No Such Lunch
It’s wholesome, it’s heartwarming–and the little guy triumphs in the end. Hollywood has only nibbled at previous BAT competitions, but this year’s is too good not to option. Nine months after forlornly leaving town, Skip Bayless is the toast of Chicago. The first expatriate ever to claim the honor, he’s the champion of the XXII Hot Type BAT competition.
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“It was almost one year ago to the weekend,” he said. “I was in San Antonio to watch yet another demise of the Illinois basketball five, who of course lost this past weekend also.” It was Friday night in the Alamodome, and the Illini were whipping Kansas, a prelude to their loss to Arizona. “I got a frantic call from the office saying, ‘Oh my God, where are your baseball picks?’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I forgot to make them.’ They said, ‘We have to have them immediately.’
Let me press the pause button on this riveting tale and digress. The Golden BAT (for Baseball Aptitude Test) was founded in 1981 by Hot Type predecessor Neil Tesser to celebrate the incompetence of baseball writers, but in recent years they’ve got pretty good at picking the pennant races. So last year as I analyzed the 2001 BAT returns, I applied conventional wisdom to major league baseball to explain this phenomenon. My theory was based in part on playoff inflation and in part on big-payroll squads overwhelming the little. “Before 1969 there were 20 teams competing for two berths in the postseason,” I wrote. “Now roughly 10 teams compete for eight.”
Which is the charm of the place, I curtly reminded him.
Genii?
Brokered-time stations sell airtime to producers, who are responsible for finding their own advertisers. With two hours a day of evening drive time to fill, Fred Eychaner, who owns both WSBC and WCFJ, had a really off-the-wall idea: he talked to his friend Rich Nelson, a communications consultant, about producing a jazz show. Nelson then turned to a buddy of his from college, Tesser.
