Interesting Editorial about Ken Jennings.. from a baseball..

[Josephine96]

writers perspective.. I saw this on Yahoo..

What is ... overrated?

Jacob Luft, SI.com






Thirty games. That's how long a hitting streak has to last for baseball fans to go to DEFCON 3 on the Joe DiMaggio watch.

That's when the multimedia barrage begins, Katie Couric and the rest of mainstream American begin to notice and you start getting those pesky non-baseball questions like whether you prefer Coco Puffs or Rice Krispies. (I'm thinking Coco Crisp would choose the former.)

The 30 plateau must resonate loudly in the public conscience, because Ken Jennings found himself squarely in the limelight this week as he approached -- and passed -- that mark for consecutive Jeopardy! victories. Newspapers are running features of the Utah software engineer on the front page and keeping a daily tally of his winnings. He presented David Letterman's Top 10 list this week, and Baskin-Robbins is giving Jennings a year's worth of free ice cream.

I tuned into Thursday night's broadcast to see what all the fuss is about as he went for consecutive victory No. 32. I wasn't impressed. Jennings won, all right, crushing two guys who wore all the confidence of John Kruk going up to bat against Big Unit. Jennings increased his winnings to $1,050,460. (Not bad, and he didn't even have to eat cockroaches or hang out with Rupert and Boston Rob on a deserted island for a month.)


But after all I had read about Jennings' vast fields of knowledge, I couldn't get over these two slow-pitch softballs he failed to take a swing at:

1) This Yankee is the only Ford in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

2) Beefy Barry Bonds has hit many balls into the "Cove" named for this earlier Giants slugger.

We've heard Bonds referred to by many epithets lately, but I don't believe "beefy" to be one of them.

Superman Jennings, meet your kryptonite: baseball. If they really want to get rid of Jennings, Alex Trebek should arrange the following categories for him: "19th-century switch-hitters" and "Intricacies of the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement."

We need to brush back this Jennings hysteria before it's too late. That is, before anybody starts mentioning his accomplishments in the same breadth as DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak or Eric Gagne's 84 consecutive saves.

It's not like Jennings is facing the equivalent of exploding sliders, 12-to-6 curveballs or a Beefy Bonds hanging over home plate. This is Jeopardy!, a show that succeeds because the questions are easy enough for viewers to feel good about themselves so they keep tuning in. The show's producers can't raise the difficulty of the questions just to get rid of him, not unless they want to risk alienating an audience that gets a kick out of sweeping the "Potpourri" category every other day.

Now that the rule ushering away five-time winners has been eliminated, there is no telling how long Jennings will keep winning. But it also begs the question, How far would previous dominant players have gone? What about all those teachers and accountants who cruised to their five straight victories? For all we know, they would have made Jennings look like a bush leaguer.

Before you ask, no, I couldn't win that many games on Jeopardy!, or probably even make it onto the show. I went to a state school (go Gators!) and spend way too much time watching baseball for my knowledge of Victorian literature to be up to snuff. But that's what Google is for, to find stuff we don't feel like memorizing. Many of us, if we really wanted to dedicate our lives toward the pursuit, probably could make it on the show and peel off a few wins. The same can't be said for our chances of making the big leagues.

So Jennings is at 32 now. That's not even Paul Molitor/Pete Rose turf as far as streaks go, and he's barely more than halfway to DiMaggio. Wake me up when he gets to Gagne.

[southerngale]

Geesh, the guy keeps winning so somebody has to find something to slam him about.