deadspin.com, perhaps the premier sports blog out there, is funny.
“God Save the Fan,” the new book by deadspin founder Will Leitch, not so much.
It almost seems that someone told Leitch that, with the book deal, he has to stop with the fart jokes, stop torturing Carl Monday, stop making Chris Berman’s life a living hell.
So instead, we get a series of ponderous and oh-so-righteous sports essays that, frankly, leave the reader glassy-eyed and more than a little ready to ditch the book and click over to the website.
Here perhaps, is why: on deadspin, Leitch only needs to be funny in small doses: headlines, witty descriptions and the like. He does that very well.
But when trying to expand that to a full-length book, he falls flat. He isn’t very funny, but he is very preachy. Proof can be found in his one-paragraph descriptions of the fans of teams in the NBA, MLB and NFL. They’re funny. They’re also short.
For a much funnier, more enlightening and frankly more interesting read, check out “Now I Can Die in Peace,” the collection by ESPN’s Bill “The Sports Guy” Simmons.
He’s the real progenitor of the Internet-spawned “Sports fan as sports writer” craze, and he’s the best at it. Leitch might just know this, since he takes a couple of barely veiled shots at Simmons in his book.

Unlike Leitch, Simmons seems to be able to place sports in a context that reflects the rest of pop culture. And also unlike Leitch, he actually seems to like sports. That may sound strange, but after reading “GSTF,” it just doesn’t seem as if Leitch likes sports very much.