Archive for the ‘Getting Blanked Special’ Category

The 2012 baseball season came to a conclusion a little more than a week ago when Sergio Romo struck out Miguel Cabrera to earn the San Francisco Giants their second World Series title in three years. There were, generally speaking, three reactions to this finale: 1) From Giants fans: “Woohoo!”; 2) From Detroit Tigers fans: “Noooo!”; 3) From all other baseball fans: “Meh” (or else, “Of all the seasons I’ve ever followed, this was certainly one of them.”).

Due to its structure, which includes scheduled competitions almost every day for seven months, Major League Baseball tends to be followed by fans in a different manner than the avid followers of other sports. We typically cheer for our favorite teams, but don’t necessarily care all that much about what other clubs are doing so long as it doesn’t affect the one that we support. This is a by-product of there being such an ample supply of baseball to be followed. We have to pick and choose, or else we’d be reduced to living our lives without much in the way of variety.

This is likely best seen by comparing nationally televised games of baseball to nationally televised games of football. While baseball plays out a 162 game schedule, the National Football League’s regular season schedule consists of a mere 16 games for each team. Nationally broadcast games of football absolutely slaughter nationally broadcast games of baseball in terms of television ratings partly because there’s a more limited supply of content for fans to consume and more meaning behind each game. This caters to the neutral observer in a way that 162 game schedules simply can’t.

Despite the differences in the way that baseball is played compared to other sports, stories still emerge throughout each season that transcend the boundaries that normally govern our favorite team-based interests. Here, in my opinion, are the top ten stories to do this from the 2012 Major League Baseball season.

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Baseball’s beat writers have a tough gig. It’s not easy logging hours in press boxes, chasing quotes in the club house, or coming up with unique angles on subjects that have been handled millions of times before. And to make matters worse, it’s a relatively thankless duty as well.

Any time you come up with something original, collect an actually interesting quote or write a game story that doesn’t amount to clichéd rancour, it’s immediately appropriated by someone like me, more often than not for purposes of mockery. If not, it’s dismissed outright by someone so knowledgeable on the subject that they didn’t even have to read the story in order to express an opinion about it.

I appreciate beat writers, what they do and the guff with which they put up. It’s not easy, and for the most part, they work hard to produce content and do well in bearing with the reactions that their writing receives.

However, I don’t understand certain habits among these earthbound creatures when it comes to social media. What is this seemingly innate urge that the beat writer has for using Twitter to provide play-by-play of baseball games to their followers. With live blogs, MLB Gameday, and a myriad of sports websites and applications all providing as-it-happens coverage, does anyone actually use Twitter to follow the pitch-by-pitch occurrences of a baseball game.

Seriously, is there anyone in the entire world that depends on the tweets of others to follow baseball games?

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Join us at 6:45 PM ET tonight to chat about the draft and find out who we’ll be seeing in what uniforms . . . in the next two to four years.

We’ll be carrying the Twitter feeds of all the top draft analysts right here and linking to the scouting reports of drafted players as they’re made available. And we’ll also likely have a healthy dose of snark for anyone pretending to know more than they actually do.

It’s all apart of Getting Blanked’s MLB Rule IV Draft Chat, which you can find after the jump.

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