In Praise of Jeffrey Toobin

The New Yorker’s most excellent Jeffrey Toobin is astride the current baseball news cycle because of his lucid piece on falling but not yet quite fallen Mets owner Fred Wilpon. Indeed, when, in the course of the same dispatch, you get Sandy Koufax to go on record, have an email conversation with the incarcerated Bernie Madoff and do such a masterly job of teasing out Wilpon’s insecurities that he plaints, “We’re snakebitten, baby!” you’ve got reportorial chops. But as great a scribe as Toobin is, let us recall that he’s also a baseball fan in outstanding standing …

That, readers glistening from hard-won sweat, is an image of Toobin’s laptop when he was on set and empaneled by CNN during the tedious run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Yes, Toobin — rather than listening, in rapt admiration, to Anderson Cooper’s handsome ruminations — was checking in on postseason base and ball. Since politics is a lodestone for all that is miserable about the stinking human animal, we should praise Toobin for this most righteous decision.

History teaches us that Paul Bunyan skipped out on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because he had Marlins tickets, so it should be no surprise that Toobin, a distant cousin of Bunyan’s, is similarly inclined. Accruals of power helped along by vacant stares and scripted outrage or green, grassy baseball? Toobin chose correctly, and may all the gods bless him for having done so.