We Are, In Fact, Eating More Beats 2017

[Ceetar]

and spoiling games and trolling I'm sure.

[G-Fafif]

Attended the PitchTalks event in Brooklyn last night. The featured attraction was Hank Azaria, promoting his new IFC show Brockmire, whose pilot was screened. It's about a minor league baseball announcer who is climbing back from his fall from grace, to put it mildly. It was probably funnier because it was on an enormous screen shown in the company of a couple of hundred people with the star and creator on stage. But it was funny on its own merit. Premieres tonight at 10. DVR it if the Mets game is still on.

Also on the bill were Anthony DiComo and Marc Carig, both personable and loose. Biggest takeaway: Bartolo speaks great English, he just doesn't want to be bothered to talk to reporters most of the time. Also: Syndergaard looked amazing from behind home plate during a game against minor leaguers in PSL; Carig curses quite freely; they respect how good even the worst players are; they give the impression that they think Mets fans are a bit over the top in their emotional investment but seem to respect it; and the sense that another injury shoe is going to drop is almost a given with these guys.

Azaria sat in on that panel. He is truly one of us. "I can't believe Eric O'Flaherty is still in the major leagues!" was his response to Opening Day. None of this celebrity vagueness about rooting for New York.

Also on hand and charming as emcee: Jonah Keri, joined by Jay Jaffe of SI and Hannah Keyser of Deadspin for a general MLB panel. Fun night all around.

[Ceetar]

I've always been intrigued by those but between kids and that it actually costs money to hear people that generally share their writing on the internet already, I've never pulled the trigger.

How was Hannah Keyser? She started by writing the most basic clickbait drivel for deadspin (their MO after all) but her Twitter always seemed mildly intelligent.

[Frayed Knot]

G-Fafif wrote: Azaria sat in on that panel. He is truly one of us. "I can't believe Eric O'Flaherty is still in the major leagues!" was his response to Opening Day. None of this celebrity vagueness about rooting for New York.

Heard Azaria on a radio interview a few days ago. When asked if he could/would-like-to-be a real baseball announcer he admitted that he's more of a Mets fan than he is an all-purpose baseball fan.
IOW, knows that O'Flaherty is still in the league because he saw him pitch on Monday but likely not as up to date on the rest of the NL. But then also claimed to record and watch 'Daily News Live' on a regular basis.
"Hey", he said, "I only work three hours a week".

[Benjamin Grimm]

Frayed Knot wrote: ...he admitted that he's more of a Mets fan than he is an all-purpose baseball fan. IOW, knows that O'Flaherty is still in the league because he saw him pitch on Monday but likely not as up to date on the rest of the NL.

It's like he's my brother from another mother!

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I never thought I'd see the day when a Hollywood Celebrity has a better memory of ex-Mets than I do. I saw you guys discussing OFlaherty as an ex-Met the other day and I was like "when?"

I had to look up my own data to remind me he was a post-deadline guy in 2015, and wore #44.

[Frayed Knot]

G-Fafif wrote: Bartolo speaks great English, he just doesn't want to be bothered to talk to reporters most of the time.

Ichiro is like that; can speak English but chooses not to.
His inevitable HoF induction will be interesting as it'll be the first time 99% of baseball ever hears him speak.
Of course he's also vowed to play until he's at least 50 so many of those who watched him play will no longer be alive.

they give the impression that they think Mets fans are a bit over the top in their emotional investment but seem to respect it ...

Dealing with Met fans has got to be one of the tougher parts of that job.

[G-Fafif]

Ceetar wrote: I've always been intrigued by those but between kids and that it actually costs money to hear people that generally share their writing on the internet already, I've never pulled the trigger. How was Hannah Keyser? She started by writing the most basic clickbait drivel for deadspin (their MO after all) but her Twitter always seemed mildly intelligent.

Keyser was professional with a touch of mischief. She talked about the series she wrote on the smuggling of Cuban ballplayers but also answered a deadly serious audience question about pressure from the business side to write things a certain way rather playfully before admitting, no, nobody's bothered her.

Dealing with Met fans has got to be one of the tougher parts of that job.

The dealing is something the previous generation of beat writers didn't have to dirty their hands with. These guys interact social-mediatically, if you will, probably because they have to, probably because on some level they enjoy it until they don't. DiComo has been a Met writer all his working life, it seems (been with MLB.com for a decade, having started as an intern, covering the Mets all along) and seems to accept Mets fans as the breed we/they are. There's a still a touch of the outsider perspective in Carig, which is probably helpful. They both hung out and mingled later, as did everybody else, save for Azaria, though he appeared approachable during one of the intermissions.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Bill Madden is back with the Daily News.

[Edgy MD]

I hadn't realized Bill Madden was on the planet.

[Frayed Knot]

Edgy MD wrote: I hadn't realized Bill Madden was on the planet.

I think if Madden were one of the participants in Elon Musk's mission to Mars we would have heard about it already.

[G-Fafif]

Groping through Twitter for updates as Sandy press conference supposed to have begun, not finding anything new from the crew. Days like this a fan misses Adam Rubin.

[MFS62]

We're not the only ones concerned with current baseball writing.

http://www.billjamesonline.com/modern_baseball_writing/

Interesting read. I think the reduction in the number of newspapers, and the resultant reduction of newspaper sports writers has been off set by coverage in other media. But I feel that has made the writers who remain get snarkier and more outrageous as they battle for readership and that had made them less readable.

Not sure if this should be spun off into a separate thread.

Later

[Ceetar]

MFS62 wrote: We're not the only ones concerned with current baseball writing. http://www.billjamesonline.com/modern_baseball_writing/ Interesting read. I think the reduction in the number of newspapers, and the resultant reduction of newspaper sports writers has been off set by coverage in other media. But I feel that has made the writers who remain get snarkier and more outrageous as they battle for readership and that had made them less readable. Not sure if this should be spun off into a separate thread. Later

This this is the key paragraph:

It’s not all good. There are team-centric, unpaid bloggers and writers for mainstream, or wanna-be mainstream sites, some of them even making decent money, who do little more than regurgitate passages from other sites’ stories, maybe adding a few sentences of "analysis" that add nothing of value. All that "content" does is crowd good writing and original analysis out of the sports space.

The Internet creates more noise, and sometimes it's harder to see the signal. But it's there, and it's strong. And the thing about the noise is, sometimes it's not just noise, but someone else signal. You may find tweets about food/dinner annoying, but someone else in the same space enjoys them. There's no more "I can't believe the Times wasted space covering X" because we have unlimited space.

There are more great writers out there, it's just less linear. You have to put in the work yourself to find them, they're not automatically the regular columnist at the New York Times. And that's the real key. Previously it was a bit of a tautology, "This guy's the best because he writes for the Times. He writes for the Times because he's the best" There were almost definitely better writers out there that didn't go into sports writing or get the chance, that today could spend a few hours a week on a blog and get noticed.