Siegel's takedown of Boston Sports media

Cabrera also had more RBIs, a higher average and a more successful team as a whole than Trout. Just sayin'.

 

I used to call up Shaughnessy columns once in a while to see if they were usable.
I can't remember the last time I made it through the first three or four grafs.

 

Trout hit leadoff;
By a whopping .004;
Trout's team won more games.

 

Oh, for crissakes, are we gonna tread this tired ground again, with neither player having a remote connection to Boston? Cabrera's MVP win is no travesty, tho Trout had a case.

 

Dan Shaghnessy was and is one of my all-time favorite writers, even when he pisses me off.

So there's one.

 

And the writer links Peter Abraham with old-time Boston writers -- when's Peter has been theer what, two years? -- is just another example of how weak the piece is.

 

+1.

 

Shaughnessy has done what any good businessman would, polish his effective brand of contrarianism and make a ton of coin off it. The audience takes the bait and looks like idiots in doing so.

As long as the Globe, 98.5, TV shows and book publishers think he's worth the investment, he'll still be around.

 

If the food is who won the damn game, aren't we serving barely reheated leftovers? I imagine the food's got to consist of more than that, the why would be a big thing, and to that end, newer stats can be very valuable.

Looking at the Ray Allen thing. If you knew he was great from certain spots and shot poorly from others, you could look at how his game meshed with other members of the Heat. If he shot badly in a game, you could point that the opponent forced him from his spots, or that he got to his spots, but simply didn't hit. Now that food (game story) is actually worth eating a day after the fact.

Earlier you pointed out that basketball writing has plenty of numbers, but if the numbers are unwieldy, they provide less insight. If any writer says, "Team X got out-rebounded 30-20," they've said nothing, becuase while that's a number, it doesn't really tell much of the story. Same with a team's raw points scored/allowed per game if pace isn't accounted for.

 

The story you just suggested is a good one. But it's a second or third day follow story for Allen's departure, or in fact, a story for the Miami papers on his arrival, not the Boston papers. The stories about Allen leaving here were focused, quite correctly, on the anomaly that a Hall of Fame player took LESS money to go somewhere else. That is real news in 21st century sports. If you ignore the obvious, you are not accurately presenting the news.

 

Why would the Boston media write an analytic story on how Ray Allen will help the Heat?

 

The writer makes an appearance on Boston radio and gets absolutely crushed. By the end of it, he appears entirely clueless about how sports media works ...

http://audio.weei.com/device/mobile/a/70319127/20-minutes-of-silence-with-kirk-minihane-alan-siegel-defends-his-boston-magazine-column.htm