NY Post, Daily News, LoHud Yankee Blog, RiverAveBlues.com, NJ.com, The Star Ledger, Newsday, and ESPN New York

Don’t equate the bolded one with the rest. They aren’t reporters, and they do a far better job than the others (save maybe the Star Ledger). The others are absolute trash and usually have the same stories from the AP.

Oh damn, Craig, should I have called them “the football team in Washington DC that I hate because I am a Cowboy fan” so you don’t get charged by Dan Snyder?

You are correct with A.B,C. I can’t/won’t get that from a team.

That is a perfecty worded assessment of the situation. Thank you.

Yesterday, you put up a post about Ron Gardenhire being upset reporters tweeted the news that Nick Blackburn was named the 4th starter within seconds of him telling them. The news made it all the way around to the players out on the field via the internet in seconds. And they got upset because they were competing for that spot leading Gardenhire to get ruffled at the speed with which his conversation was spread.

I jokingly posted a comment in that thread that Gardenhire should just start his own Twitter account and/or blog so he could cut out the media entirely, which accorindg to you is actually happening.

If you follow the media for a team, as I do for the Yankees, you can run down your news reader for the NY Times, NY Post, Daily News, LoHud Yankee Blog, River Ave. Blues, NJ.com, The Star Ledger, Newsday, and ESPN New York and you’ll see that they are all writing the exact same articles because those reporters are only allowed to speak with the players and coaches at the same time. so only have the exact same quotes to publish. And you’re right, just what purpose does the media serve if the team could issue the same statements in one press release from the manager and players about the game?

The PR Department could come up with the top fifteen questions baseball reporters ask every day, and ask the coaches and players to answer them in front of a microphone and camera with one personal annecdote each and the news organizations can do a summary for their particular audience.

What you do here at Hardball Talk is to give a bit of personal opinion, spin, flavor, and insight into the news events around baseball, and that is why I think you are successful. But you do not find this from writers who cover teams every day.

My interests lie in on the field strategy and how player & manager actions affect wins and losses, so the pieces that I try to write at my Yankee blog are analysis of the events within the games themselves and how off the field coaching and front office moves affect what happens between the lines.

I don’t have access to the players so I don’t have the same cookie cutter quotes that the mainstream media (god i hate sounding like fox news) gives us. I’m a fan who yells at the TV: slide! hit the cut off! bunt already! and why isn’t Girardi letting Gardner steal?!?! And my favorite from back in the day, ‘Why didn’t Rivera throw over to keep Dave Roberts close?!’

So instead of yelling at my screen, I put it on the internet and hopefully do it in some fashion that is wrapped in the theories of the game with hopefully well thought out analysis behind it. (if anyone made it this far in a rambling post, you can click my screenname above for the link to my tiny site).

And yet, in two or three years of following the media that follows the Yankees on a day to day basis, I have never once seen the team brought to task by an in depth article about a failed strategy or season long approach. All you find are the same quotes disseminated in slightly different ways across the spectrum of beat writers.

So, ultimately, you’ve nailed it. The sports media are nothing more than mouthpieces for the highly controlled PR departments for their respective teams and until they start to give us insight into the games and why things happen, how much do we really need them?

What’s next, a ban on Yahoo in clubhouses, Chairman Mao bobbleheads, foot binding for all cheerleaders and ball girls