The Raul Ibanez thing...

OK, Lord of the Internet.

 

All MLB has to do to see its future is look at professional cycling. This will never go away.

Agree on Gonzalez' research ... he had to attibute Ibanez' homer average to baseballreference.com. Sure, it's pretty reliable, but damn, how hard is it to pull out a calculator and add it up yourself? At a paper like the Philly Inquirer, we really should get a better effort.

 

You have a valid point to make, or are you sticking with the "it's-OK-if-you're-just-a-fan" shitforbrains defense?

 

I think the media should concern itself with policing its own professionals before elevating musings by a complete and self-identified amateur to feel better about itself. Hell, what Morris wrote was leaps and bounds a more intelligent dissection of the performance of a "possible user" than what an award-winning, million-dollar professional journalist recently did for a mainstream outlet:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3930554

I just did a Lexis-Nexis search for Brady Anderson, and found a column from the Charlotte Observer from April 19:

Media types are getting all high-and-mighty about something professional journalists do all the time, just because a blogger did it -- even though the blogger in question went into far greater detail explaining how his breakout year could've come about naturally.

Selective memory and hypocritical outrage aren't going to help the media much.

 

Another example: Rick Telander:

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/telander/1575381,CST-SPT-rick15.article

 

Anyone else have the inkling that as an industry we are still stinging a bit from the train of thought that we were complicit in the steroids boom -- both from looking the other way and from glorifying the ungodly numbers being put up -- and now we've gone hypervigilant on the issue?

 

Fanhouse.com's Tom Fornelli asks where's the outrage over Bryant Gumbel accusing Jeff Bagwell, Nomar Garciaparra, and Ivan Rodriguez of using roids:

http://bit.ly/8RgJBI

 

Nice closing line:

 

Leave the bloggers to their own little world...they will get their followers, but nothing like you have for readership of online/print newspapers. No need to fuel the bloggers fire.