Tag Archives: blogging about blogging

A fresh glance at Babe Ruth, upon the resumption of baseball

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My latest post at Banished to the Pen contributes to the spirit of the opening of a new baseball season with a quick look back at one of the game’s most accomplished players.

It is nice to see the rookies of today showing respect for their elders, but modern celebrants of the game sometimes fear that reexaminations of their childhood heroes will alter their images and understandings of past giants in adverse fashion. For Babe Ruth, a truncated, targeted retrospective does serve to modify the Ruthian folk zeitgeist, but, in his case, it does so exclusively to enhance the stature of the Sultan.

The full post is available here.

Max Scherzer scouting report (backup catcher ed.)

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My first post over at Banished to the Pen, a new baseball blog, takes a very serious look at a rumor of debatable seriousness: that the Texas Rangers considered adding Max Scherzer as a backup catcher before he signed as a starting pitcher for the Washington Nationals.

The full post is available here.

The (Walking) Death of Sports on Earth

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soe

Last month, in a story that was poorly reported to the then-staff of the site Sports on Earth, to say nothing of the general public, it snuck out that, in some order, USA Today had pulled out of its partnership with MLB that supported the site and ninety-five percent of the site’s staff had been let go. The soldiering-on of “senior writer” Will Leitch (which is far from nothing) aside, SoE exists today at best as a sort of undead shell of the vibrant self Leitch and its former staff had built in what I called an important “second chapter” of the site’s history.

As David Roth, Keith Olbermann, and even Leitch himself have commented, the whole thing came as a surprise even to the writers, many of whom found out about the great “unwinding” for the first time on Twitter.

We have tracked the rise of Sports on Earth since its birth, and we’ve highlighted plenty of their many well-done stories in the past. From a technical standpoint, SoE was designed for optimal reading on a tablet, and, for me, it held the position of go-to breakfast-table reading for a long time.

I was just a reader. For The Classical’s David Roth, the whole thing was more personal, as he was friends and colleagues of many of the dispatched writers, many of whom also had written for The Classical. I learned about Sports on Earth’s demise from Roth’s extended obituary, which also expounds upon the challenges of sustaining and supporting interesting sports writing in today’s media landscape.   Continue reading →

Blogging About Blogging, vol. 40

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We’re not in any way opposed to meta coverage here at ALDLAND. Blogging about blogging is basically our bread and butter. (We also cover blogging about blogging about blogging, blogging about writing, blogging about writing about writing, writing about blogging, and writing about writing.) That’s why I’m glad to accept, on ALDLAND’s behalf, a Liebster Award nomination from the good folks at Musings of a Displaced Tigers Fan. Another, actual reason is that I have been a fan of their work since I first found their site last year. It’s the perfect online place for fans of the Detroit Tigers who find themselves living somewhere outside the reach of the Tigers Radio Network. This season, they’ve upped their game by increasing the volume and breadth of their Tigers coverage, and through a very impressive visual overhaul of their site.

The idea behind this nomination concept is to draw attention to strong web content that doesn’t currently draw a lot of attention, and it’s pretty cool that these DTF guys thought enough of our site to loop us into the game. Part of the drill is answering some questions they sent along. Here goes:      Continue reading →

Sensational Sporst Synergy: Clay Travis and Fox Sports

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oktcfoxsportsAs of last night, Clay Travis’ Outkick the Coverage has merged with Fox Sports. The exact nature of the relationship is not clear. According to Fox Sports, “Clay Travis has officially joined FOXSports.com as a contributor.” As Clay tells it,

Outkick the Coverage and FoxSports.com have entered into a partnership agreeement. OKTC won’t change at all, we’ll just have a much broader audience. And those times when you try to hop on the site and we’re overloaded with traffic and you can’t get to our article?

Yeah, that won’t happen again.

Which is why FoxSports.com is hosting our latest story.

Did that ever happen to anyone? Anyway, Clay continued (as he always does): “After a lot of conversations FoxSports.com made the most sense and I’m excited about what’s to come.” He promises more details in the future, and for now says: “I have editorial control and Fox doesn’t want us to change at all.”

Together with MSN, Fox Sports already owns Yardbarker, which it bought in 2010, and through which it has a relationship with similar sites, such as Larry Brown Sports. Fox Sports seems to like to keep all of these formerly independent blogs underneath the umbrella of its Yardbarker Network. Major questions at this point include whether OKTC will receive the same treatment, whether OKTC itself will become a mere FoxSports.com reverse-portal, and what it means for Clay to be a FoxSports.com “contributor” (and why Clay did not reference that label on his own site).

As for clues about what Clay thinks– or thought– about Fox Sports, we can turn to the premiere source of information on all things Clay, Clay Travis, who in August 2012 responded to a question about ranking the major sports media outlets’ college football coverage by rating Fox Sports last among the given options, adding

I would rank Fox Sports last in its coverage of every sport. In its humor. In everything that it does online. I truly have no idea what this company is doing. FoxSports.com is a complete and total disaster of a site. So it’s no surprise that it’s also bad at college football. It’s also behind SBNation, Bleacher Report, and even OKTC.

Less than a month ago, he wrote that he had not visited FoxSports.com in over a year: “I barely have a conception of what [the page looks] like on direct entry.” Now that his article is plastered atop the front page of FoxSPorts.com, though, it’s probably his homepage.

Baseball Notes: Preview

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baseball notesInvolving myself in this project meant developing a more intentional approach to sports observation, fandom, criticism, and so forth. Part of this was reorienting my daily and weekly routines in order to make myself more aware of important events happening in the sporting world, and to place myself in a position to be paying attention to those spaces in which something important to that world might be about to happen. My immersion has not been total, of course. (See, for example, this site’s golf coverage.) Some aspects have required greater degrees of adjustment. Others have felt much more natural, though, and baseball probably leads that group. Living within the terrestrial boundaries of the Detroit Tigers Radio Network (and Fox Sports Detroit) during the 2012 season meant keeping up with that team on a near-daily basis was as easy as passively listening to the radio at night after work. Baseball is a sport that, for the fans, is designed to seep into the mind over time, a multi-month titration of awareness appreciable only at some distance. Writing a serial feature on that team only made sense. Having an outlet for accumulated observations and possible trends, interesting stories about the team, and personal experiences was a way to process a 162-game season, memorialize those little thoughts, observations, and experiences, and generally gain that periodic distance from the game’s day-to-day that makes caring about the next game and the next series fun.

Listening and watching that much baseball– 2013 finds me tracking two teams in particular– is a great way to learn about the game, and I wanted to carve a space outside of those individual team features to write about some of baseball’s details and strategy. I would like this to be more about aspects of the sport that are hiding in plain sight: readily observable things that, when noticed, would enhance any fan’s enjoyment, rather than complex statistical analyses, although I do have some thoughts on the unavoidable topic of sabermetrics. My thought is that each post in the series would look at one isolated issue or nugget of information that, when I happened across it, felt like something I was really glad to know as a slightly more than casual baseball fan and something other, more casual fans might appreciate knowing too.

Here’s a brief, very simple example to kick things off:

Continue reading →

The slowest day in sports blogging?

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Things have been a little slow around here lately, but hey, we aren’t the only ones. Deadspin’s pulling an amateur radio move and begging for calls, while Clay Travis has been padding his content at Outkick the Coverage by reposting months-old articles by guest writers.

Fortunately, we have tons of great content sitting in the hopper just waiting for that finishing touch and a push out the door. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, go Wings!

A Song of Bryce and Fire

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imagesAD has been writing about his new favorite team lately in the popular column Upton Abbey.  Since I can’t allow him to praise the Barves unchecked, I will now write a semi-regular-ish column on their division rivals, the Washington Nationals.  So now you get three columns on teams you (probably) don’t care about.  But you should read all of them so you can get some culture and have something to talk about with your co-workers at the ol’ water cooler.

This past weekend saw a series between the scorching hot Bravos and the hot-but-not-scorching-hot Washington Nationals.  The series did not go so well for Washington, as they got swept and only looked competitive in the first game.  I attended the Saturday game with noted blog subject Bad Jeremy, who is almost as big of a Braves fan as AD.  The game was a 3-1 Braves victory that saw the Nats do very little in the way of making offense and the Braves do slightly more.  Evan Gattis carried the Braves, hitting a two run homer that caused Bad Jeremy to get out of his seat and flex at all the Nats fans in the surrounding area.

The highlight of the game was, as always, the Presidents’ Race.  George Washington jumped out to a big lead early on with Teddy Roosevelt, Abe Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson trailing behind.  Newcomer William Howard Taft was nowhere to be found, and everyone in attendance wondered where he was.  The answer to that question was soon revealed, as Taft emerged from the right field bullpen to join with Teddy in beating up George Washington.  Apparently there was some beef between Presidents 26 and 27 and President 1.  Who knew?  Jefferson and Lincoln continued past, neck and neck, until Jefferson went into his kick and won what was one of the more exciting Presidents’ Races in recent memory.

Despite being swept by the Barves, the Nats have looked good early on and seem like they are more than capable of making it to their second postseason in franchise history this year.  They have some great young arms in Stephen Strasburg and Gio Gonzales, not to mention the bats of Bryce Harper, Ryan Zimmerman and Jayson Werth.  This weekend’s series could very well be a preview of the 2013 NLCS (where the winner will go on to get swept by the Seattle Mariners in the World Series).  Stay tuned for more of A Song of Bryce and Fire, and also for a Mariners column with the working title of King in the North(west).  Baseball, huh?  How about it?

Introducing ALDLAND’s special Masters coverage

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As I’ve written many times, our golf coverage is limited to ancillary matters like hovercrafts, mustaches, Jungle Bird, and the Dukes of Hazzard. With one of the most anticipated iterations of the Masters starting today, though, we thought it would be appropriate to bring in a guest blogger to cover the tournament in earnest.

Starting later this morning, Luke Watson of Hotdogs and Golf will share, from his experienced perspective, his insight on the 2013 Masters. Stay tuned.