Your new Herald beat writer...

John Tomase.

Reilly says it best: there are gonna be an awful lot of pissed-off aspiring sportswriters out there.

I was never inclined to pile on the guy like so many were. Mistakes happen. But the fact is that Tomase — and, of course, his editors — screwed up royally on the Pats beat, and now he’s being handed one of the plum jobs in town.

Sorta brings to mind what Bill Simmons told Adam not long ago, commenting about the tiff between bloggers and print journalists...

“I couldn’t get a job at a newspaper because nobody ever left, and nobody would give some schmuck writing on the Internet a press pass. So what was I supposed to do, give up? I started writing a column about sports from the only perspective that I had — the voice of a fan — and it worked. I’m not going to apologize for it."

“The bottom line,” Simmons concludes, “is that these guys never, ever fucking leave. That’s one reason sportswriting took off on the Internet — because you had a whole generation of frustrated wanna-be sportswriters who couldn’t get a chance to do what they wanted.”

I wish Tomase luck. He’d better dot every i and cross every t, because if he thought the full-bore fury of Patriots fandom was bad, it’ll end up looking like a mild art-school critique if he ever pisses off Red Sox Nation.