Frank Deford is a sportswriting legend. No bones there. But in his twilight, he occasionally writes things that, well, they’re not exactly wrong, I guess. They’re just sort of weird and unquantifiable. Like, sometimes if I read something really affecting right before bed, all my thoughts jumble up and don’t make sense, and when I wake up I feel like I just had four dreams at the same time. Deford’s columns feel like those dreams.

Like this latest one, which goes from wondering why people like to volunteer for sports events — because they like sports, dude — to envisioning some sort of sports salary dystopia brought on by the U.S.’ ongoing economic death march. It should be noted that the description to this column in my RSS reader was “As economy flounders, sports face competition with, well, sports.” Your guess is as good as mine:

More seriously, it may become the case that even if the top stars, like Sabathia, still get huge pots of money, sports may begin to follow the model of Hollywood. The movies pay their performers on, what is known in the trade as, the “tent-pole” model. It works this way: the lions’ share of the money allotted to the actors on a film goes to one big box-office star. The star is the pole that holds up the whole she-bang. The other actors are not paid proportionally less. That is, if the tent-pole gets $20 million, it doesn’t mean his leading lady gets $15 million and the top featured character actor gets three or four million.

The sports model I can envision will mean that the merely nice, serviceable players — the character actors of games; say, the rebounding power forward who can’t shoot, the good field/no-hit shortstop — will see their multi-million-dollar salaries considerably reduced, even if the celebrity stars may still receive real big money.

Um, maybe? I guess so? I don’t even know how to respond. It’s like when an uncle says something about sports that’s not really wrong, per se, but showcases a weird gap in knowledge suffered somewhere. Like, “Man, those Hoosiers sure are struggling. They need some inside scoring.” Well, yeah, but they’re not going to get any, because they were completely decimated in the offseason. You see what I mean?

Anyway, Deford ends by saying that sports are an expendable recreation in a down economy thanks to TV. That’s probably true, and resembles a largely cogent point, proving that Deford — who, I realize, has more writing talent in one strand of curly gray hair than I have in my entire apartment — can occasionally fish out something reasonable. It’s like he can’t write an actually bad column if he tried.

Frank Deford is a problem that will never be solved. Just like Kanye West.