Weber's book would have been long forgotten, of course, if it hadn't have been for Simmons' tome, which, because of the titles, has pushed Weber's Amazon ranking from 203,608 to 71,276 in just the last day. (Weber's book was in the seven-digits pre-Simmons publication.) We feel terrible for the young Bostonians whose clueless parents heard about this "Sports Guy" writer and bought the wrong book. "Look, son, it's that Internet writer you like so much." "Awwww, Mom!"

The Sports Guy: Scorecard Scribblings from an Ordinary Journalist [Amazon]

(We find it very sad, by the way, that this phenomenon has not transferred over to excellent Esquire writer Charles P. Pierce, whose book Sports Guy languishes in the 800,000s of Amazon's netherregions.)

Deadspin Party Crash: Bill Simmons' Book Signing [Deadspin]
Nonfiction Hardcover Bestsellers [NY Times]

Simmons has become sports' moral arbiter. He speaks with the authority of a particularly thoughtful bartender. ... It is quite possible that "sports," broadly defined, is thriving even while its major institutions are in decline. The genius of the "Sports Guy" is that he knows where the action is.

High praise indeed. In other Simmons news, there's some fun B-side material from his interview with Boston Sports Media. The book signings (which wrapped up their first leg last evening in Chicago) have been continually packed — even causing some bloggers to grouse about books selling out while forcing Simmons to post uncomfortably for pictures — and the book is said to have cracked the NY Times' Top 10 Hardcover Nonfiction list. You know what this means, of course: "He's a sellout!"

Bill Simmons: Bard Of The Red Sox [Slate]
SG Forum [Sons Of The Sports Guy]
SG Interview Revisited [Boston Sports Media]

Former Clippers/now Bucks forward Bobby Simmons, most famously smooched by Bill in a "Simmons On Simmons" profile, was arrested yesterday after a woman accused him of fondling a woman in his car outside a club at 2 a.m. and then punching her in the face. The police report the incident involving Bobby Simmons, whom Bill called "the guy everyone wants to play with" and his "favorite player on the [Clippers]," happened outside The Jungle club Saturday night/Sunday morning, and the woman reported it a few hours later.

In incidents like this, one has to realize that Bobby Simmons has been convicted of nothing, one has to hope the woman — if actually assaulted — is OK and one has to not jump to conclusions. But needless to say, Bill is being reminded this morning of the dangers of getting too close to the players he "covers." He's hardly the first journalist to have been potentially schnookered by a source looking for good PR, but as of this second, he's certainly the most high-profile.

Simmons Arrested Following Incident [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel] (via Sports Hooligan)
Simmons On Simmons [Sports Guy's World]
Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers: Simmons No. 17 [NY Times]

"There's going to be a point where it will no longer be worthwhile creatively for me to write my column for them, and that point is coming sooner than anyone realizes. Including them."

All kinds of Bill goodness after the jump, though we STRONGLY encourage you to read read the whole thing on BSM.

"I am just hitting my prime: 35-40 (years old)," [Simmons says]. "That's when every writer peaks."

"I hate the word blogger only because I actually wrote 2-3 full-length columns a week back then, unlike just about everyone now, he says. "Was it an early prototype of what's all over the place right now? Probably. But most of this stuff would have happened, anyway I was just the first one. As for the guys floating around now, I can't really comment because I don't have the time or the interest to read them. The only three sports blogs I read are: www.sportsbybrooks.com; www.bostonsportsmedia.com; and www.deadspin.com (all for their links)."

About the cartoon: "They (ESPN) promised me more leeway than I was receiving in my column which, by the way, I don't have a lot of leeway with and I ended up getting less," the Guy says. "That's all I'm saying about that. But it was a good experience for me because I learned, once and forever, to trust my own instincts and not listen to anyone else with decisions about my own life."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I took the chance (with the cartoon), I learned from the experience, and that's really all you can ask for out of life. And sure, that sounds like something Rick Pitino said after he was fired from the Celtics, but I honestly feel that way. At the same time, I'm still pissed that I didn't trust my gut. And just for the record, I quit the cartoon everyone else wanted to keep going. The numbers were actually pretty good."

"I wrote a movie last summer that ended up getting buried by the studio that hired me to do it, even though everyone loved the script and Chris Moore and Live Planet were the producers."

And I feel the same way about ESPN, even though they exposed me to 10 times as many readers as the Globe would have. I just feel like a newspaper column, when it's done correctly, can resonate with an entire region."

It was a rollicking evening, to say the least, full of endless lines, weird people dressed in Incredible Hulk outfits and, inevitably, Pop Culture Guru Chuck Klosterman, who showed up at the end of the night to nuzzle and discuss the impotence of blogs. Come with us, after the jump, to the first ever edition of the Deadspin Party Crash.

Whatever your thoughts on Simmons, one thing was clear from Tuesday's night's festivities: On the East Coast, anyway, this book is going to be huge. We arrived at 5:45, 45 minutes before the signing was supposed to start, and the line was already wrapped around the bar (which was entirely unequipped to handle that many people, by the way). We stood in line for nearly an hour, and we were the lucky ones; we estimated nearly 600 people there (and that's probably conservative), and Simmons, to his credit, stayed and signed for nearly three hours. By the end of the night, he was beginning to resemble Don Zimmer.

The story must start with a line, however.

This is early in the night, when the khaki-ed masses still were harboring illusions that they'd end up sitting and having beers and arguing about Dale Sveum with Bill all night. This is the highest number of straight men ever seen in one place in NYC's West Village, by the way.

After waiting for our hour-and-a-half, we approached Bill's table. We stopped to bust this dude who was trying to steal from the tithing tray, though. We're good citizens like that.

Success! We handed our book — stolen — to Bill and introduced ourselves as Deadspin, at which time he leapt out a window and started streaking naked down Varick Street, screaming about the second coming. Best part about that? "The OC" isn't even on until Thursday.

After this photo was taken, Deadspin editor Will Leitch ran out on his wedding, inspiring a nationwide search. "I was running away from myself," says Leitch.

At this point, the line stayed still for about an hour.

Well, crap, now we're going to have to go back to writing about A-Rod being a swinger.

Well, now our book was signed, we'd all traded heterosexual man hugs and ass grabs, and we were all done. What more could happen at this point? Just a long line of people who, tragically, looked like chubby Jimmy Fallons waiting to get their books signed. And then the real fun began: Bill's Bosom Buddy Chuck Klosterman showed up!

He seemed bewildered by the infinite line and went forth to try to find Bill.

This is Klosterman trying to get past the velvet rope of ESPN Books executive editor Michael Solomon. "No, you don't understand ... we discussed Can't Buy Me Love just yesterday."

Finally Chuck made it in and sat next to Bill as he signed book after book after book. The woman next to him is not The Sports Gal; we asked. She looked kind of horrified when we asked, actually.

We started to feel kind of bad for Chuck, sitting there all by himself, author of three books, with none of his own to sign. So we ran down the street to Barnes and Noble and bought one. Least we could do.

And God bless him, he signed it. He wrote "This Is Charity!" in our book, which was either a rip or a line from a Dokken song that we didn't remember.

(Update: We've been informed that we weren't the first people to have Klosterman sign their book; two people before us actually happened to have copies of Klosterman books WITH THEM as they went through the line. We find this both amazing and terrifying.)

The night started getting a little hazy. Apparently this guy dressed up like a doctor — and his buddy dressed up as The Incredible Hulk — so Bill would take a picture of them and put it on his site, or something similarly nonsensical. But ESPN had sold out all their books and weren't letting anyone in to talk to Bill unless they had a book. So he asked for ours. And we said yes, because, well, as we said, things were getting a little hazy at this point.

By now, Bill had signed so many books for so many hours, he probably still thinks he was hallucinating. But hey, weird dressed-up-as-doctor-guy, you made our site anyway. That's something.

And then all the books were gone, and it was time to rope off the Simmons/Klosterman/Solomon/Not-Sports-Gal quartet. Fortunately, there was an extremely important, extremely close Red Sox game playing in the bar, so Bill — the Boston Sports Guy — could get back to the business of rooting on the Sox.

Or discussing The Karate Kid, whatever.

And then we all went home and watched "Justice League." Thanks, Bill! Good times!

But of course the real news with Bill this week is the release of Now I Can Die In Peace and its subsequent book tour. The publicity crunch has already begun as well, and it begins in the place all great publicity tours for books start: At the author's hometown paper!

Simmons speaks with Handsome Bill Doyle of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette about how he got his start as a columnist at Holy Cross University. He covers the typical bases — newspapers were too hard to break into, he honed his voice on his old site, so on — but breaks two pieces of news that tickled us.

• 1. Bill lived in a coed dorm with the different genders separated by a "birth control door."
• 2. Bill used to broadcast Holy Cross basketball and football games on the campus radio station. Somebody has these tapes. Somebody. Operators are standing by.

HC's Sports Guy [Worcester Telegram and Gazette]
Sorting Through The Slop [Sports Guy's World]
Now I Can Die In Peace [Amazon]
Bill's Book Tour [Sports Guy's World]

(By the way, our favorite part of the Worcester paper's Web site: The photo of Handsome Bill Doyle, which has a link to "Enlarge This Photo" right beneath it. Wait ... it gets BIGGER?)

We don't take much stock in Amazon reviews, which are pretty much just message board posts with star ratings. (We once were called "the next phase in America's obsession with watching stupid people embarrass themselves," which, actually, is pretty much dead-on.) But they're still fun to pick through. After the jump, a look at some our favorites for Bill's book:

A few of our favorites ...

"There's one thing that I noticed—don't know about anyone else: did anyone else see the HUGE number of typos and publisher's gaffes? Sentences printed twice? Italicized words that shouldn't have been? Extra letters inserted in words? Didn't anyone copyedit it?! These aren't nitpicky grammarian things, either. If I were a first-time author, and my book was published as shoddily as this, I'd sue my publisher."

"I, like everyone, have an absolute adoration for all things Boston. I read ESPN's Page 2 every day hoping to learn what Simmons has to offer about my team and how I could possibly, possibly hope to be as great and deserving a sports fan as a Boston fan. I have already placed orders for multiple copies of this book to share with others. The magic and mystery of Bill needs to be shared by everyone. I, for one, tip my hat to all arrogant, holier-than-thou Boston sports fans and say "Command me, o great and wise fans." And it all begins with Bill."

"I used to like the Sports Guy before he got all cocky. You may live in a sports mansion, but your writing style is piss poor."

"i read this book for summer reading and thought it was sooooo funny. bill simmons is my papi."

Now I Can Die In Peace [Amazon]

The question most people have asked us most often about the book: Is it just a collection of his old columns. Frankly, we thought Simmons had addressed this already, but whichever: Yes, it's a just a collection of his old columns, broken into new sections with original intros to each one. We'd be hard-pressed to rip him about this, and besides, the real appeal of the book are the footnotes.

Yep, Bill has gone all David Foster Wallace on us; the book is jam-packed with little addendums and obsessive meta-commentary befitting a guy who we always imagine is up all hours of the night Googling himself. (We're just as bad.) No years-old sentence has gone overlooked; Bill's always questioning himself and revealing too much, changing his mind, hopping back and forth between bravado and insecurity.

Did we enjoy the book? Yes; Bill, whatever you think of him, is always a fun, breezy read. Once you get past the jarring nature of Bill using the word "fuck," it's a good time. But the footnotes have kept us mesmerized; it's almost Beautiful Mind-esque (we imagine the walls in Bill's study covered in Post-It notes). After the jump, our equally obsessive statistical breakdown of the 501 footnotes. Prepare to be overwhelmed.

(All statistics approximate; we have an early galley of the book that very likely will have changed in the final version.)

Total Number Of Footnotes: 501
Number Of Footnotes Featuring Direct Quotes From Another Column That Bill Wrote That Didn't Make The Book: 66
Number Of Footnotes That Feature Direct Insults To The New York Yankees And/Or Their Players: 29
References To "Saved By The Bell": 7
References To Gabe Kaplan: 5
References To Gabe Kapler: 2
References To "Life Goes On" That Made Us Almost Pee: 2
References To Pop Culture Things We Have Simply Never Heard Of: 13
Media People Bill Finally Gets To Cut Loose On: Too many to count. But Joe Buck should enjoy this book.
Spin Doctors References: 2
Spin Doctors References In Any Other Red Sox Book: 0
Wrestling References: 13
Fever Pitch References: 9
Jimmy Kimmel References: 11
References to Sarah Silverman as "Jimmy's girl Sarah": 1
Great Stories About Darryl Hannah Backstage At "Jimmy Kimmel Live": 1
Great Stories About Snoop Dogg Backstage At "Jimmy Kimmel Live": 0, sadly.

In addition, we feel like Bill's maybe a little too confessional in this book. Here's a smattering of facts we learned about Bill, from the footnotes alone.

• Bill learned how to read when he was two years old.
• Bill once wrote a screenplay about college life (which we will someday find).
• Bill's first erection came while watching Cheryl Ladd on "Charlie's Angels."
• Jaclyn Smith was "asking for it" from Bosley during every episode.
• The first person Bill called a "fucking asshole" was Mickey Rivers.
• The fact that The Skipper from "Gilligan's Island" never got his due has been nagging at Bill for more than 30 years.
• Bill knows, um, nothing about buying pot in a foreign country.
• You can sum up modern professional sportswriting by the phrase "press box hot."
• Bernie Williams is a dick.
• Bill's mid-90s relationships mirrored the lyrics of Counting Crows' songs.
• Bill has never drunk an appletini.

Now I Can Die In Peace [Amazon]
Sports Guy's World [ESPN]

We're not going to get too much into this here, since we actually have a copy of the book and are waiting to, um, discuss a little later. But we will say this: When Bill says, "I absolutely hate when writers release a collection of columns and pretty much say, "Here they are!" Drives me crazy," well ... he's not kidding. But hang in ...

Hurricane Katrina [Sports Guy's World]
Now I Can Die In Peace [Amazon]