Slate Pulls a Sox-Yanks Switcherchoo!

I logged on to Slate last night to feed my Dear Prudence obsession, when I was distracted for a moment by a story in the lower-lede section of the homepage:

Thoughts of the girlfriend who won’t fix her bikini line and the boyfriend who wets the bed fled from my mind. I clicked on the link — how could I not? — and was taken to the following page:

Cheated! Duped! Defrauded! I’d been tricked — lured — entrapped into clicking on what I thought was a story about my beloved BoSox only to be taken to a story about the Yankees!

But as I skimmed down the page, I realized this wasn’t even a story about the Yankees. It wasn’t even a story about baseball at all, but about pro sports in only the most generalized and generic terms.  And it was from last year! It was like clicking on a link about Jennifer Aniston, being taken to a headline about Angelina Jolie, and then finding out that the story was actually about Hollywood’s classiest plastic surgeries…from last year. Sure, I might have been interested in reading that story — but not after feeling like I’d been tricked into boosting their pageviews by less-than-honorable means.

Even so, I ran my eye over the piece, and, sure enough, baseball is the dirtiest sport — because it schedules the most games, each of which entails tens of thousands of additional fans making the drive to the ballpark. But where was the discussion of the Bronx Bombers’ carbon footprint? In fact, outside of the headline, the Yanks didn’t appear once. But — in a mind-bending twist — Fenway Park did:

Antiquated Fenway Park in Boston is arguably one of the most eco-friendly stadiums in the nation, because of the fact that parking is so scarce and most fans must take public transportation. That gives it a big leg-up on modern counterparts that claim to be green, whether by virtue of their solar-powered LED  boards or their cup-and-bottle recycling programs.

Suddenly, it was Casino Royale all over again: wait, Vesper betrayed Bond?! But did she really betray him, or was she actually trying to save him? And is that French guy really a double-agent, or only a spy pretending to be a bad spy who’s really a good spy? And what the heck happened to the money???