Sign of the times …

… The Evolution of the Hot Take: A Brief History of Bad Sports Writing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A recent apex example of the form came via Jeff Passan, the lead baseball columnist forYahoo! Sports. The easy target was Ryan Braun, an all-star and MVP outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers who was suspended 65 games by Major League Baseball for his involvement in the Biogenesis scandal. The extent and specifics of Braun’s presumed cheating remain, at best, vague, but Passan still wrote about him with the same level of humanity Hunter S. Thompson afforded his obituary of Richard Nixon.