Beer and Sports: A man’s best friend.

Baseball is an entertaining sport in many ways, including the antics that players and even fans pull on live TV. For Jayson Werth, a star outfield player for the Washington Nationals of the MLB, catching astray foul balls is a ubiquitous sighting. However, Jason Werth catching a foul ball in one hand, without spilling a single drop of beer in the other, as stated by the intriguing title of this article, entices me, the average male baseball fan looking for something other than a shabby 3-1 home loss for entertainment. Werth, who had not been paying attention to the game for the majority of the game, only needed one lucky moment of concentration to produce one of the best plays of the season, second to “Brandon Crawford catching a foul ball earlier this season while holding his baby”. Upon first glance, the picture headlining the article looks very authentic, establishing ethos: his cave-man beard in full bloom, his signature home jersey, beer in one hand, and glove waiting to catch the ball in the other. Furthermore, the piece contains a story/inspirational quote from Werth himself, establishing authority. This story is also a form of pathos, as it  vividly describes firstly, the rising action to Werth’s stressful catching of the ball after he did not have enough time to put down his beer, and secondly, Werth’s joy that he did not spill beer on his new jersey. Werth’s comparison of his catch to Brandon Crawford’s establishes logos. The informative descriptions of the “clear plastic cup of Miller Lite”,and  the “incredible play that drew cheers from the whole stadium” (which is also ethos and appeals to emotion) amplify the logical reasoning of the article and makes it more believable.

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One Response to Beer and Sports: A man’s best friend.

  1. Lindsey Grubbs says:

    Lots of good stuff here, Alex. You do a nice job incorporating evidence from the article, and I like how you’ve included visual analysis ranging from how the article appears on the page to the scruffiness of the player’s beard

    To develop this farther, I would have liked to hear how the article comes off at “second glance”–you’ve noted the ways that it establishes veracity, but how does it then reject it? Where does the satire genre come in? What is the humor writer’s purpose? How does he or she achieve the joke (or does it flop)?

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