I suspect this is the strategy of Bill Simmons, who somehow knows everything about everything, even though he says he doesn’t read blogs. Last year he brought up how Hargrove was overusing Mark Lowe before I even realized it. How did he do that? He also correctly identified during the ‘05 NFL playoffs that Walter Jones is the most valuable player on the Seahawks, something that’s a fairly well-kept fan secret–something you’d never know if you read the typical mass media coverage of the Hawks.

I think he just watches a ton of games, which is something that Derek never mentions. You’ll learn more about a team from watching a few of their games

Anyway, with regards to linguistics, words are nominal in nature and, resultantly, can’t be defined in a tangible manner.

I would assume this definition of yours also applies to the words “nominal”, “tangible”, “defined”, and “words” itself for that matter. In which case, I suppose this would be a tautology, since it would be unclear what “defined in a tangible manner” would really mean. But since “tautology” is, by your logic, also undefinable, then I might as well say

blork, bjert, graak skands bloomquist g’berk-g’berk.

since you’ve stripped words of any distinction they might have over mere gibberish.

So, I find your argument somewhat hlack dreft and confasterung.

There is hope for sportswriters…

One tricky minefield is to keep your own rooting interests unbiased as a national columnist. I think it’s easy to stop being a cheerleader, but it’s much harder to stop caring. Rob Neyer, for example, tries his best, but I still think it’s easy to tell that he cares about the Royals a lot more than any of the other random stink-o teams out there. Peter Gammons still talks extensively about the Red Sox every couple of columns or so. Ken Rosenthal keeps on taking shots at Peter Angelos like he was still writing for the Baltimore Sun. And so on.

I think, as others have stated, that you may be over-relying on the ability/willingness of local writers and bloggers to help you out — unless you cite them, preferebly with links. You have to incentivize them to help you, since in some way you’re still a competitor.

While the press still does its job for the most part w/r/t finding and reporting the news (after all, blogs mostly report news dug up by the incumbent forms of press media), print media’s quickly becoming a dinosaur that can’t move quickly enough to keep up in 2007, let alone beyond.

But as to the larger issue, I’d say there really are a couple different categories of writers we’re talking about.

Beat writer: follows the team, writes game and team stories. Works really hard cultivating sources in the organization.

Local baseball columnist: (Larry Stone) Follows all of baseball for a local paper, does some local team stuff

National baseball columnist: what I meant here is writers who cover baseball for a national outlet, like SI, or ESPN. Someone with a national audience, writing about baseball.