Thoughts on crappy baseball writers

In the tv show "The Office," one of my favorite caveats is that while Michael Scott is a crappy boss, he's an expert paper salesman. He could sell paper to a tree. He's simply been promoted one level too high for his own good.

This happens a lot in journalism. Successful beat writers often get promotions after years on the job. They become columnists. Some are very good, some are terrible, and make me seem like Peter Gammons.

In a race to provide the fastest, best baseball coverage, ESPN and Sports Illustrated have both lowered their standards to try and one-up each other.

Jon Heyman is probably the most evident example of this. The man is a beat writer, half his columns are him just blogging about the rumors around baseball. But whenever he tries to make any sort of evaluation on any team or player, he sounds like an idiot. He's that Yankee fan that thinks that just because they have the 5 highest paid players in the league, that means they have the 5 best players too. And that because half their team is overpriced former stars, that means that the other half of the team which are fringe minor leaguers are also star. He's the one that thinks because the Mets bullpen crumbled in the second half of the year, and the Phillies fluked their way to the playoffs, that it means that they are the best team in the National League. He's the one who thinks the Cubs will never win the World Series. He's the one who believes that the American League is clearly superior to the National League, and it has nothing to do with the competitive advantage of the DH that the AL has over the NL. (National League teams don't have roster a DH, so when they play by AL rules, the NL team puts a bench player as a DH, it gives the AL a huge advantage. The construction of AL teams vs. NL teams is very different, the NL places more emphasis on defense and intangibles than the AL. The AL places more emphasis on hitting. It's just different approaches. Unluckily for the NL, when the AL teams play by their rules, they aren't effected nearly the same amount, because they are now merely on equal levels of play, as opposed to when playing by the AL rules, where the NL teams aren't able to compensate for the differences.)

Ted Keith is another example of poor column writers. While I don't know what his background is, I do know that he writes terribly both stylistically and analytically, and had no business being hired. His columns are unimaginateive, boring, and predictable. A column should give someone something to think about, good or bad. Keith gives you nothing. His analysis is on the same level of that in SI for Kids. That's an inhouse move, maybe not a bad idea....

ESPN has its share of poor writers too. Jim Caple is uninspired, boring, and dry. I just ignore his articles now.

I'm not naive, I understand that not every writer is as good as Peter Gammons, Rob Neyer, or Tom Verducci. But the standard has to be set somewhere, and there's plenty of talent out there still undiscovered.