Rick Morrissey Uses Dead Baseball Scribe As A Soapbox For Blog Rant

Here's a thoroughly obnoxious column by the Chicago Tribune's Rick Morrissey in which he picks up the corpse of Jerome Holtzman and swings it in the general direction of — what else? — the blogosphere.

Holtzman was an old Chicago newspaper institution who smoked cigars and wrote a charming book but also a lot of pedestrian and disposable columns, especially in his emeritus years. He died a year ago, and recently the White Sox unveiled a display case honoring him, giving Morrissey the opportunity to take on every sports hack's favorite straw man: blogs. You've read this column a million times, so I won't bother quoting at length or mounting any defense, only to point out that Holtzman was generally unhealthy in his habits and dorkily obsessed with baseball minutiae — he invented the save, after all — and if he came along today he'd probably be writing for FanGraphs or Baseball Prospectus or something and he'd be ridiculed to no end by the likes of Rick Morrissey, who really needs to move the fuck on. Jerome Holtzman a true Hall of Famer [Chicago Tribune]