Mariotti Finally Gets His BAT
Now it’s 2004, a year when justice deferred becomes justice delivered. BATless no more, the new BAT champion is Mariotti.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Actually, the latest BAT race confirms the thinking of Hot Type predecessor Neil Tesser. The predictions of the scribes at the close of spring training are as eternal a ritual as spring training itself, and Tesser launched the BAT in 1981 to test his theory that these crack prognosticators are no better at seeing into the future than the average jamoke in the bleachers. When choices are obvious, sportswriters will make them; when they aren’t, time has shown they rarely do. Over the years the BAT award has honored the scribe most adept at picking the National League and American League teams that reached the playoffs the year before, but last year I bent the rules. I decided to give the BAT to anybody who’d picked the Anaheim Angels to win the 2002 World Series. Or even to make the playoffs. But no one had.
Another six writers had the Braves or Giants reaching the playoffs as the wild card. Nobody predicted more than one of the four NL playoff teams.
How to account for it?
Who do you like in the semis? I asked.
Even when a mistake is pedestrian, the facts behind it might not be. But some mistakes are astonishing, and readers are cheated if they’re not told how they happened. The Tribune rarely makes such a mistake, but the Defender just published an excellent example.
