OK, since no one else wants to follow IJAG ...
Terry Pluto: This piece was actually listed as a blog post, and though it's a very long blog post, it had a rushed quality. I know that's typical of Pluto's writing, but it surprised me for a piece of this magnitude. It felt out of the notebook, cobbled together and shallow. There was a lot of self-referencing, which surprised me coming from the man I think of as the pre-eminent current Cleveland sports authority. The focus was strange, but he wasn't writing the main column, either. As IJAG noted, though, he kept his opinions and emotions out of it, which didn't seem appropriate given the situation and particularly since he made so much of the column about himself. It's not that it was bad; there was good information in Pluto's column that others didn't have, and it had a unique side to the story. But I would have encouraged Pluto to write something more personal about a guy he covered (to varying degrees) for years.
Joe Posnanski: You could take any paragraph from this piece and send it to a regular Posnanski reader without a byline attached, and he or she would immediately recognize the author. It's as though Posnanski was parodying himself, to a degree, with the understanding covering the emotion. But it was a good column. On first read, I wanted more about the move. That's the emotional core of the story. But I realized Posnanski was gone by the time the move hit, presumably down in Cincinnati or North Carolina working as a reporter and too busy to fully grasp everything his city was going through. Posnanski takes the opposite approach to Pluto, letting his writing ability shine, delving into personal emotion and not spending too much space talking about the move but instead talking about the man and the earlier days. It's a strong effort, and it's what Posnanski readers want out of him. There's a value to that, but this column was a bit on the safe side.
Jeff Passan: Writing for a young, national audience frames Passan's work. That's why he brought up LeBron James four times and why he used Joe Paterno as an example. I don't think either was necessary, but he knows his audience and those types of reference points increase clicks and spark conversation. Passan went right to the heart — the heartbreak — of the issue. And he didn't bother mincing words. He won't forgive Art Modell, even if he'll forget him. The ending was wonderful, and the emotion was raw compared to the other four columns. More or less, this is how I would have approached a Modell column, had I been a Clevelander. This is why the Cleveland perspective is so much more interesting than the Baltimore perspective. All five writers hit on the key points, but only Passan hit on the key emotion.
Pat McManamon: McManamon comes in at a disadvantage, like Posnanski, because he wasn't there for the move. McManamon is an Ohioan, but I'm pretty sure he was down in Florida in the mid-1990s. But I thought his piece was unfeeling. This was the least personal of the four pieces, and it included a lot of rehashing and explaining to an audience that's heard this story more times than it would like. There was very little beyond the surface, perhaps because McManamon never covered Modell's Browns and instead covered the new Browns. That would have made a good, unique column, the story of how the new Browns never picked up the pieces of broken hearts Modell left scattered about the city. But McManamon chose the broader approach.
Bill Livingston: If Pluto is the populist pick for northern Ohio's favorite sports writer, Livingston is his counterpoint. He's a stylist in a working-class city. I think this column exemplified that. Columnists shouldn't always pander to their audiences, and I liked Livingston's approach and his conclusion (though I could have done without the arguably misuse of "irony" in the lede). I thought Livingston provided a nice look back at the best of Modell's time in Cleveland, but he skimped on the worst. Maybe that's how it should be for an obituary column, but Modell in Cleveland would seem to be a time for an exception, if there ever was one. It was a good column, but it missed its audience.
I voted for Passan.
