Lamebag - It is the carrot. It had the staff.

You win, Griffin. This will be the last time (for at least a few weeks) that we dedicate our efforts to dissecting one of your articles. The sun is shining, laundry is piling up, and bills need to be paid; Mr. Till and I can't spend all of our time pointing out your mistakes, half-truths, and outright lies. We need to get on with our lives. We thought we could keep up with your prodigious output, but this week has been too much. You used to give us one or two gems a week, but now they are coming so fast and furious that we have crumbled beneath the mounting pile of trash. It is like shock and awe. We have been bukkaked with idiocy. So, for the sake of our hygiene, our jobs, and our relationships, we are declaring a Grimace moratorium. To paraphrase another renowned Dick, you won't have us to kick you around anymore.

Except, of course, for this one last time:

...I'm glad you brought up Moneyball. People are always accusing me of misrepresenting what Moneyball was all about,

You said it was racist.

but there are so many facets and interpretations that it's tough to say anyone is really wrong.

Not tough at all really. You are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And, what you write in this mailbag reply is so beyond wrong that if a normal run-of-the-mill wrong was the dot on an i, your wrong would be the sun. Wrong.

But think about this. One of the Billy Beane precepts was to look for college and, occasionally, high school hitters that were not really the greatest athletes on their team but had the discipline to wait for the right pitch and then smack the hell out of it when they found it.

Um, shit, technically that isn't wrong (but it will get wrong quick). Getting on base and hitting for power are good things, and Billy Beane identified that these traits were being undervalued by scouts and major-league GMs. Beane was able to build his teams in the early part of this century around these types of players, which resulted in tremendous success for Beane's small-budget As (and a five year aneurysm for Dick Griffin).

On-base percentage, dude. That's the wave of the future.

Unlike the first 150 years of baseball, when getting on base was considered a bad thing. Dude.

Forget about how boring those four-hour games get. These were the bargains.

I think base-runners and home runs are exciting. I also think that A's fans don't care how long a game lasts, as long as their team is winning. What do you think is more exciting:

a). Watching a team hit home runs and make it to the playoffs five out of the past seven seasons.

b). Watching John McDonald ground out to second on the first pitch four times a game.

Okay, here is where things get really good. So far, the Grifter has given us his tortured description of what Moneyball is all about. Now he will tell us how Moneyball is responsible for steroids in baseball. I will refrain from making snarky comments until the end:

Now think of a college kid back then in the post-Mark McGwire era who knew he was always going to be on the fringe because he wasn't your most graceful natural athlete, but knew that if only he was a lot stronger, he could learn to play within himself and crush an occasional mistake pitch. As long as he didn't chase bad ones he could make an impact in this century's home run crazy major-league baseball. As for a position in the field, they could teach him to be adequate somewhere. Major league minimum of $319,000 (U.S.) is all that these kids wanted. That's the carrot. He had the stick. The rest was gravy. Before there was steroid testing, who, if they were on the fringe with a clear market for awkward sluggers, wouldn't take that plunge? Moneyball is over.

That last sentence is amazing. Moneyball is over. Griffin has resorted to just wishing his problems away, like someone hanging a "Mission Accomplished" banner on a warship in 2003 and declaring an end of the war in Iraq. What kind of moron...

As for the Grif-man's argument regarding how Moneyball created baseball's steroid problem, or vice versa (I'm not sure)...well, I don't really know how to respond to it, since it makes absolutely no sense. In fact, I bet you that if I entered that paragraph into Google Translate and translated it into French and then German and then back to English it would actually make more sense. Lets see:


I was about to call it a draw until I got to the last sentence; even Google Translate knows that Griffin is wrong.

So there you have it, our last Griffin piece. It will be a shame to miss Grimey's columns on how Moneyball killed the dinosaurs, Moneyball's choreography of Britney's MTV Awards dance routine, Moneyball's role in 9-11, and Moneyball causing the collapse of the mortgage market. You'll have to tell us all about them.

In the meantime, if you need your fix of Griffin bashing, check out this site. It is great.

And if you just want a good laugh, click here.