Fire Joe Morgan

» see firejoemorgan.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Three friends who had met on the staff of the Harvard Lampoon started Fire Joe Morgan on 28 April 2005. The stated purpose, according to one of them years later, was to make each other laugh. The slogan across the top of the page read "Where Bad Sports Journalism Comes to Die," and the method under it was simple enough to describe in a sentence: take a published baseball column, quote it in pieces, and answer every piece.

The target in the name was Joe Morgan, a Hall of Fame second baseman who had become ESPN's color commentator on Sunday Night Baseball and who spent years dismissing statistical analysis in general and Moneyball in particular, a book he was fairly open about not having read. He was never the only target. Anything the writers considered ignorant journalism qualified, and sportswriters who misstated what was actually in Moneyball were a standing category.

It got out fast. SI.com wrote the site up in October 2005, inside its first year. By 2006 the name was turning up in newspaper sports sections and getting said out loud on sports radio. In 2007 readers of bustedcoverage voted it sports blog of the year, over Deadspin and MetsBlog. Will Leitch, then editing Deadspin, called one of the pseudonymous authors a favorite sports blogger without knowing who he was.

Baseball is the part of this I have no access to. It is not a sport you drift into from Turkey, where the games were not on television and the names meant nothing, and Fire Joe Morgan assumed you already had opinions about a commentator whose broadcasts never reached me. I came to it as a piece of writing history rather than as a reader who was there.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fisk ~

The format the blog used is called fisking, and Fire Joe Morgan may be the purest sustained example of it anyone produced. You quoted a paragraph of someone else's argument, then answered it, then quoted the next paragraph. No summary, and no attempt to be brief. Posts ran for thousands of words because the column being dismantled had to be reproduced in full for the dismantling to work.

Underneath the comedy there was an actual argument, made in the tradition of Bill James: that baseball could be measured, and that a lot of professional opinion about it was unmeasured assertion repeated until it sounded like craft. When Slate went back to the blog in 2016 the verdict was that it had been on the right side of history and that it was also very, very funny.

~ the names ~

For most of its life the writers signed as Ken Tremendous and dak, with a third called Junior, and readers argued about who they were. In February 2008 they said so themselves. Ken Tremendous was Michael Schur, dak was Dave King, Junior was Alan Yang, and all three wrote television for a living. Schur was on The Office at the time and went on to co-create Parks and Recreation, then to make The Good Place. Yang wrote for Parks and Recreation too and later co-created Master of None. King wrote for Workaholics.

That is the detail people remember now, and it is also the reason the blog ended. Three writers with television careers could not keep producing five thousand words a week about Bill Plaschke for free.

When Joe Morgan died in October 2020, Schur said publicly that he had always regretted the name. The man had been a great player, the blog had been a joke between friends that escaped, and the word "fire" had been aimed at a broadcasting job rather than at a person.

~ the past tense ~

Post #1377 went up on Thursday, 13 November 2008 at 8:54 PM, titled "The Relatively Short Goodbye." It opens on a joke: "After 21 years, and almost 40 million posts (we'll have to check those numbers, but it's something like that), we have decided to bring FJM to an end." Then the real reason, which is the most ordinary reason a good blog ever stops: "the realities of our professional and personal lives make FJM a time/work luxury we can no longer afford."

They promised to leave the archives up, and they did. The site is still served, eighteen years later, with the goodbye linked from the navigation bar. The New York Times and the Boston Globe both reported the closing. Sports Illustrated named it one of the five most influential sports blogs of the decade a year after it stopped. The authors came back twice as guests on Deadspin, in September 2009 and again in September 2010.

The detail that does the work is the header. At some point before they walked away they edited one word of their own slogan, and it has read the same way ever since: Where Bad Sports Journalism Came To Die.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »