first

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OOOOOOHHHHH YEEAAAAHHHH DIG IT!

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Remember when Road warrior Hawk was drunk and fell off the titantron?

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Road trip:6 – 3, I’ll take it. Now we have a tough ass home stand coming up starting on Tuesday against Boston. Maybe we can win one at home this time.

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I suck…

4  1

I was in a movie called The Load Warrior.

1  1

Gee, great photoshop.

0  2

AJ Burnett and Mariano Rivera can lick my bald balls.

0  1

Colon has bitchtits.

0  1

Can someone give me the stem cells that Colon got?

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Amazing photoshop. Probably one of my favorites of all-time. Hawk and Animal, baby! RIP Hawk.

1  0

Why not give Teix the inverted mohawk as well?

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where da white wimmin at

1  3

Will work for cock

2  3

We live in a golden age of information. Not only do we have access to more sources of data and content, but we learn new information almost instantaneously. Twitter presents us with facts, and blogs analyze and interpret those facts in rapid fashion. These media have given rise to the journalists who provide the information and the writers who make use of the information. This leads to unprecedented levels of published content, whether professional or amateur. Yet one element has not followed. We no longer have brilliant writers whom we can look up to.

This isn’t to demean reporters and assert that they’re not actually writers. They are, in the strictest sense. They compose articles and stories using words, sentences, and paragraphs that, for the most part, obey the tenets of English grammar. They provide us information to which we otherwise wouldn’t have access. But the mere presence of information and grammatical structure does not a good writer make. In fact, many reporters, regardless of the information they present, are downright bad writers. Where, then, are the good writers that the future generation will use as role models?

To fully present the idea of a good writer vs. a bad writer, I turn to Stephen King. In his memoir, On Writing, he expresses the notion that there exist four tiers of writers. There are bad writers, who are alway bad and cannot graduate to a higher level. There are competent writers, those who write plainly and clearly but not much more. Then there are good writers, a level which competent writers can attain. Finally there are great writers, a status obtainable only by genius at birth. I’m not sure this holds up across all writing disciplines, but I’m more certain than ever that it applies directly to baseball writers.

Most local reporters pass as competent writers. They understand that their purpose is to tell a story in a clear, concise manner, and that unless they are directly involved that they are not part of the story. They avoid cliches and keep their writing reasonably fresh. But they lack a certain style, a certain — pizzaz might be the right word, though I’m not sure it has a definition concrete enough to make the proper point. From intuition, I suspect that they found success as a competent writer and saw little reason to change. After all, the market is competitive. Why change something that works?

Less common is the bad writer, though apparently bad writers gain more prominence when sports is the subject. True, some prominent national and local columnists pass as competent writers. Buster Olney, for example, is a competent writer; he might even pass as a good writer. Ditto Tyler Kepner of the New York Times. But Ken Rosenthal? He might be the most prominent reporter in the country, but his writing chops are as lacking as they come. The same goes for Jon Heyman. The man cannot spin a yarn. If, like George Costanza, your favorite writer is Mike Lupica, because you find his columns to be very insightful, you should stop your pursuit of writing now. He is a bad writer. The same goes for a cadre of local columnists, including Richard Justice, Phil Rodgers, and Bill Plaschke. They garner attention, which is why they’re columnists. But they garner that attention because they are bad writers. They are hacks.

The glut of competent writers is encouraging in that way, because a competent writer is infinitely more tolerable than a bad writer. In another way it strikes me as disheartening. Every competent writer on the planet has the potential to become a good writer. It takes deliberate practice that takes place outside of working hours, and I understand why many reporters don’t feel that a worthy investment. They have lives — a spouse, kids, other passions and interests, etc. A good job, a job at which they display competent skills, might be enough. But that doesn’t quite explain why so few competent baseball writers become good writers.

Great writers, for the most part, do not exist in sports. This makes sense. Sports might be important to us, but to a natural born genius they might seem mundane. The great writers of history typically write stories of their own brilliant creation, or otherwise chase topics a bit weightier than baseball. Some great writers take an interest in sports, and when that happens we should be grateful. Despite the hackery of Lupica filling half the book, Wait Till Next Year was a phenomenal book, because William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride, among others, wrote the other half. John Upike is another great writer who took a particular interest in baseball. Rarely, if ever, though, will you find a great writer who spins his yarns primarily about sports.

The complete lack of great writers, combined with the abundance of competent writers, makes me yearn even more for good writers. For young sportswriters, the only truly appropriate role model at this point is Joe Posnanski. He explores his curiosities more thoroughly than any other baseball writer, and he combines these curiosities with competent writing skills to create good articles and stories. Beyond him, though, I see few other good writers gracing printed and electronic pages. A few have potential, sure, but those aren’t writers to set as a role model. The role models should be the ones who have already done it. We have so few of them in baseball.

This story circles back to my own situation. For years I have sought an appropriate role model for baseball writing. While I have found many strong writers and many stylistically interesting writers, I’ve yet to find anyone who approaches Posnanski’s level of skill and art. I imagine that others feel differently, and perhaps categorize, for instance, Rob Neyer as a good writer. I just don’t see it that way. I imagine, too, that others view Posnanski as the one writer worth emulating. This could have a negative overall effect. We don’t want a cadre of Posnanski clones. We want a young army of competent writers who are willing to put in the work and develop into good writers. Posnanski might have influence, but I don’t think he can raise a generation of baseball writers by himself.

We have the tools. All the information we seek sits right before our eyes, and is accessible any time we want it. What we lack are writers who show us how it’s done. The solution, I think, is to read dozens of different authors, both amateur and professional. We aggregate content, and so we can aggregate writing skills. The sabermetric movement, for instance, might lack a single standout, good writer, but if someone were to combine the strength of Dave Cameron’s writing with Carson Cistulli’s literacy, well, there might be the makings of good writing. In an era where we lack writers worth emulating, it might be the best way to develop writers who can influence the next generation.

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Don’t worry guys, I’ll probably blow my arm out by 2013.

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