The Golden Age of Baseball Writing

Edgy MD

Site Manager

Posted June 27, 2013

Author

Posted June 27, 2013

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Thing Is, Bob Gibson Actually DID
Knock Down His Mother

Ceetar

Grand Central Contributor

Posted June 27, 2013

Edgy MD wrote:
That's what I go to Faith and Fear for.

well duh, that's the mecca for beautiful Mets prose, but I was getting at something a little different. Hell, maybe I should just do it myself and see how it feels.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote:
Not for nothing but that cannot be everyone's job. I'd agree the papers aren't doing a real good job at providing beautiful writing but do employ columnists whose job it is to provide those backstories. And guys like Rubin do an incredible volume of work that includes a fair amount of analysis-type stories. Their jobs are generally considered a real grind (travel, print/twitter/web deadlines, dealing with jocks and Wilpons), 98% of the blogosphere lives off them yet much of the twittering pretend baseball journalist society casually disrespect their work and many feel entitled to be openly hostile toward them.

I don't mean everyone's job, just one guy doing something different with the grueling stuff. I don't know how much of the blogosphere lives off the beat guys. Maybe as a whole, in the sense that if they weren't there the Mets might not have Terry Collins answer all the pertinent questions after or before the game. The routine "How's Niese feeling?" "Are you going to use Brown more?" questions. The problem many of have with the beat guys, especially Rubin the Troll, is that they bombard us with that filler stuff that they think, and the newspapers think, is still their job. lineup tweets, injury updates, especially things that they're just rephrasing what the Mets are saying publicly, sometimes on Twitter at the same time. So in essence, the beat writers are the 20 guys that come in the morning and say to the security guard who's drenched in sweet and sitting in front of the fan "Man, it's HOT out there today!"

Part of it's that they aren't changing fast enough, if at all, with their jobs. It's becoming less analytic and more fact-gathering. They can find out injuries, philosophies, things people are working on, etc. But we don't need them to say 'Hey, Gee's velocity is going up, that's a good thing, look at these breakdowns.." because guess what? half a dozen bloggers already wrote about that, noted it, graphed it, tracked it, compared it to last year ,etc, all without any input or information from anyone but publicly available information. And some of them seem to actually dislike their job and some of the facets that come with it, but that comes across like griping with your customers about your boss.

But like Greg said, Jared Diamond, Andrew Keh, Jorge Castillo and Marc Carig all seem to be doing a pretty good job from my end. I enjoy following what they have to do and the interactions they have on Twitter. Between them and Kevin and Howie/Josh etc I'm covered with the Mets info I want. I wouldn't even notice much if the other guys vanished.

(and I have plenty of gripes about other bloggers too. Take yesterday's Metsblog post about Collins saying Niese won't need surgery. Well duh, that's what the story was last week. Joe and Evan obviously asked about him in the weekly spot, their first of the year, and there is no new information. So why is that a story? You see that all the time, the trickling and retweeting and reblogging of stuff so that it somehow becomes new again. )