The Responsibility of Media

When people can get more in-depth coverage of their team from elsewhere for cheaper, it doesn’t suggest good things about your job security. They need to do something unique and as far as I see, lots of them don’t.

I love baseball, but I rarely open a sports page anymore. And when I do, I almost never find stuff in there that was useful.

Until they are exposed to something different, they do not know any better. My problem with the local media is not only do I read many different writers online, I also see a lot in print when I travel to other markets for my job. There are a few I go out of my way to read: Baker is one of them, and Jordan Bastian for mlb.com that covers the Blue Jays is another.

Those two markets seem to embrace the different approach while ours seems content with what it has. My dad loves baseball but I had to pull out my freaking laptop to show him where Topkin made a factual error in reporting Baldelli could replace JP Howell on the post-season roster because my dad said, and I quote, “Why should I believe some blogger over the guy that gets paid to cover the team?” He was just playing devil’s advocate with me but wanted me to prove to him how a writer could make that type of mistake.

Educating readers is one thing, but you also have to make sure you’re factually correct when doing so.

Any difference between education and reporting is probably down to finicky semantics. I’d see reporting as more passive than educating. Unfortunately the business of journalism is on some fairly shaky ground, so expectations should be tempered.

However the facts are the very least we could expect from reporters. It blows my mind when I hear people (mostly on talk radio) pontificate about how you can’t learn anything from a spreadsheet, or that using batting average and RBIs worked for 100 years, etc.

It’s a quite simple fact: the Rays use advanced statistics and evaluation methods. You can opine all you want whether the team relies too strongly on advanced stats, or that they’re using the wrong advances stats; but if you’re reporting about the Rays, you need to be familiar with these advanced evaluation methods and acknowledge their importance to the team.

Explaining these methods to a readership that is mostly unfamiliar with them is vital. However educating the readers really shouldn’t be considered a standalone responsibility, but more a necessary function of the overall goal of reporting the facts.

The newspaper is read by a mainly older crowd. When I think about someone reading the paper, I picture my father. The guy reads it cover to cover every day. He loves baseball but isn’t interested in the Saber stats. His joy from baseball has evolved over decades of comparing how many RBI’s Willie Mays got versus how many Ted Williams got, etc…

If the St. Pete Times put out a “Saber Primer” and started printing stats such as WAR and VORP, I think he would just skip over it and look at ERA and Runs scored. I wonder if the older crowd that reads the paper is just too old to have any interest in hearing about how the stats they grew up studying and loving are bascially useless. My dad certainly is.

Some credit where it’s due: 10 years ago there’s no chance you’d see anything like OPS or WHIP or BB/9 during a TV broadcast of a game.

If people are more willing to believe a paid newspaper writer than a blogger (mind you, some of them are paid too), they’ll definitely believe the station being paid to show the games than anyone else. If you start putting different stats on the screen during a game, people will learn about them, even if it means going out to get the information themselves.

The TV broadcasts have the same problem as the newspapers: a lot of people in the business are used to the old ways. If you get some people in the booth who are willing to think more critically, fans will follow suit.

is the Andy/Dave Cup o’ Joe interview during radio pregame. Maddon is the best teacher out there when it comes to everything we’re talking about. Dave/Andy do a good job of asking questions without getting too technical.

about using statistical reason. He may not say “what” stat he’s using, but he’ll say “we looked at the way so-so has fared againt so-so and we decided to play him.”

http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/blog?name=olney_buster&id=5549694

I think it’s a great example of what Hahmann and everyone here is getting at.

The traditional, shallow analysis of Jaso as a leadoff hitter is, “Why the hell are they leading off with a catcher, they have Upton and Crawford, blah blah blah.” The only statistic he mentions is Jaso’s OBP against righties, but he quotes Jaso and Friedman in explaining why he’s batting leadoff. He also makes mention of Jaso’s excellent baserunning, which is known to anyone who regularly watches Rays broadcasts but probably not to anyone else.