Monthly Archives: June 2009
Why Mariotti is Right
The sports blogsphere is all a flutter today in response to Jay Mariotti’s rant against bloggers in his latest post on Fanhouse.
Much of the criticism of Mariotti’s piece is nothing new; the MSM doesn’t understand bloggers…bloggers are not journalists…the MSM should focus on doing its job. And on and on.
Listen, I’m not a fan of Mariotti, but I do have some suggestions to all my blogging friends;
- Get over the criticism.
- You give Mariotti more attention by reacting to him.
- Mariotti’s contention that some bloggers need to act like journalists is right!
How can I say this you ask? Look what else is happening today that proves Mariotti’s point.
There is a list making it’s way across some blogs, many of them quite well regarded (I will not dignify them by listing them here) which, allegedly, is an UNCONFIRMED list of the 104 baseball players who tested positive as part of the 2003 drug testing conducted by Major League Baseball.
How irresponsible can these blogs be? You are publishing a list that is UNCOFIRMED! If a mainstream media reporter were to publish/blog this UNCONFIRMED list, they would be immediately taken to task by their editors. And rightly so. Why should bloggers be any different?
Ken Rosenthal was right when he appeared on ESPN’s Outside the Lines when a blogger speculated that the increased power numbers of a member of the Philadelphia Phillies may be the result of his taking performance enhancing drugs. Speculate all you want with your friends over drinks, but once you publish your thoughts and accusations for all to see, whether in print or online, that takes your accusations to another level, one where we all should take more responsibility.
The blogger mentality of hiding behind reporting the list as “UNCONFIRMED” or citing the original source of the list should not make it acceptable to spread the rumor or innuendo. It makes no difference whether the list is proven to be accurate at a later date.
I am not perfect when it comes to everything I write here at SMJ. But I view this site as a journalistic endeavor and if I get a tip on a story, I will never throw out the information before it is completely vetted. I will also never report that someone else is reporting the rumor. If that means I am not first to report a story, that’s fine by me. For me it’s accuracy over expediency.
Bloggers, stop complaining when someone in the MSM criticizes your work. Find out the facts before you publish them. Stop hiding behind your perceived security blanket called the blogsphere.
Doing the time warp in Baltimore
Some of you might recall George Carlin’s newscaster routine that opened something like this: “It’s 6 p.m. in New York. It’s 3 p.m. in Los Angeles. It’s midnight in London. In Baltimore, it’s 4:27.”
I was reminded of that as I drove around today listening to the Baltimore ESPN Radio affiliate, 1300 AM. This was at least the third time I’d noticed how the station runs taped network talk shows on Sunday afternoons. That would be only mildly annoying and perhaps sometimes not very noticeable if not for the fact that the tape job also included four-hour-old updates every 20 minutes. So after I’d already watched the end of the U.S.-Brazil soccer game, I was hearing how the game was about to start shortly.
OK, maybe not a lot of people listen on a Sunday afternoon and it’s a skeleton crew at the station, but you guys surely could do better than that, couldn’t you?
NBA draft > NFL draft
The NBA draft is so much more enjoyable to watch than the NFL’s. It moves more quickly. The telecast has a much smaller cast. And, overall, it doesn’t have that air of overblown importance and ultra seriousness that infects the NFL’s.
The thing is, you get 25 people talking about each pick by the NFL teams, analyzing and analyzing as if we were talking about step-by-step instructions for repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. The NBA picks zip right along with comments from three or four people. That’s true although each draft selection is far more important to an NBA team than to an NFL team. Just look at the size of the respective rosters and how a single player can make such a large impact in basketball.
Plus, when is the last time an NFL team drafted a guy named Omri?
SMJ Video- Dan Hoard & Steve Hyder, Pawtucket Red Sox Radio Announcers
Here is our video report featuring Dan Hoard and Steve Hyder, the voices of the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Triple A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox.
Baseball: Stats all, folks
The news that a proposed movie based on Moneyball has been shelved could be viewed in a few ways. For one thing, just imagine you’re A’s general manager Billy Beane and you suddenly discover there isn’t going to be a movie with Brad Pitt playing you. Now, if that were me, I’d be majorly bummed. I’d have been telling everybody I knew, “Brad Pitt is going to be me in a movie!” (Yeah, I know, you’re looking at that photo and thinking I would be lucky to get Jack Black.)
Another view is to say this is a strike against the stat-heavy view of baseball, because Beane so famously is enamored of numbers in evaluating talent. The news should make for a happy day among those who deride the progeny of Bill James as baseball nerds.
(Not to beat this whole Brad Pitt thing into the ground, but having him portray a stat-head should be enough to remove the nerd tag.)
At the same time, we have a rather curious blog post by MLB Network commentator Harold Reynolds — whose work I have always enjoyed — who takes a puzzling, tortuous path to say he doesn’t buy the importance of the OPS stat (on-base plus slugging percentage). I’d summarize his argument if I could figure it out.
(Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski has a wonderfully off-the-wall reaction to Reynolds’ post in his own blog. Thanks to Deadspin for pointing these out.)
Some former players — and apparently Reynolds is one of them, with Joe Morgan being the most prominent example — want to disregard the statistical analysis they seem to believe takes the human element out of baseball and reduces their visceral experience to dry numbers on a page or computer screen.
