Reilly –
Admit it, you voted for Swisher in the All-Star election. I know you did.
– ddh99
Totally. Because he’s so awesome.
Andrew –
Hypothetically speaking, do you trade Gordon Beckham for Roy Halladay?
– Janet, Chicago
Absolutely, and let me explain before anyone starts sending letter bombs to the office. Bacon Spice, as we all know and mostly agree, has the possibility to be a great baseball player; Roy Halladay, as we all also know and mostly agree, is the best pitcher available right now and quite possibly the best pitcher in baseball. Plugging in an okay third baseman in lieu of Beckham is easy, but finding an elite-level arm is perhaps the most difficult task in the world. Conversely, Beckham might make the team competitive but Halladay will make them into legitimate contenders. One of those outcomes is better than the other.
To put it another way, imagine it’s 1995 and you’re Mariners GM Woody Woodward: do you trade Alex Rodriguez for Greg Maddux? Of course you do.
Andrew,
Jose Contreras: back for real, or just getting on his usual post-traumatic stress awesomeness?
– Alan, Westmont
Not that I don’t love a Sox pitcher beating the hell out of the Indians and Cubs, but I’ll be more convinced another couple times through the rotation. I don’t doubt that he feels like a new pitcher, but I quite highly doubt he’s going to hold every team in the American League to one run.
Mr. Reilly,
Seems Rick Morrissey at the Tribune has problems with what’s going on outside the MSM. Thoughts?
– Mike Carsten, Hyde Park
If a hard-hitting, serious reporter like Morrissey, famously known for exposing corruption at the highest levels through his legendary investigative work, intense cultivation of well-connected sources and willingness to delve into the deepest, darkest corners of society in the name of democracy and journalism, actually feels threatened and offended by the existence of multi-thousand-word screeds on how the Sox are like Chinese Democracy, long-winded musings on fights in the stands at Miller Park or the charming things the people of Cleveland have to say about where I can go, I think he has bigger problems than whether or not I know how to use WordPress (nevermind the couple dozen co-workers of his doing the very thing he so happily derides in the name of saving the company).
But hey, whatever. My mom says my blog is cool, and that I can keep it as long as I pay rent to live in her basement. Yay blogs!
Morrissey is “convinced” that bloggers don’t want the access print journalists have because he needs that assertion to make his argument logically sound. Too bad it’s inaccurate, however. I know assumptions are dangerous, but I would be willing to wager that even a more-often-than-not lighthearted/tongue-in-cheek blog like 35th Street (not to mention slightly more serious White Sox, or Bulls, or whoever) blogs would absolutely LOVE to have the access that Holtzman had and used, to marvelous effect, or the access that even Morrissey has, and doesn’t use. But you know what they say about assumptions.
No, you’re exactly right, and this is what so many columnists get wrong about sports bloggers: we don’t like having no access. We hate it. If anything, we want more access, more information, more inside knowledge, and I know quite a few of us have some stellar ideas on how we could make our sites better if we were let behind the curtain.
As an aside, I often wonder if these people making the assertions of bloggers relying on MSM for their content and ideas realize the same information is readily available from so many other sources, a person could quite easily go the rest of their life without ever reading a newspaper or major sports media website ever again. To put it another way: you never hear about MLB.com, Baseball Reference, FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus et al complaining about what’s going on out there on the big, scary internet.