Saturday, February 24, 2007

 

Spring Training News

The first week of spring training is behind us. All of the fans, myself included, have been scouring the Internet for news like squirrels after an explosion at a nut factory. (Actually, that phrase could be used to describe the whole 'Net, couldn't it?) In days of old, we had to read the newspapers to get any news from the desert. The only way to get first-hand, unfiltered information was to fly to Arizona yourself and watch spring training personally. Now, in the days of the World Wide Web, we have choices. We can still go to newspaper websites for that professionally filtered outlook, or we can go to blogs by fans who are actually there, without agendas. (I suppose catching some rays and drinking some beer is a kind of agenda, but don't distract me. I have a point to make, eventually.)

If I were the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, I would have to ask some hard questions of my sports department. I don't know how many full-time paid journalists the Chronicle has assigned to cover the Giants in Arizona. At least one, right? How can these pros get outdone on a daily basis by the unnamed "amateur" who at Giants Jottings? Look at the coverage at Jottings. He has photos of nearly every player he can see. The Chronicle, despite having a professional website with extras like blogs, doesn't give us very many photos. If we want to see for ourselves how Russ Ortiz is looking, we can either take the Chron's word for it, or we can look at the photos on Jottings.

Jottings also has the Chron beat when it comes to actual prose coverage. Jottings tells you who pitched batting practice, and who hit. He tells you how they did, how they looked, and any interesting or relevant comments the players make. He gives you a really good glimpse at the jokes, the fun, the camaraderie, and he leaves the jaded snark at home. The Chronicle might give you a third of that information, if you're lucky. The rest is jaded snark, sanctimonous proselytizing, or worse.

There is a place in the newspapers for opinion pieces, of course. In the main news section, however, there is at least an attempt to herd the opinion pieces into the opinion section, and the journalism into the forefront. Not so with sports. The lines there are much blurrier, and to the detriment of the fans who don't have another choice.

Those of us who do have that choice should take advantage of it, and wrest our fandom from the hands of the jaded and the sour. All we ask for is information. It shouldn't be too much to ask from a newspaper.

Jefferson 9:17 AM

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