"The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on."

 

Among the many things that Stephen A. Smith knows nothing about is, obviously, baseball.

Smith's random jeer at Aaron Judge the other day—after the Yankees won their opener, 7-0—referred to Judge as a "Goliath of a man," as if Judge's physical size should give him some invincible advantage in the game.

Yet there's a good reason why nobody remotely Judge's size has ever played major-league baseball at this level before, and it is that being very tall and very large confuses home-plate umpires and affords crafty pitchers all sorts of weak spots to hit if they can.

Someone who actually knows something about the game would understand this. But of course, Stephen A. Smith knows nothing about baseball.

Smith also tells us that in, "Too many moments," Judge "comes up considerably and conspicuously small"—clearly implying that the Yankees' Opening Day contest against a mediocre team not in their division or their league is a big moment.  

Anybody who really knows anything about the game of baseball knows that this "moment" was only considerable or conspicuous because a big corporate media sponsor decided to "buy" Opening Day and festoon it with all sorts of ads for its other, decidedly mediocre products.

But then, Stephen A. Smith knows nothing about baseball.

"Everybody around him came up big but him," Smith told us—as if we really needed Judge to, say, whack a finishing, three-run homer that would have turned a 7-0 game into a 10-0 game.

Anybody who really knows anything about baseball knows that it's great if the whole team is hitting, and that if the big kahuna doesn't get a poke that day, probably all the better, because it's all the more likely to come in a game where you really need it. 

As it did for Aaron Judge, in the very next game of the season.

But then, how was Stephen A. Smith supposed to know that? Stephen A. Smith, after all, knows nothing about baseball.  

The Contrarian feels that we really shouldn't hold this against Stephen A. Smith because Stephen A. Smith is not really supposed to know anything about sports. Because even though Stephen A. Smith appears constantly on channels and in shows, and on all sorts of other forums that claim to give us first-rate sports analysis, he is really just an "entertainer"—much like a rodeo clown, or a burlesque house tumler, or maybe the current president of the United States of America, which is a position that Stephen A. Smith apparently now aspires to.

Okay. But true wit proceeds from knowledge. 

Even the most foul-mouthed, obscene and transgressive of entertainers—say, Robert Smigel's Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog—manage to strike a deeper vein, if they are any good.  

Last week, on Stephen Colbert's show—canceled, in an unprecedented move, by the proto-Stephen A. Smith who currently resides in the White House he has so foully vandalized—Triumph went through his usual, filthy tirade...and ended by saying how Colbert was being canceled "for financial reasons only."

Smigel was willing and able to mock the powers that be throttling what used be the "Tiffany Network" of television, by dismissing their excuse for blatant, craven censorship. 

It was speaking truth to power—as opposed to what Stephen A. Smith prefers to do, which is to spew insults from a place of ignorance. 

Judging by what the American people now seem to prefer in a leader, Mr. Smith should be a lock in 2028.