shank's crappy sourcing: “He just won’t admit he’s wrong.”

Curtis does a nice job drawing The CHB out, getting him to admit that it's all about Shank: "I’m rooting for myself." Of course he is.

And we learn that Shank is a major prima donna: When he goes to Red Sox spring training, he has the Globe overnight him copies of the paper "so he doesn’t have to read the paper online."

As for Shank, perhaps becoming joining the Immortals of the Mediocre comes with a curse of its own. Since winning the Spink Award in 2015, Tom Gage has lost his job  twice.