Help with a player of the year debate

Jerry Lynch had went 5-for-7 in his career against Sandy Koufax, and walked three times. That didn't make him the better player. It made him a good batter against Koufax.

 

Screw you, Bertie. I cherish my award as fourth-team all area left-handed pinch hitter.

 

I'm convinced the all-area team started the decline of our beloved industry.

Random metro sports editor decides to make an all-area team. He/she commits sports writer to the job, assigning half-knowledgable writer the agonizing task of separating and rating mediocre players.
Said writer does a good job, but with the increased workload and lack of feasible fact-checking, mistakes are made. Parents are upset. Paper loses small amount credibilty. Multiply that by the number of sports at a high school.

With the loss of credibility comes a drop in subscriptions and advertising dollars, ergo a staff reduction, meaning instead of two prep writers, only one does the all-area teams, or they assign it to a stringer.

Editors try in vain to catch up with new demanding parents, but their staffs are short. Meanwhile, dinky papers are printing team photos and their profit margins are growing.

New publishers/owners know how to fix things. The small papers must be copied. There should be more puppies and less Iraq. And more players on more all-area teams.

 

Unfortunately, the all-area team is about as old as the industry itself.

It used to be, newspapers would name the "all-tournament team" at various high school tournaments (that goes back to the teens, at least, in our neck of the woods). The all-area team/county player of the year was often named by the newspaper and/or some civic organization (or both) before WWII in many communities.

It's probably more of a relic to the old days than anything.

When I was an SE, I eliminated all-area teams in any individual sports (the all-area team is determined at the county meet, or in mano-a-mano competition). In the team sports, I used to make the coaches nominate kids, provide the stats and vote on it. I gave their vote 50% weight, and the staff vote 50% weight, and made it VERY clear in the text that this was voted on by both the area coaches and the staff, and I also made it very clear to coaches that if they were intentionally omitting people due to politics ("if I don't vote for this kid, it'll help my kid get picked"), then I would throw their ballot out.

Nice thing about the all-area team at a small daily ... it gives you an easy centerpiece during the hard-to-fill time between seasons.