So I visited the Sports Illustrated website last night, looking for something mildly interesting to read, and clicked on an article about predictions for the second half of the baseball season. Baseball is my favorite sport and predictions of any kind are inherently amusing for their high probability for error.

So one of the questions was which of the contenders has the biggest need to fill to increase their chances of winning the championship. Consensus was the Cleveland team badly needed relief pitchers. What jumped out at me was how one of the writers worded part of his response. Here is the quote:

Ben Reiter: "The Cleveland Indians. A bullpen with a 5.17 ERA will be enough to win an etiolated AL Central, but will probably ensure an ALDS exit."

Etiolated? Really?

I am familiar with the word. But this is a column about baseball on an all sports website. Not a botany article in Discover.

Writing choices like that in this context do not tend to impress me with the writer's breadth of knowledge. Rather, I suspect he's a pretentious asshole.