Changes at SI

Peter King is going to have a Holiday Inn Express Preferred Traveler Note Of The Week.

 

SI was never going to be part of the Meredith deal. I figure the spin-off is mainly aimed at boosting the TimeWarner stock price.

Just saw the 75th Anniversary of the NCAA issue. I don't mind commemorative issues, but they should be "extras." This is two issues in the past month devoted to things that happened in decades past instead what is happening in sports "now."

 

Nothing? In the "Jordan issue" --- which also had a nice piece on the Sochi Olympics --- Scorecard didn't end until Page 36. Was about the longest Scorecard I've ever seen.

 

A lot more Rushin now

 

In regard to the discussion about the spate of recent errors, Verducci wrote in the cover story last week that Bryce Harper turned in a 5.0 WAR, the highest single-season WAR ever by a teenager. Well, yeah, of course he did ... among position players, though that statement was never made in the story. Just mentioned Mel Ott. Not sure how Verducci forgot about Dwight Gooden, a player he covered for years at Newsday, who topped Harper by any measure (5.2 on Baseball Reference, 8.6 on Fangraphs) during his 1984 rookie season, when he was 19.

How did nobody catch that during the reporting, writing or editing process?

 

In fairness, that's hardly among baseball's milestone numbers, like 73 hr or 4,256 hits. No red flags are going to go off about doc gooden's teenage WAR.

 

Seems like the issues are suddenly getting pretty thematic. It almost looks like SI might be trying to follow ESPN's direction.

SI also seems to have a lot less news in it lately.

The prime example of a newsless story was in the Power Issue, where Jeff Pearlman went all the way to the Arnold Festival and all he wrote about was the Expo. It might have made a nice blog entry, but not a multi-page feature story in one of the hardest magazines in which to get published.

 

It is true they seem to have taken at least one "story" and turned it into a Scorecard item, like the "Case For" feature..
I get it. Figure by the time the magazine comes out, a sports event (game, match etc.) has been over for at least two days, but you would like the mag to at least seem to be a little current with their stories and not turn into Sport Magazine (which I enjoyed, but it wasn't SI).

 

You're right, Fop, it's not a recognized milestone number. It's also not an error that would have been made 20, 10, even five years ago — and, lack of red flags or not, it's still wrong.