I’ve written here quite a few times about the baseball pundit lawyer Craig Calcaterra, originally the author of an excellent baseball blog called “Shysterball.” Since then he’s apparently dumped law entirely, and is a full-time baseball analyst. Craig is a good guy, based on my many interactions with him over the years commenting on amd sometimes criticizing his work; he once called me “a handful,” which I take as a compliment. Now he makes his living on various paid newsletter platforms writing about one of my favorite topics.
I would dearly love to subscribe to Craig’s fascinating baseball musings, except for two thing. First, it’s awfully tight at the Marshall household since the pandemic wiped out 75% of our business, and second, Craig has increasingly marred the enjoyment he brings to baseball with metastasizing knee-jerk wokism. Yes, it has become worse since Donald Trump was elected.
Sadly, this hard left bias, which used to be undetectable, now frequently creeps into his baseball commentary, as when he opined that pitcher Josh Hader should have been fined or suspended from Major League Baseball because of some gay-bashing tweets he wrote to a handful of pimply faced friends when he was in high school. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it turned out to have signature significance. After that, Craig increasingly let his political obsessions creep into his view of baseball. Once he left NBC Sports for Substack, he indulged himself by including pure political punditry along with what people pay for, his baseball thoughts, in his newsletters. I know, I could just skip the progressive garbage, but it annoys me. Unlike his baseball instincts, these intrusions are emotional and logically sloppy.
Now Craig is pushing his newsletter to potential subscribers following his move to a new platform; sure enough, he is one of the Substack refugees who are boycotting that platform for not censoring a handful—okay, two handfuls—of neo-nazi and white supremacy extremists. (I wrote about this example of the new Left’s obsession with restricting ideas, speech and people they find “offensive” here.) For a while, he is sending out free samples of the new publication to people like me who have exchanged emails with him over the years. In today’s edition, he includes a deranged rant against “right wing politics” that perfectly illustrates how a progressive bias and hanging out in woke bubbles (lawyers, journalists) will poison even the best of minds.
Since he sent me that rant and I didn’t ask for it, I feel justified in reprinting the whole thing here, after which I will offer a few comments:
