Passan vs. Ben Verlander: The slap fight you never knew you needed

toxic positivity

 

Daniel-

It's happened in every fan forum I ever participated in.
The ones critical of the franchise are on the outside of the sacred hoop, as the great Jose Chavez y Chavez once put it.

 

Amen to that.

 

I think for a lot of journalists, that idea has changed. It's more about the storytellers than ever. Who they are, who they're friends, what their politics are, for some reason, which enviable hobbies they have, what food they eat, etc.

Most national journalists barely exist for the reading or viewing audience, at this point. They lend little credible insight and appear to have little relevance to a customer. They are interesting to a small subset of peers.

 

You're nothing if not remarkably consistent.

 

I feel a little bit sad that for a good long while he was someone with a different point of view worth seriously engaging with and now he’s a civilized dyepack.

 

OK. I’m accurate. Hell, Defector and Outkick made it part of their content offering. (Which is their right, of course.)

 

Well, you managed to name two sites that have chosen to wear their politics on their sleeve. I guess that’s indicative of the industry at large. Well done.

 

Yawn …

 

Not sure what the skirmish here is about--I for one never get involved in arguments on SJ dot com --but I don't see much to argue with about much of this, especially the latter graph. Everybody knows Twitter's not the real world, and I can guaranfuckingtee you no one in my neighborhood has ever heard of Maggie Haberman. But on Twitter, all her peers are engaged in gazing at her navel while the rest of us scream about how she's helped topple democracy. The inside baseball stuff is just as omnipresent on sports Twitter, which is much easier to deal with because, you know, the fate of the free world isn't at stake.

 

Back to my point: Do either of these media personalities exist for a customer audience? If, for example, you go to ESPN, are you writing for any one particular group of people outside players, managers and other media? If you’re Verlander, what is your audience outside of players?

 

Verlander is a name that draws some eyeballs and Fox digital is on a spending spree. That'll end soon enough.