Splicetoday

Digital
Jun 20, 2008, 12:43PM

"Blogging Is Ruining The Esteemed Traditions Of...."

Curmudgeony writer Buzz Bissinger recently jumped on the blog-hating bandwagon in the rather narrow world of online baseball writing. One blogger takes exception, and actually gets motivated enough to contact Bissinger. He sticks to his guns, but an enlightening exchange follows.

Dear Mr. Bissinger,

I am a graduate student at the University of South Dakota, majoring in English. I hope one day to share my love of our language and passion for meaningful communication by teaching English to speakers of other languages. In the meantime, I teach Freshman Composition, work in our university writing center, and take many courses on rhetoric, linguistics and literature.

Without a doubt, there are many bloggers out there without the breadth of information or the language skills necessary to make meaningful contributions to sports journalism. This may well be true of the majority of sports bloggers. However, to make blanket statements about all bloggers and all blogs is blatantly fallacious. The baseball blogs I read all feature a priviliging of facts over opinions, whether those facts be statistics used to accurately value player contributions or insider information regarding the state of the clubs. Moreover, the blogs I read provide me with pleasure because of the quality of the writing. Naturally, this cannot be said of the majority of blogs, but anyone who appreciates both language and baseball could not be disappointed by reading Rob Neyer or Craig Calcaterra (aka "ShysterBall") any given morning. I am also a devoted fan of the authors of Fire Joe Morgan, a blog which certainly qualifies as "snarky," but which is devoted to revealing logical fallacies, misinformation, unfounded opinion, and mangled prose - the very flaws you revile in the blogosphere - where they can be found in "legitimate" sports journalism. I would be sad about how often such errors in thought occur in "journalism" if the results of FJM's fisking weren't so darned risible.

Discussion
  • Thanks for the pub, whoever linked this. I have to clear something up, though. I read "Three Nights" when it first came out solely out of Redbird fandom, knowing nothing about sabermetrics (as opposed to the marginal knowledge I now possess), and I remember exactly two things about the book: In the section where he blows sunshine up LaRussa's butt for using the dreaded hit and run, he italicizes "hit and run" every time, as if it's a Latin phrase or something. Also, there's a place where he uses the word "androgynous" twice in something like a 500-word span, and he uses it to describe the interior of a taxicab. An androgynous taxicab, you know, unlike those *femmy* taxicabs you run into now and then, with the pink leather and the boobs. I don't dare speculate on the features of a masculine taxicab, although I presume it wouldn't have automatic transmission. Anyway, now the world probably thinks I really loved his book, when I only started my letter that way to get him warmed up to my entreaty. Really, I do have more taste than that!

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