Snarky is the new cool, so let me be cool for awhile

     My joy at the arrival of another baseball season will be restrained at the insistence of those who write about baseball -- and most other sports, apparently -- because a snarky attitude about professional sports is a prerequisite for the job.
      Back in the days of my innocence, there was a sports editor at the old Baltimore News Post named Roger Pippen, who lived to take pot shots at the Orioles. Maybe it was because the Orioles by another name were still the St. Louis Browns, a truly needy collection of used to be, wanna be and never will be players, whose legacy to Baltimore was the likes of pitchers like Bob Chackles, the only player I ever asked for an autograph. He was brusque, but accommodating, but as I looked at the signature, I asked myself, Who the heck is Bob Chackles? The next question was, Who cares?  And the question then became, So what? I never asked another celebrity for an autograph, not any of the big time politicians, actors, musicians or other Names in Lights types I met over the years because I figured they were just like everybody else, and a good mechanic is worth more to the betterment of humanity than most of those idols we gush over.
     Look, see there? I'm being snarky. Maybe I can still get a job writing sports.
     I worked with big league sports writers at the News American. John Steadman was the only one who was truly happy to have his job. The others had jobs that I once considered the next best thing to playing center field in Baltimore; they traveled with the team on nice expense accounts, got to see the country, got to talk to players in the locker room, and always had a by-line even when they filed stories half in the tank.
     They griped about having to travel, eat restaurant food and stay in hotel rooms in cities hither and yon, suffer indignities at the hands of spoiled players, having to file stories while others could get fully loaded, and being underpaid.
     Underpaid? I didn't make their kind of money in my best job. But then I wasn't snarky enough.
     Newspaper people are, as a herd, a snarky lot. Sportswriters are the snarkiest of the snarky, save the occasional editorialist. Still, baseball writers can be snarky every day, and editorial writers and columnists can only vent their spleens two or three days a week, max.
     Besides, sports fan want snarky sports writers. And if they happen to accidentally actually read an editorial page and find a snarky word, it only makes them grumpily happy if the snarkiness is aimed at intellectuals or liberals, which they think are one and the same.
     Maybe it's my age, but I find other things more worthy of complaint, like the colors they want men to wear. I refuse to wear a peach or pink or melon green golf shirt.
     Others can buy their clothes at Nautica from Nordstrums, or wherever you have to pay $120 to be in style. I will continue to find my pocketed polos at LL Bean, Tractor Supply or WalMart, knowing that with the latter, I am risking showing up on viral email page showing the denizens known as Wal-Martians, the snarkiest of all snarky recreational put-downs.