Talkin' Baseball: Do sportswriters still matter?

This week, Talkin' Baseball writers Steven Hyden and Jason Albert reconvene to discuss whether sportswriters will soon be as old-timey as blacksmiths.

Jason Albert: So Steve, last week you shoveled dirt on the Brewers, and I couldn’t have agreed more with your assessment. There’s no way we sniff at the playoffs, short of a miracle on the order of the Virgin Mary’s benevolent visage appearing on Miller Park’s roof. So instead of picking through the already bleach-white bones of this season, I wanted to go all meta on your ass and ask you about something that’s tangentially related to the type of sports commentary we do here at The A.V. Club. Namely, with all the bloodletting in the newspaper industry, are you a little surprised baseball beat writers aren’t getting axed along with everyone else? Do they serve a purpose anymore?

I like to think I’m a pretty dedicated Brewers fan, but I can’t remember the last time I read a game recap. There’s just no need. When I miss a game, I can get free, real-time status updates on my phone, and for $15 a month I can watch any archived game I want on mlb.tv. Not to mention all the relevant highlights are posted online immediately following the game, if not sooner. The only thing I use the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for is up-to-date injury reports, roster moves, and columns. Except for the columns, that’s all stuff that originates from the Brewers’ offices, and could easily be dispersed through the team’s media relations flacks.

I have mixed feelings about the sports blogosphere and whether the decline of civilization is hastened by no-access writers poring over the Tiger Woods fart video like it’s the Zapruder film. But does the day-by-day grind of a baseball season really need insider access? The very nature of beat-writing demands living with the team for six months, and as a result, those reporters can't afford to piss off the players and coaches.

Whether readers enjoy what we do here at TB is up to their individual tastes, but I’d like to think we contribute to the types of conversations baseball fans have been having since the game was invented—that being, using the game-a-day nature of the season as a springboard for bitch sessions and/or group hugs. It used to be that newspapers were ground zero if someone wanted to know if J.J. Hardy hit into his 493rd double play of the season the night before, but now, it seems mostly unnecessary for anyone with a connection to that shiny new Internet thing. What do you think? If Tom Haudricourt and Anthony Witrado were suddenly cut loose (and for the record, I like Haudricourt), do you think your baseball-following experience be affected in any discernable way?

Steven Hyden: Hey Jason, before I address the marginally important issue of whether the Fourth Estate is now completely irrelevant, I want to clarify that I haven’t “thrown dirt” on the Brewers. No, I don’t expect them to make the playoffs, but I’m totally hanging on until the bitter end. As a card-carrying hipster douchebag, I’m drawn to mostly empty bars and barely popular bands, in part, because 98 percent of humanity annoys the living shit out of me, and I like to avoid crowds. I’m actually looking forward to going to a less-packed Miller Park over the next couple of months.

Now, on to your question about baseball writers: Yes, I think my baseball-following experience would be affected without them. I don’t know how exactly, since I was born into a world where newspapers made enough money to sustain themselves, but yeah, I’m pretty sure that dismantling the engine that powers the creation of information in our society might have some impact on my life. Maybe it’s because I worked for a daily newspaper for six years, but I get annoyed when people are so blasé about the implosion of mainstream media. Do people really think that everything we know about the world is just there, ready to be plucked out of thin air and disseminated at no cost? Information might want to be free, but the people who work hard to find, shape, and deliver that information have bills to pay. If those people can’t make a living, we’re basically handing the keys to the media kingdom to anonymous people online with no credibility or accountability. (If covering city council meetings for the fun of it is not a symptom of mental illness, I don’t know what is.)

Okay, I’m seriously digressing here. I know the city council is not the Brewers—baseball writers, even if they claim otherwise, aren’t really impartial observers, and readers don’t really want or expect them to be. So getting your box scores and game recaps directly from the team wouldn’t be a threat to our democracy. But what about the stories teams don’t want reported, like trade rumors or juicy tidbits about interclub conflicts? Those stories still come, more often than not, from professional reporters with insider access. It’s interesting that even the biggest sports bloggers haven’t really made an attempt to take over the press box. Apparently they don’t want the access that beat reporters have, or all the grunt work that goes with it. It’s a lot easier to just link to the local newspaper’s website, and riff on what somebody else reported (or the way they reported it). That’s the thing about sports blogs: In order to be left-of-center you need a center, and I’d argue that most of the time daily newspapers and ESPN still set the tone for what blogs cover rather than the other way around.

Where bloggers get the best of daily newspapers is commentary. Anyone who has gritted their teeth through an episode of Around The Horn knows that the nation’s finest sportswriters are—almost without exception—blithering, reactionary idiots who still get upset about stupid shit like end-zone celebrations and extravagant player contracts. When it comes to the Brewers, I often get more insight out of Brew Crew Ball or laughs out of Miller Park Drunk than from any daily newspaper columnist. What about you, J? If you’re not reading daily newspapers, where are you going to get your Brewers fix?

Jason Albert: I’ll give you that I’d miss the behind-the-scenes dirt stories, but trade news? Eh. Really, is trade talk any more than mountainous piles of misdirection and bullshit grounded in the tiniest kernels of truth? At various times this season the Crew was in the running for Jake Peavy, Roy Halladay, and Jerrod Washburn. Believe me, I had just as much fun chewing on those nuggets as much as the next fan. But in the end all we got was underwhelming retread Claudio Vargas, and I didn’t hear so much as a whisper of that move before it happened.

So to your question: Not to shill for a writer who’s contributed here, but I also enjoy Miller Park Drunk a great deal, and I’ll periodically check out Brew Crew Ball and Right Field Bleachers, though not every day. Funny enough, my favorite Brewers writer is Haudricourt, but only when he’s not writing game stories or those human-interest features about how Mark DiFelice cuts everyone’s hair. Haudricourt knows more about baseball than I ever could hope to, and I find that his bloggy bits, commentary, and Twitter blasts give me far more insight and pleasure than the “hard news” he does for his job-job.

Maybe we need some sort of über-commentator who’s trained and has access, but dispenses with the stories that seem totally anachronistic. Is this duality possible? Or does sportswriting have to fall into an either/or of no-access jokers like us, or “real” sportswriters writing the same rehashed game stories they’ve been writing for the past 100 years?

Steven Hyden: I think this magical hybrid of newspaper reporter and blogger that you speak of is already coming to pass. You don’t read the Journal Sentinel, and Haudricourt is still your favorite Brewers writer because he also keeps a blog and a Twitter page. The people who want the "Mark DiFelice is a great guy!" stories—believe it or not, but lots of readers eat that shit up—can get that in the dead-tree edition, and totally awesome web addicts like yourself can get less formal, off-the-cuff and much more interesting stuff online. Over time this balance—which probably now tilts more toward the former—will shift more and more to the latter.

That’s assuming the Journal Sentinel will be able to make money off of baseball coverage in the future. I have a feeling that it will. Sportswriting might be the only thing left that people are willing to pay for from newspapers. You could never ask readers to pay extra for more local cops coverage, but they’ll gladly pony up for whatever leftover scraps you didn’t report about the Packers in the regular paper in special "insider" web and print editions. It’s also important to remember that not everyone wants to read expletive-filled blog posts written by overgrown adolescents about their favorite teams online. (That’s includes you and me, J.) The majority of fans still get most of their sports news from newspapers and TV. They might check out a blog here and there, but it’s not a legitimate story until one of the big boys reports it. And, for now at least, I think that’s a good thing.

But the line between professional and amateur will continue to blur, and when it comes to sports coverage, I think that’s also a good thing. The majority of future sportswriters will be fans who maintain blogs because they actually like sports. And I think this will rub off on the professionals, many of whom will have grown up reading Deadspin as much as Sports Illustrated. The word jockeys of the future will be trained to be a lot less stuffy and down-to-earth. They certainly won’t spend 1,600 words fretting about something as inconsequential as the future sports journalism… (cough, cough).