The Book of Mike

"This is no junior college. This is the notorious University of Miami.” -- Marlins starter Dontrelle Willis, after getting knocked around for six runs in 2 1/3 innings by the Canes.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Baseball Blogs in Mid-season Slump

What’s up with blogging lately?  It feels like we’re in the midst of a mid-summer swoon here.  Maybe everyone’s still recovering from the SABR convention (although I know we weren’t all there).  Or maybe everyone’s just Randy-Johnson-to-insert-team-name-here’d out.  Whatever it is, I definitely feel like blogging in general hasn’t been up to it’s regular standards of late. 
 
Even the normally prolific (or verbose – depending on your perspective) Aaron Gleeman has shared very few words of late; both his own blog and The Hardball Times have been light on commentary - even resorting to posting the same commentary on both sites at times (thankfully Lee Sinnis continues to provide content on THT daily – even on weekends quite frequently).  Baseball News Blog hasn’t been updated for nearly a week.  It’s also seemed to me (at least since the 4th of July holiday) that Baseball Prospectus is finding it’s way to me later than usual each day.  Granted, The Book of Mike is no exception to this trend.  We’ve been churning out less of quality lately than ever before.  This is a trend we hope to reverse – and soon.
 
This isn’t to say that there isn’t good baseball writing out there everyday.  There’s plenty of it.  Rich Lederer’s series on Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts has been very interesting.  David Pinto keeps up the regular good work.  There are plenty of others.  It just struck me as interesting that at times you hear about the dog days of summer and how they affect ballplayers.  It feels like it’s affecting some bloggers too.

Please don't take my comments as a knock on anyone in particular - or even anyone at all.  That's not what I mean.  I just find it interesting that, of a group of people who are so dedicated to and passionate about baseball, many of us are getting less written lately than we usually do.  Maybe it's the time of year.  Maybe it's the weather.  Maybe we're all just busy or on vacation, or both.  Who knows?
 
This is interesting to me for a number of reasons.  First and foremost among them is that sometimes I feel like the blogging community could replace much of, if not all of, the mainstream media eventually.  There are plenty of good to great writers out there (most of the above mentioned included) and plenty of good commentary, news and analysis to go with it.  But then there are slumps like the one that currently seems to be going around.  Blogs definitely aren’t as reliable as ESPN or CNN.  Not that they should be.  For most of us, this is a hobby or a past-time, or a way to just vent and let off some steam.

But I’m slumping right now too, so I’m cutting it off here.  If you’d like, drop me a line or add some comments with your thoughts.  I suspect though that most of you are too lackadaisical to do that right now.

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