In the spirit of seasonal grinches out there, and fully in line with the pernicious year of 2020, here are some aspects to the otherwise cheerful world of sports that deserve a humbug! response:

—Coaches and managers, apparently convinced that opponents not only are spying on them but also are masters of lip-reading, continuing to cover their mouths to discuss strategy. Even though their coronavirus masks—and good for them for adhering to that protocol—clearly guard against code-breaking.

—Overly dramatic pre-game videos, screened both for television intros and on event-venue jumbotrons, that cast ball games as something akin to world war battles or the discovery of penicillin. Apparently those schmaltzy overboard productions, with voice-of-God narration and ostentatious imagery, are the work of out-of-work documentary directors keen on chronicling the likes of D-Day Normandy landings.

—The appalling lack of adverbs in the vocabularies of sports announcers, declaring how teams “play aggressive” and “get ahead quick.” These often are the same people who feel it necessary to specify that golfers hit a good golf shot and football players run the football and throw the football to help their football team win the football game.

—Pajama-style, full-length baseball pants. Bring back the old knickers and stirrup socks of the Frank Robinson days. (Ask your grandfather.)

I present these grumbles with the acknowledgement that they cast me as a sports curmudgeon, though that hardly makes me the Sports Curmudgeon. As far as I’m concerned, that title forever belongs to the late Frank Deford, the widely celebrated sports journalist most associated with his writing at Sports Illustrated and commentary on National Public Radio.

There is a 1993 book, The Sports Curmudgeon, that purports to be the “first sourcebook for spoilsports” with “biting comments and malevolent mouthfuls from some of the biggest hotdogs in the history of professional athletics.” Hadn’t heard of it until Google just took me there. Likewise with the website sportscurmudgeon.com, posted by a fellow named Jack Finarelli; each blog post begins “Don’t get me wrong, I love sports…” and commences to mostly summarize recent jock developments.

But it was Deford who gave sports curmudgeonry a good name, slyly noting the foibles and annoyances at play—among them the “victorious football teams who pour Gatorade on their coaches….The Sports Curmudgeon says, okay, maybe it was funny the first time years ago. Maybe. Once. Maybe. Besides, how stupid are the coaches now not to expect being doused?”

Another from Deford: “Announcers in any sport who say that the—choose one: shooter, quarterback, hitter—had ‘a good look.’ Fine women have good looks. The Sports Curmudgeon says: Keep good looks out of sports.”

And another: “Hockey goalies who leave their little water bottles on top of their nets. The Sports Curmudgeon says: We do not need littering on the field of play. What’s next? Picnic lunches for the right fielder? A bad precedent.”

The Deford curmudgeon mischievously railed against tennis players no longer holding a second service ball in hand—male players sticking the second ball in their pockets (“’Where has style in sports gone to?’ cries the Sports Curmudgeon, bemoaning lumpiness”) and female players “who stick the second service ball in their panties….Would Katharine Hepburn stick a tennis ball in her panties? Would Emily Post?”

All right, here are a couple more from this pale copy of a sports crank:

—College football teams fielding players with duplicate jersey numbers. Yes, I know that the second No. 12 or No. 65 must be on the opposite side of the ball from his numerical doppelganger, but only about 30 players—on rosters of more than 100 lads—have any chance of getting playing time. Let the benchwarmers sport shirts with used numbers—or triple digits if necessary; they’re just going to be standing on the sidelines.

—Soccer players’ theatrical collapses, intended to draw fouls, which suggest the wounded fellow’s dismemberment or—at the very least, paralysis. A razzberry for these cartoonish near-death moments which pass almost instantly, the way Wile E. Coyote is fully, immediately and repeatedly restored to full health after some terrible (often self-inflicted) mishap.

Sometimes booing is appropriate.