SportsCenter and the national, non-partisan view of baseball

I cringe to think a Pirate runs off the field to watch SportsCenter "to see how he did." Do you have to see it on the tube to believe it? Cue Howard Beale.

Actually, that easy & cheap crack aside, it's not the medium (television) but the show itself (a national one) that gives me the creeps these days. Baseball is one of the great national pastimes, but only as a soap opera with dozens of different - and mainly regional - interpretations of the action. There's no one, non-partisan, overarching take on the season that is satisfying or meaningful. The game is only as good as the degree of disagreement fans might have about how to interpret the action on the field.

As much as I loved USAToday when it first came out - the expanded box scores, all the statistics, a little note for every team - I've come to think that you can't really enjoy following a team like the Pirates if you rely only on the national media. It has a superficial bias towards the players and dramas of the largest markets and most-recently-winningest teams. The highest-paid players are usually the focus, and we're always reminded that they are the highest-paid players. Teams like the D'Rays and the Pirates only get notice if they win or lose a lot in a row, which signals not the best but the worst time for usually uninterested persons to look in and mouth off with their take on the meaning of the streak as it is happening. Teams that weren't picked to be winners - like the Cincinnati Reds - are subjected to overwhelming negativity until the team stops winning, and you have to wonder if that negativity ("they can't keep it up," "they have no pitching," "they get outscoured too much,") doesn't do a lot to erode the morale of the small-market Reds and their small-market fans. And morale is everything in a game that's mainly mental.

If Daryle Ward wants to know how he did, he should ask the fans. He should talk to the guy at the gas station or the burger joint (no - I take that back - he should talk to the guy at the health food store). We can't expect a show like SportsCenter to describe what events on the field mean to the audience of a small-market recently-losing franchises like Pittsburgh. The most meaningful games, for local fans, are usually the ones that appear nondescript to the usually-ignoring fans/pundits of the "whole league."

SportsCenter did a great job with the Rob Mackowiak-had-a-baby story, but that was a very easy pitch to hit, and the good feeling you might get from the national media there was totally erased by the gloating & condescending & unwelcome coverage of the losing streak. SportsCenter and ESPN are fantastic and great in their own way. But they have their limitations. And those limitations are especially felt by fans of teams like the Pirates. It would be really easy for a transplanted Pirates fan to think, after watching SportsCenter religiously for several years, that he would be better off if he divorced the team of his youth and started to root for teams with Ichiro!, A-Rod, or other national celebrities.