It will still be better than football

The aughts generally were awful and a review of them could only have ended with a rope, a plastic bag, a bottle of wine and another of pills. What's worse, the teens look to have potential in this line. We'll hope the twenties arrive hurriedly.

At least in the aughts we had good baseball to distract us, but I have five reasons to think the coming decade is going to be a crashing bore; you can surely add your own.

1) Technological advances

The installation of camera systems in ballparks that will, once refined, allow clubs to precisely measure every aspect of performance is not going to be a good thing. Every club looking at the exact same accurate information will lead to monoculture. Current evaluative metrics, which are quite crude, are already having a bit of that effect; truly granular ones will even more so.

This won't take the human element out of the game. When clubs have something near perfect information it will, if anything, make instinct and intuition much more important, as no team will be able to get an advantage just by noting that obviously good players are good, meaning teams will have to actually get creative.

Still, the kind of smarts that allow one to read a boring actuarial spreadsheet properly are quite common while the kind that allow one to steal an edge on rivals by shrewdly picking out the drunks whose drinking won't affect their development are quite rare. I worry that just as the former were violently underappreciated in baseball for many years, the latter may come to be, which would be disastrous. Far better a room full of drunk Bavasis than a room full of Wall Street washouts spouting MBA buzzwords, if you have to choose.

2) Postliteracy

The beat writer's job is devolving into the maintenence of a Twitter feed, 'hits' on TV and radio and quickly turned 'takes' on the issue of the hour, more substantive writing is supported by a half dozen or so outlets that probably won't exist in recognizable form in 10 years, and for all I know the coming generation of writers will have grown up doing immense neurological damage to themselves by reading too much off screens. Of course there will still be good writing—today's average column or game story is incalculably better than one from 50 years ago—but there will be less of it than there is now and the best of it likely won't be as good. And the constant need to feed the beast in an age when a print model has essentially been replaced by a broadcast model will have other effects as well. I can't, for example, be the only one to think that the rightly admired Joe Posnanski is courting burnout by dropping multiple five to ten thousand word blog posts every week in addition to his real writing, though we'll continue to hope he's Iron Joe McGinnity.

3) Death of television

This is a big one. If you thought the death of newspapers was ugly, wait until you see the death of cable as it converges with online, much to the latter's advantage. Do you really think baseball has a better answer for all that lost revenue than the Times did?

4) The economy

If the economy has really turned Japanese we're probably in for some hideous effects: A labor stoppage out of the next CBA negotiations for one, and the death of some major league towns for another. No matter how wealthy its suburbs are, a city like Detroit where more than half the residents are unemployed cannot be reasonably expected to support competitive baseball.

5) Doping scandals

I don't know or really care what guys are on these days, but it isn't nothing, and we're in for a repeat of the world's least interesting scandal once people figure out that various famous players held up as admirable because they claim not to use drugs actually do use them.

UPDATE: Rebuttal rebutted here.

Comments

[tgt]

I live in Kansas City and, while I don't know if that qualifies me to comment on Joe Posnanski's state of mind, I'm happy to report that he appears to be suffering no signs of burnout. In addition to writing for Sports Illustrated and posting to his blog daily (or more), he continues to contribute semi-regularly to the Kansas City Star and, oh year, turn out the occasional book.

While I'm pleased that the rest of the world finally discovered what those of us who have been reading the Star for years have always known, I'm a little bit regretful that the national stage has, to a certain degree, stolen him away from us. We suffer a bit here, missing his regular takes on our local scene at the expense of subjects more national. And, if nothing else, I'm pleased that one of his more recent columns dealt with the subject of his love of our area. It gives us hope that we can continue to claim him as our own.

Life is so rich for Pos that I expect he will continue to have something to say about it for a long time to come. And that is something for which we can be grateful.

[Tim Marchman]

I don't think he's showing any signs of burnout and I fervently hope he never does. My point is that anyone who writes that much is risking it, and if we get to a point where it's an expected thing that's going to have some effects.