Even Jay Mariotti's Co-Workers Hate Him

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti is not popular. He's hated among readers, who often (I assume) read his columns out of masochistic self-spite. He's hated by teams and players. He's hated by the crosstown paper. And he's hated by the internet, perhaps most of all. Now, you can officially add his co-workers to that list.

Mariotti's feud with fellow Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander is well documented, but his latest swipe came at the expense of the Sun-Times' entire baseball staff, whom he called soft for not criticizing Ozzie Guillen with fervor. Because it's totally normal, and not at all obsessive, to call for the firing of a World Series-winning manager when his team is in first place. Right.

Mariotti's comments sparked a total newspaper catfight. Who wins when everyone buys the ink by the barrel? Find out after the jump. (Hint: we do!)

The conflict started after Mariotti wrote last week of Guillen: "As you may have noticed through the years, I am the Blizzard's only critic in the Chicago media, mostly because my soft colleagues either fear Guillen's wrath, enjoy how he rips me, work for one of the Reinsdorf-controlled broadcast outlets or are afraid of getting on the chairman's bad side."

The next day, Sun-Times national baseball writer Chris De Luca led his column this way: "The same critics who avoid ever stepping into the White Sox's clubhouse are calling the Chicago media soft for not skewering manager Ozzie Guillen. They want Guillen fired yesterday. Sounds tough, but the rhetoric comes up a little, well, soft."

Telander also believed Mariotti had unfairly impugned his reputation and fired back in a Wednesday column that got spiked, according to media insiders. The paper explained to its readers in a box that Telander was taking the day off.

By now, everyone knows Mariotti's schtick. He loves to position himself as the rogue outsider, the one man speaking truth to power in a city too loving toward its athletes. Everyone also knows that it's utter garbage. Mariotti writes not because he believes what he's saying (he would surely change his stance less often were that the case) or because he loves the games and wants them played the right way. No. He writes to feed a solipsistic need for attention.

But when will Mariotti's nonsense stop being lucrative? When will it stop selling papers? If the Sun-Times' financial are any indication, it doesn't sell well enough. Now it's visibly alienating the rest of the sports desk staff. When does it stop?

Newspaper people like to complain about the death of newspapers as perpetrated by the internet, but too often in that discussion, the quality of the product is overlooked. Could the impression that newspapers are dying have anything to do with, you know, quality? After all, the Evil Web doesn't cut a check to Jay Mariotti. That stupidity is self-imposed.