Jose Reyes on cover of Baseball America

[Guest KC]

Came today, more to follow.

[Frayed Knot]

Not for the first time either.
He was the cover boy in May of '03

[soupcan]

The Sporting News cover this week...

[Guest Edgy DC]

Jos� is looking hot!

[Guest Johnny Dickshot]

TSN has fallen on very hard times.

[Guest OlerudOwned]

="Johnny Dickshot"]TSN has fallen on very hard times.

Are you kidding? It's the BEST issue!

[soupcan]

Johnny Dickshot wrote: TSN has fallen on very hard times.

That is very true.

I have a subscription because my neice or nephew or something was raising money for 'Dogs against Cats' or some such organization by selling subscriptions and they didn't offer SI so...

TSN which used to be known as 'The Baseball Bible' and has such a rich history and tradition as a sports publication, is now pretty much 'all NASCAR all the time'.

I had a subscription to TSN all throughout high school. It was printed in color on newsprint and was newspaper size and it was baseball, baseball, baseball. Couldn't wait for it to arrive each week.

Don't feel that way anymore. Gone are the weekly baseball statistical updates and the team synopsis are pretty much there just for show. It seems that even though ESPN The Magazine is very far behind Sports Illustrated in circulation, both SI and TSN for some reason feel that they have to lower their own standards to compete with it.

[Frayed Knot]

I followed an internet link to a free 1-year subscription to TSN a while back.
After reading it for that year I relized I was overcharged.


It's not just the de-emphasis on baseball (although that's bad enough) but the '80s version I came to know was filled with actual journalism and the reader was exposed to some of the best sportswriters from around the country writing about issues both local and national, controversial and universal.
Now it's all lists, charts, rumors, and quickie "insights" in a more-or-less generic form for the short attention span set; sort of a 'USA Today' in magazine form.
Ken Rosenthal's baseball coulmn is worth a quickie glance, but that's about it.

[TransMonk]

soupcan wrote: I had a subscription to TSN all throughout high school. It was printed in color on newsprint and was newspaper size and it was baseball, baseball, baseball. Couldn't wait for it to arrive each week.

Same here word for word. TSN was pretty much my only link to the Mets in the late 80's and early 90's while living in the Midwest. TSN and the pocket sized Basball Digests gave me my weekly fix.

Now the internet allows me to overdose everyday.

[soupcan]

Baseball Digest, yummmmmmmmm.

[Elster88]

IMHO, the Internet is partly, if not mostly, responsible for the demise of the quality of sports' periodicals.

[Guest cooby]

My dad subcribed to The Sporting News for years and years and years, way back when it used to be in newspaper form until ???

I say "???" because I just realized, he hasn't given us any in months and I never even noticed.

You are all correct, at one time, Sporting News was a full page of each MLB team and during the winter months at least, it was the only way to find out what was going on. Now it wants to be every-man's magazine, and as a result, it is no-man's magazine.


Baseball Digest was a delight when I was a kid. My sister subscribed for me when I was about 12 and it was big and thick and had the complete 40 man roster of every team every single month, plus interviews with players and great stories.
All in a little fat package that you could almost fit in your jeans pocket.

And it cost about $6 for 12 issues. (Remember when subscription packages were 12 issues, not 10? Those were the days)

The Spring Training issue was sacred.

Last time I got it, it was a bunch of baseball card ads and NO rosters, maybe once a year.

[Guest cooby]

Oh, and "Caught on the Fly" blows

[MFS62]

cooby wrote: The Spring Training issue was sacred.

Mole and I have discussed BD before. We remembered when they used to print rookie reports for each organization. They would include the player's ancesrty (e.g.- English-Irish).
The earliest rookie reports I remember seemed to have been written by scouts or impartial observers. The were sometimes brutally honest. One funny one (to me) I remember was when they said "Bud Harrelson has good power for a shortstop". OK, so they lost a little credibility there.
Later, it seemed that the "reports" were written by the teams. They were all sweetness and light, with some select stats to support them. Finally, they deteriorated into a compilation of stats wil little or no observations.

I still miss those early ones.

Later

[Guest Edgy DC]

Elster88 wrote: IMHO, the Internet is partly, if not mostly, responsible for the demise of the quality of sports' periodicals.

How about the seperate, though related, rise of rotisserie/fantasy sports hobbying, and journals angling to porvide those hobbyists with data and betting angles that don't really illuminate the culture of the sport, and sometimes dim it?

[Frayed Knot]

The internet has certainly given fans access to writers from across the country to the point where there'd be less incentive for a magazine to put together such a stable a la the old Sporting News ... except that they were already abandoning that format and steaming downhill long before Al Gore began connecting all those tubes.

[stevejrogers]

="Edgy DC"] ="Elster88"]IMHO, the Internet is partly, if not mostly, responsible for the demise of the quality of sports' periodicals. How about the seperate, though related, rise of rotisserie/fantasy sports hobbying, and journals angling to porvide those hobbyists with data and betting angles that don't really illuminate the culture of the sport, and sometimes dim it?

Excellent point. The stories didn't matter as much, only the statistical anaylsis more so than regular anaylsis.

In some ways the trend for the mags have gone back to the previewing rather than review.

Greatest example I can think of last year is that the week that the White Sox won the World Series, they were regulated to an insert on SI and the cover was a preview of a Monday night football game featuring the Colts and Pats.



Yes that was a big game, and both teams seemed to be on a colision course for the AFC title game (Colts made it, Pats did not) but in the past the celebrating White Sox would have dominated the cover while Manning and Brady would have been an insert

Back in the early days of the magazine it was like that, but only because of the speed of producing the mag (hence the start of the so-called jinx, usually when you put out a cover thats mostly preview your "success" rate is scrutinized) but now its clearly a sign of "giving up" to a more fast paced society where a weekly magazine isn't a fresh and relavant source for news and is more commentary and previews

[Elster88]

Edgy DC wrote: ="Elster88"]IMHO, the Internet is partly, if not mostly, responsible for the demise of the quality of sports' periodicals. How about the seperate, though related, rise of rotisserie/fantasy sports hobbying, and journals angling to porvide those hobbyists with data and betting angles that don't really illuminate the culture of the sport, and sometimes dim it?

That's what I was going to say next.

[Guest KC]

Anyone missing print coverage of baseball should subscribe to BA and for-
get about all the other rags. There's more stuff in it than one can digest and
the web-site is cool too (comes with it).

Prolly shouldn't have started this thread before I could do what I set out to,
but I left the mag at home this morning.