IDIOT OF THE YEAR 2021: Party rolls on with Gerrit Cole, John Stockton, and Mark Davis

Happy holidays, you filthy animals, and welcome to Deadspin’s annual IDIOT OF THE YEAR extravaganza. Within these hallowed slides are 50 of the year’s least bearable dorks, whose transgressions range from “just kinda silly,” to “dangerously stupid,” to “Trevor Bauer.” The IDIOT OF THE YEAR selections ahead were voted on by an expert team of Deadspin staffers, whose first round of balloting was thrown out after they’d unanimously picked themselves No. 1. With that conflict of interest loophole sewn up, the team tried again. This list is the product of that scrupulous process. The qualities considered include, but are not limited to: Volume/Wrongness Coefficient: Look, nobody cares if you’re wildly off the mark about everything in private. But please don’t shout about it on national television. Established Track Record of Idiocy: Has the candidate enjoyed sustained excellence in the field? Memorableness: There are many stupid things that happen each day, so time is the ultimate arbiter. If you forgot the person behind the idiocy, chances are it was not sufficiently resonant. Is It Trevor Bauer? If it is Trevor Bauer, they are an idiot. What follows is a vaguely depressing cross-section of athletics and culture. We invite you to laugh with us not out of spite, but because it’s the only defense mechanism one might hope to muster against the Lovecraftian nightmare that is sports. Missed our other gripping IDIOT OF THE YEAR installments so far? Here they are: December 20: December 22:  December 23: 40. Kim Mulkey source: Getty Images “After the games today and tomorrow, there’s four teams left, I think, on the men’s side and the women’s side, they need to dump the COVID testing. Wouldn’t it be a shame to keep COVID testing and then you got kids that test positive or something and they don’t get to play in the Final Four? So you just need to forget the COVID tests and get the four teams playing in each Final Four and go battle it out.” Former Baylor Women’s Basketball coach Kim Mulkey said this after her team lost a heartbreaker to UConn in a regional final game. And this was back in March, well before the virus was under control, which it’s still not. Would you like to know what question she was asked that prompted that statement? “Kim, you touched on it a little bit, but the resiliency of this team cause you guys got down 12 real early in the game and then even in that fourth quarter ya’ll got down nine, had a chance to win.” Mulkey did answer the original question, but then felt it necessary to give her opinion that there should be no more COVID testing while doing a press conference on Zoom. 39. Gerrit Cole source: Getty Images To some extent, this spot belongs to all Major League Baseball pitchers who tried defending their use of Spider Tack for grip. However, Yankees ace Gerrit Cole stands out from the crowd of cheating baseball players because he offered the worst defense/misdirection/non-answer we’ve heard yet on the matter. When asked whether or not he ever used Spider Tack, Cole responded: “I don’t quite know how to answer that.” Well, it’s a pretty simple question. Did you or did you not use a substance, specifically Spider Tack, to increase your grip on the baseball, thus providing a greater spin rate? Cole basically says yes, without actually indicting himself. He and other sticky-stuff tricksters try to defend their methods by implying that pitchers have done this for generations, but that still doesn’t make it OK. Of course, this can be said about dozens of pitchers across Major League Baseball, not just Cole. Cole is simply the poster child of the Spider Tack sensation — a position he officially earned with this exchange — and his answer to a very simple yes-or-no question merely offers a peek into the mental gymnastics pitchers likely must experience in order to help themselves justify breaking the rules. If pitchers truly believed it was alright to use a foreign substance to help them pitch, then why did they keep it a secret for so long? If it’s not a bad thing, why not just come clean about the whole situation? Cole and all the other Spider Tack users in baseball clearly knew they were in the wrong and not only continued to use those substances but even handed those secrets down, according to Cole, generation to generation in order to keep the cheating alive. 38. Andrew Wiggins source: Getty Images Andrew Wiggins held his anti-vaccination stance as long as he could leading up to the NBA season. Wiggins even managed to make the NBA Anti-Vax Dream Team, led by head advocate Ted Cruz alongside Kyrie Irving, Bradley Beal, and Jonathan Isaac. By early October, either the pressure or his agent got to him because he ended up taking the vaccine a couple of weeks before the season started. Wiggins doesn’t strike you as someone to take a stance like this all the way in the same fashion as Irving. The thought of losing $9 million this year was likely enough to snap him out of his idiocy and get him to roll up his sleeve for the jab. Those “beliefs” he talked about in September sure took a back seat when the rubber was about to hit the road. Once the time came near for those paychecks getting cut off, here came the needle. It came down to a business decision for Wiggins, and the almighty dollar won the battle over principles. 37. John Stockton source: Getty Images Everybody had a blast in June putting assist puns in headlines about John Stockton’s cameo in an anti-vax video, where he said he’d done a tremendous amount of research about coronavirus or the vaccine or whatever. It’s easy to drown out silly nonsense, but it’s not so easy when Johnny Assists is dishing out knowledge in his collared shirt on what was probably a recorded Zoom call — at least that’s the thought. Can we get a little production value at least? Someone pass the ball out of shot and then throw it to Stockton at the start of his take, so it looks like you passed the ball to him? Maybe punch up that dialog, too. “Hi I’m John Stockton, and I’m here to talk about how you can avoid those turnovers and maximize your misinformation in three easy steps, because this [shoots a jumper] is the only shot I recommend.” 36. U.S. Soccer source: Getty Images The thing for U.S. Soccer, is that even though it didn’t actually pick the fight with the USWNT over equal pay (we know what you’re going to say, but we’re going to get to that part), is that there’s no way to look good. The USWNT is the most successful in the world in the sport, everyone knows the players and their faces by this point. U.S. Soccer on the other hand, is just a faceless organization, and if anyone truly knows the inner workings of it they all think it’s a bumbling collection of paranoid marmots. Which it kind of is. You can’t win in the court of public opinion. And you certainly can’t win by picking fights with them on Twitter, or drawing the USMNT into the debate and putting the responsibility of paying both teams the same money on them. Which is what U.S. Soccer tried to do with their latest proposal, and then got pissy when that was pointed out. The actual case is far more nuanced than most understand, with the structures of the two teams’ pay methods wildly different, including yearly salaries and different bonuses from organizations outside the purview of U.S. Soccer. It would be hard for the organization to explain all that in a Twitter thread, but that would have been a better course than this. 35. Jonathan Isaac source: Getty Images What makes Jonathan Isaac different from other unvaccinated NBA players? Why is he at 35 and not (spoiler alert!) up higher with the more prominent NBA anti-vax crew? Why isn’t he on the fringes of the list like Bradley Beal? It’s because he’s not as prominent as a Kyrie Irving, but he doesn’t get a pass like Beal due to carryover from his stance, which was to remain standing, in The Bubble. That, and the rumors of him coming to his vaccine philosophy by binging Donald Trump videos and studying black history were false. Fun note: Isaac invited teammates to listen to him deliver a sermon (hard pass) his rookie year and none showed up. That’s sad. 34. Kaycee Sogard credits: Kaycee Sogard It takes a special kind of idiot to move to a new city with a high-profile husband, and then use one’s social media to take shots at said city, all while expecting the new city to embrace one’s family. That’s pretty much the tack Kaycee Sogard, wife of then-Chicago Cub Eric Sogard, decided to do while Derek Chauvin was on trial for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Here’s a tweet she proudly liked, right out in the open for the whole world to see: credits: Twitter Apparently shocked that Chicagoans recognized her endorsement of the tweet for the racist dog whistle it was, she then became immediately indignant and blamed everyone else for “misunderstanding her,” when the problem was actually that people understood all too well. Predictably, Kaycee is also a blatant anti-vaxxer, which actually saw her fitting in beautifully with Chicago’s North Side team, one of the least-vaccinated teams in baseball. And all the while Kaycee was letting us in on her extremely bad and uninformed views, her husband was hitting a measly .249 with an on-base percentage of .283. Not that there’s ever a time that racism and misinformation is acceptable, but she definitely doesn’t know how to read a room. Both Kaycee and her husband were designated for assignment at the end of July, and good riddance from a city that deserves so much better than racist, anti-vaxxer wives chirping from the family section. 33. Jack Morris source: Getty Images Perhaps it does a Chicagoan’s heart proud to know that a team in Detroit has had a rep for having two of the biggest assholes in baseball history as foundational players. And when you’re talking about being such an asshole to stand out in the world of baseball, you’re talking about a universal type accomplishment. Kirk Gibson stood out as a guy who, every time his name came up, it was almost always followed with, “Boy, that guy was an asshole!” Same goes for Jack Morris, who then backed it up even as a broadcaster by attempting some awful and hateful fake Asian accent when talking about Shohei Ohtani. It was yet another crusty old dude in a sport revealing himself to be that, and one who probably never thought anything like that would be considered out of line. Who would have told Morris such in the past? He’s an asshole through-and-through, but these days we can at least feel a small sense of relief that, eventually, there are consequences. Morris saw his asshole journey through to its completion in the public eye, and this is how it ends more and more often these days. 32. Thomas Bach source: Getty Images International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach makes this year’s list for unapologetically suckling at the teat of the Chinese money machine. When Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai mysteriously disappeared from the public eye after accusing a former Chinese government official of sexual assault, the WTA pulled tournaments out of China in protest of her mistreatment, at a great financial loss. The IOC would hear of no such thing, and instead Bach pulled the fascinating PR stunt of showing a photo of what was apparently a 30-minute video call with Peng Shuai that answered exactly zero questions about what was going on with her. The IOC says she’s fine, and since they’re obviously the beacon of all that is right and good, Bach says we ought to just take them at their word. Of course it’s normal for someone to lose all outside contact after coming forward with an accusation like that! Come on, guys, she just wanted some alone time at home. Not like China’s known for censoring stuff like that or anything. 31. Mark Davis source: Getty Images Mark Davis probably could have made this list on his kids-movie-villain haircut alone, but he and the Raiders made it easier on us this year with a truly ill-informed graphic following the indictment of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who murdered George Floyd. The graphic read in unmistakable bold print “I Can Breathe,” which appeared to have been based off of Floyd’s last words captured on video, “I can’t breathe.” While the Raiders were attempting to show their support for the guilty verdict, their statement read as incredibly tone-deaf — and got even worse when Davis stood by it after public criticism and kept it up as the Raiders account’s pinned tweet. “I Can Breathe” was also used as an unofficial NYPD slogan after the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. Yikes.