Sports Not Make One Great

At the time of this writing, we are but a few short hours from the first baseball activity of the year. Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow and some have already started throwing.

Since there still isn’t much of anything to talk about as far as actual baseball news, I’d like to shed light on something that has bothered me for a while and that continues to bother.

There are a lot of things that sports broadcasters do and say that gets me a little bit riled. Bias is obviously high on the list, as is a national guy just not doing his homework when covering a local team.

Mixing sports terminology also irritates me, such as saying that a hockey goalie has ‘pitched a shutout’ or something similar.

But one of the biggest is when the media uses the word ‘warrior’ when referring to someone that plays a game for a living.

Antrel Rolle compared football players to soldiers back in December [and his exact quote can be found here]. That was a stupid thing to say, but plenty of writers and analysts do the same thing on a weekly basis.

“Player X was hurt, but he went back into the game because he’s a warrior,” the ESPN guy will say.

The fact is, there are a lot of people overseas that are actually fighting a war [two wars, really]. They’re dodging bullets and they’re getting blown up and they don’t get paid millions of dollars to catch a football.

Cliff Lee is not a warrior, he’s a pitcher. He throws a ball for a living and nobody shoots at him while he’s doing it.

You can say a guy is a beast or a monster or a gamer or whatever, but don’t use any language that draws comparisons to actual members of the military.

There are better ways to say what you’re trying to say.

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