Blame Brandon Phillips For Our Children Being Overweight

The most boring topic on sports talk radio is hustle.

In recent years the fine people of Cincinnati had to absorb constant praise of Ryan Freel's false hustle (i.e., diving for balls he had no chance of catching), and likewise for Ken Griffey Jr's perceived lack of hustle (in reality he was an old man with two bum wheels and trying to score from second on a sharp single to right wasn't often the wise move).

That's not to say Ryan Freel's hustle wasn't the occasional sparkplug (or that it was always phony; it wasn't), and Griffey, well...he certainly loafed more often than is realistically defensible.

But you know what I mean.

Regardless, the topic is -- and will always be -- boring.

And I'll always just assume anyone who spends too much time talking about hustle was probably just a lousy athlete.

That said, Brandon Phillips is an asshole. I say this because he didn't hustle last night when the Reds could've been blowing the door wide open in the first inning.

I guess I'm just like the boring white media I mostly hate.

But, seriously, what is it with Phillips? This crap happens all the time around him. Fly ball, medium depth, everyone in the park is expecting the ball to find a glove...except it doesn't. And now the shithead, who was jogging to first, steps on the gas out of embarrassment, only to be hosed at second base.

Here's the deal with baseball: You can be a fat ass and still be a great player. I'm not silly enough to suggest baseball players aren't athletes, but the majority of them don't have to be well-conditioned mammals; they merely have to try hard for --at most -- seven or eight seconds at a time. If the ball is hit in your general vicinity, run towards it and try to catch it. If, as a hitter, you put the ball in play, run as fast as you can until it's no longer beneficial to your team. That's it.

Did I just over-simplify the American sport of baseball? Obviously. But that doesn't mean I'm not sort of right about all this.

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Final note: You know Brandon Phillips does this nearly every time he hits a medium-depth flyball directly at someone, right? Well, maybe you don't. But it's true. And this is how the media works. Situations like this don't become an issue until they become an issue. Had Dodgers RF Andre Ethier caught the lazy fly we wouldn't be talking about this. Make sense?

Now, if we could just go another hundred years or so without ever discussing hustle...

-Brad Spieser (Brad@TwinKilling.com)
7/21/09