Normally, I don't do dissections of articles—there are other sites who do that a lot better than I do, but this Patrick Hruby article on ESPN.com about the gyroball was so utterly stupid I just had to rip it apart.
First of all, the article is actually a series of "e-mail dispatches" from Hruby to the "Assignment Editor, E-ticket". That format is obviously fake. So fake, in fact, that it makes the rest of the article inherently funny[1]. Next, the very premise of the article is flawed: the subtitle reads "Is the gyroball real? Will the pitch revolutionize baseball? Patrick Hruby searches for the sport's Loch Ness monster". The gyroball is nothing like the Loch Ness monster[2]. Everyone knows that the gyroball is real. We saw it with our own eyes at the WBC.
The article itself gets off to a bad start, after all that hilarity. The fist two sentences are "You sound skeptical. Don't be." Why would the mythical "Assignment Editor" be skeptical about a pitch that everyone on Earth[3] already knew about?
In the next "dispatch", Hruby says, "Right now, the gyroball is akin to Keyser Soze. A mystery. One report claims the pitch breaks twice. Another says it bends like a screwball. Most big leaguers haven't even heard of the thing. So if we find the truth? We'll have captured the Loch Ness Monster, beating everyone else to the sports story of the year. The decade, even." I guess most big leaguers are stupid. Very stupid. The rest of the article goes on in the same stupid way, with people denying the existence of the gyroball left and right. It is so stupid, this post is starting to bore me, so I will cut it short right here.
[1]If the people at ESPN wanted this to be funny, kudos to them. They did a great job on it. However, judging from the way the article takes itself seriously, I don't think that's quite what they had in mind.
[2]For a analogy, gyroball:Loch Ness Monster::the fact that Iraq had no WMDs:Sidd Finch.
[3]Okay, not everyone on Earth. I'll amend that to anyone on Earth who follows baseball and has the vocal capacity to say the word "gyroball".
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