March is For Mailing It In

Not to steal Fire Joe Morgan's shtick any more than we already do-- especially after they just nailed some petty douchebag on his schadenfreude over Jeremy Brown's retirement-- but holy shit! Back in December FJM pointed out how both the Star's Alan Ryan and the Sun's Bob Elliott each waded deep into the ol' cliche pool and dragged out the rotting corpse (?) of articles about David Eckstein being a tiny, tiny man who has had to overcome great odds to make it as a professional ballplayer.

Well, it seems that by this Monday-- a whole two-and-a-half months later-- Elliott found himself fishing in the same end of the lake again. Because apparently coming up with a fresh lead for a piece about David Eckstein is really fucking hard. (Might I suggest a half-assed dragging-corpses-out-of-a-lake metaphor?)

Though the rest of the piece is mostly absent of the cheap garbage about "heart" and "grit" that we're used to in every single fucking thing about Eckstein, here's how Elliott checked in with Underdog Champion:

He is with another team in another city, another country and yet it's all, oh, so familiar.

It is as it has been and likely shall forever be: David Eckstein has to prove himself all over again.

He is in his usual role -- unappreciated, undersized and under a mircoscope, just as he was as a small man on the University of Florida campus.

Puke!


Oh yeah. Elliott did this same exact goddamn thing a week-and-a-half ago. WTF?
... also back in June. WTF?!!?!?


UPDATE: FJM caught it. After we did. But they ripped it apart much more cleverly.