I mean, he's an MMA fighter who knows a lot about baseball. Has he been to college? He broke out a thesaurus to spice up his writing. Tortured language is not something new in sports, right? A lot of the guys who know the most about sports haven't really stretched their knowledge into other fields. I would rather have Yogi Berra describe baseball or John Madden describe football than have Stanley Fish describe either, right?
I don't read a lot of sports writing, but I suspect that the writing has the same problem as the sportscasting: there are only so many ways to praise or pan the performance. You've got to have a lot of adjectives and adverbs and metaphors in the hopper or you start sounding pretty repetitive.
Fixing this was the job of his editor, really.