Bloggers v Baseball!!
Old School v New School!!
Numbers v Emotions!!
Bang!! Pow!! How’s that for some 4th of July fireworks!! Well, thankfully, it looks like Rany v Royals-gate has been peacefully resolved without anybody losing a limb. Or at the very least, if they were in danger to, they’re thankful not to have to rely on Nick Swartz to diagnose or treat it.
In the age-old sportswriters v. bloggers debate, we’ve had many a highlight. Generally, the two camps consist of 1.) The crusty old BBWAA member who knows the nuances of the organization, can speak on the mood in the clubhouse, and can run the gambit from organizational apologist to muckraker within the span of two columns, and 2.) The number-crunching, front-office bashing, drippy stat geek broadcasting WART radio* style out of his mother’s basement.
* Anybody get that Pete & Pete reference?? Anyone??
Except, these days those lines are becoming blurrier and blurrier (no red spell-check line under the word ‘blurrier’?? Really??). Rany (for those who don’t know), despite being accomplished as one of the founders of baseballprospectus.com, is not a sportswriter by trade. He’s a pimple-popper out of Chicago who writes passionately in his spare time about our fair team. He ruffled a few feathers last week by taking a blowtorch to admonishing the Royals training staff, calling for the head of the 19 year-tenured Head Trainer Nick Swartz due to gross negligence.
While it might take a really big zit to kill a man, Jazayerli is medically trained. Still, without having access to the player’s records (he doesn’t), you can’t take his take on the medical staff without a grain of salt, especially since Rany’s take seemed to be a hatchet-job as opposed to the deep exacto-knife stat-based analysis we’ve come to be used to from a Sabermetrician.
Luckly, Jeff Zimmerman* was happy to oblige (albeit independently), and, surprise, surprise, completely justifies Rany’s resentment. Turns out since 2002, the Royals are above average in number of trips to the DL (Royals, 116; MLB avg, 101) and in number of days lost to injury (Royals, 6,942; MLB avg, 5,586).
* Zimmerman talks to Royals Authority about his DL studies for Beyond the Boxscore here
But the real issue is not the justification of Rany’s anger, but the justification of the Royals front office to ban him. Well, of course they are obliged to do so to whomever they please, but the fact that they would go out of the way to banish an angry blogger is questionable…until you realize that in this day-in-age, even your run-of-the-mill dermatologist can be considered amongst the big-boy journalistic elite.
The difference between Rany and your boy Bellwether here is that in the blogosphere, his work has garnered him access not to the Royals as a team, but to some of the heavy hitters in the KC sports talk scene. He makes a weekly appearance on 810’s Border Patrol, and now has his own weekly talk show on the same station. He’s still no threat to blow up the front office from his seat in Chi-town, but apparently the veiled threat by the Royals brass to cut off 810 from their wellspring lest they cease their cohabitation of the airwaves with Rany has blown this issue into new territory.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be lumping together the educated, well-versed, stats-based baseball posts with dog-and-pony, dick-and-fart joke idiocy that you would find…well…here. But if there’s one thing to take away from this fracas, it’s that the line between which we find objective journalism and angry blogging is getting precipitously shorter.