Grantland so far

Yeah, AdBlock eliminates all of those for me, too.

 

Loved this piece on the Red Sox meltdown, putting it here instead of the Red Sox thread because I have one question about the footnotes: Why are these footnotes and not part of the actual story?

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7095696/the-collapse-red-sox

Footnotes:

 

Because DFW used footnotes.

 

I actually like the way it sets off the most specific part of Schur's rage.

 

Probably way more of a Simmons influence than DFW, actually.

Just seems to be a common stylistic device these days in this kind of freewheeling sports writing.

 

I don't think it's common at all, really. I think it's a signature feature of Grantland stories, that they've decided it's part of their house style, and Posnanski uses it (but with asterisks instead of numbers) in his blog. That's about it.

 

The footnotes made that piece.

 

Sepinwall does it in his TV columns, though I guess that's not sports. But he's someone I regularly read, probably helping it to seem common.

I guess we're quibbling over what "common" means. Do I think that more than 50 percent of writers use footnotes? No. Do I think it's somewhat of a trend? Yes. I like it better than parentheticals, though.

 

It first struck me as a little too cute/Deadspinish, but I guess in keeping with the format of the site, it works.

 

Agree 1000%.

What a sniveling, bloodless insect -- and that's giving him all the best of it.

 

http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-triangle/post/_/id/6601/reconsidering-sebastian-janikowski

Insight into the Grantland editorial process?

Mr. Simmons has a whim, and now, instead of cloaking it in a one-paragraph response to a fake mailbag question getting to it in a column weeks later, he has one of his minions write it that day. (Edited to remove what was apparently taken as slander.)

Also, there's an egregious factual error: "Of the players taken after Janikowski in the first two rounds ... only one — Keith Bulluck — went to the Pro Bowl."

Umm... Wikipedia makes this process really easy. But what's worse is Mays acknowledged that Shaun Alexander was taken two picks after Janikowski one paragraph earlier.