Paparazzi at the car crash

I'm predictably and perhaps inanely critical of national-media guys for appealing mainly to the largest fan bases. If I'm bitter, it's not because I'm jealous but because all the attention to the daily soap opera of just a few teams means fewer remarks and worse, fewer well-educated or thoughtful remarks, about our team. So as Pirate fans, we live with a sports media in which the popular and influential pundits know little about our team. When they do pay attention, it's often for some embarassing reason: this player got released or the team has lost that many games in a row. Preseason predictions are often insulting and stupid ("Mac won't start Craig Wilson," "Rick Reed will be the #2 starter," "McClendon will be fired by the All-Star break," etc.). And, reaching for some team or player to make the butt of a joke, writers often choose some losing team they know little about. It makes them feel better, I think, about their ignorance of that subject.

I tune into a lot of the national coverage and consistently, my response is thanks but no thanks, and why the hell do I pay attention to this stuff? After all, no one can know much about every team, so it's wrong to expect more from the big guys who got big by catering to audiences in New York, Boston, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

What I really don't understand, however, is why the national sports media spends so much energy on negative stories. I'm hardly a don't-worry, be-happy kind of guy, but writers should recognize that fans escape to sports. Just because the typical amateur sportswriter writes juvenalia for a period (or a decade) of needlessly cynical venting, that doesn't mean that the average fan wants to read that kind of material. What they will read, however, is what's available. When better stuff becomes available, fans will flock to it. It's only a matter of time, I hope, before the work of Batgirl is as popular and well-respected as work like this. (We'll always enjoy a bit of gloating, and it can be good fun too, but as Pirate fan I don't need so many opportunities to gloat about the poor fortune of some AL team we never play.)

Anyway, totally worthless and bullshit story of the month definitely goes to the inordinate attention to Boston's side of the Nomar trade. I often check Google Sports to get a sense of the biggest stories out there, and for several days they've been rubbing shit in the wounds of the Red Sox nation. And I thought the coverage of the Aramis Ramirez deal was nasty and bitter.

All this to say, sometimes it's good to be ignored. Ignorance makes the moving on easier. Perhaps that's why the Red Sox nation feel like they're living under a curse.