Defensive Indifference

As someone who straddles the line between MSM and blogger on a daily basis — yes it is possible to be a “privileged sportswriter” and enjoy the filthy stylings of “Big Daddy Balls” — I thought I’d weigh in on the whole Buzz Bissinger freakout situation, even if I’m a few days late to the party.

What I am going to do is draw a parallel between the blogger-MSM feud and the sabermetrics-scouts feud that still simmers in some corners, but was much more heated in the immediate aftermath of the release of ‘Moneyball’. In both cases, the “feuds” are stupid and a creation of extremists on both sides of the debate. Seriously, how many sabermetricians believe there’s no value to scouting and how many bloggers believe there’s no value to journalists? I’ll generalize and say very, very few.

On the flip side, I do think there is a little more pushback from MSM members against bloggers, just as there was some pushback from scouts with the rise of sabermetrics, largely because both bloggers and sabermetricians were seen as a threat to the respective livelihoods of an established industry. I think that will slowly dissipate as members of the MSM realize bloggers aren’t a real threat to hard-working journalists.

Bloggers do, at times, work at original reporting, but by and large they leave that to journalists with access. The real threat to journalism is corporate ownership of newspapers, and the subsequent relentless pursuit of the bottom line regardless of how it affects the quality and depth of the paper’s reporting, not bloggers, who really make up a small, small sliver of the sports media. This isn’t any different than scouting, which will always have a very important place in baseball no matter how influential sabermetrics becomes.

So what am I really getting at? This whole Hatfield-McCoy/Montague-Capulet/East Coast-West Coast act between bloggers and journalists is a bunch of unneccessary bullshit. The “feud,” if you can call it that, is kept alive by a small segment of aging sportswriters who basically don’t get this whole movement and never will, and by two different segments of the blogosphere — the bad ones who are read by virtually no one and have no responsibility or skill and the mainstream bloggers who mobilize in force every time one member of the media insults them, usually returning the insults in kind and then some.

(Sidebar: societally speaking, and this goes for bloggers and journalists too, we need to stop judging groups of people by their worst members.)

We live in the Information Age. Blogs, newspapers, scouting, sabermetrics — it’s all information, it doesn’t bite, it’s up to you to assign the proper value to it. Unlike Buzz Bissinger, I think most people are smart enough to do that without Western Civilization turning into a deleted scene from Cloverfield. And you know what, that’s a wonderful thing if you’re a media junkie like I am. If you want to know why the Red Sox have been so successful in the last decade, it’s because they’ve embraced scouting and sabermetrics. They use ALL the information available to them, and then make a decision, rather than going on the word of some crusty old scout or some sabermetrician locked in an office on Yawkey Way. Crazy idea isn’t it?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a Kumbaya circle scheduled with Rick Reilly, Will Leitch, Murray Chass and Big Daddy Balls. I hope it goes good!