Baseball and eggheads (or "eggheads")

Here's the opening of a piece in Slate, by Tim Marchman:

To play in the NFL, you have to make a show of going to college. To play in the NBA, you have to get through high school. To sign a contract with a major league baseball team, all you have to do is convince someone you're 16, provided you weren't born in a country with inconvenient labor laws. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining both the high reverence in which the intellectual is held in baseball and the low standards necessary to qualify as one. Mike Mussina's crossword puzzle habit was the telling detail that led a thousand profiles during his long career, limning him as a man apart from the rabble surrounding him in the clubhouse … And Tony La Russa leveraged a never-used J.D. from Florida State University into book-length fawning from both George Will and Buzz Bissinger.

Love it! Marchman goes on to eviscerate Joe Girardi, the Yankee's manager who, as you may have heard from a fawning sportswriter or 20, has an engineering degree from Northwestern. Interestingly, Marchman slams him on the grounds that his decisions are haphazard and illogical, the opposite of what you'd expect from the slide-rule jockey image created by the media.

It's worth pointing out, however--and this has to do with Marchman's lead, not his main argument--that a key reason that college baseball is not corrupt in the same ways as big-time college football and basketball is that the path to MLB is explicitly not tied to education. I've made this point before, to mixed reactions.