It's 2013, have you killed your MLB page yet?

Looks like to me we're good for just one more year of chewing up a page each day with MLB ledes and boxes and such. Our paper already has a full page each day filled with the names of readers who think pro baseball should consume another page or more each day - it's called the *obituary* page.

We kicked this around here in 2011, maybe it was. What's the current line of thinking about MLB pages outside of papers in immediate MLB markets? Are you changing, or have you changed, your MLB plan?

 

Awesome.

We generally run the boxes and capsules of the teams with biggest reader followings (Seattle and Colorado, in our case) and 1-2 graphs for the rest as we can. Weekly we try to get the expanded standings and MLB leaders in. Other than that we don't have the space to dedicate to it anyway, so I just field phone calls because our hand was forced on that a couple of years ago courtesy of a redesign.

 

Redesigns, papers dropping AP (with its sports agate monopoly) and 3-day-a-week papers are all issues that are being dealt with in different markets.

 

I know it will never come back, but I loved seeing the long agate for every qualified ML hitter and pitcher each Sunday.

 

One of the first things I can recall poring over as a kid.

 

Every year I get the phone call asking when we're running the MLB team-by-team schedule page. I've been here five years and never run it once, but people are still convinced "it ran last year."

 

I was just thinking about this the other day.

In 1997, I was 15. I bought one of those pre-season MLB magazines every year, as thick as I could find. I loved it.

That year's addition had a top-100 prospects list that included no less than two cubs, one of whom was in the top 5, a pitcher named Kerry Wood. Every week (I forget which day of the week it was) for the entire season, I would make sure I bought the Chicago Tribune so I could check Kerry Wood's minor-league stats when they were published.

Last week, I caught several different college baseball games streaming live on the Internet because the Cubs have the No. 2 overall pick in this year's draft and I've been keeping tabs on the guys who are considered possible picks in that slot.

It's an awesome time to be a sports fan.

 

It would be well-nigh impossible to do such a thing now on one page in agate. We we did it, it was AL on one page and NL on another. The 2013 schedule is interlaced, so you can't do that. It would have to run over – and fill – two pages.

 

We went to a combo MLB/agate page a few years ago. In July, when there's not much else happening, we'll break MLB out for its own page.

 

Standings, scores, etc. are all things that I believe the majority of people will get online. I think if you can replace it with quality local content, that is the better route.

We haven't run agate in years.

 

No agate page at all?

 

but not a cubs fan

we still devoted a page or half-page to mlb roundups last season but have had a lot less room than usual lately. will probably be a night-by-night call until it's summer and there's nothing else going on.