Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports media…
Dan LeBatard 1: Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News calls LeBatard’s stunt “highly questionable.”
Last November, Deadspin said it was looking for someone who’d give up their Hall vote, even if they were willing to sell it. LeBatard took the bait, although there was reported to be no money exchanged.
Doesn’t really matter. LeBatard sold his soul on this one. Payback could be worse.
As if he could not have just handed in a blank ballot, explaining he did not believe the process was just, and then used his ESPN and Herald platforms to get the same message across?
Instead, like a kid throwing a smoke bomb into a movie theatre, the issue becomes more clouded.
Dan LeBatard II: Tony Copobianco of the Tucson Citizen praised LeBatard for his decision.
In an act of protest — something that most snobby sports writers are used to doing in the same arena — LeBatard allowed the readers of Deadspin, an underground sports media website who’s writers and editors best resemble a group a rebels fighting this form of class warfare — to vote for him. Contrary to the apocalyptic scenario that is LeBatard voting for former Florida Marlins Paul LoDuca, Todd Jones, Jacque Jones and Armando Benitez; his ballot was filled with legit candidates Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, Tom Glavine, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio, Edgar Martinez, Jeff Bagwell, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Curt Schilling. Knowing LeBatard, he would’ve voted for those guys anyway.
Among the selected players on LeBatard’s Deadspin ballot: Maddux, Thomas and Glavine were elected into the Hall of Fame. Not to bad for a bunch of commoners.
The voting process: Dave Zirin in The Nation slams the entire thing.
What gets lost, however, in the slings and arrows we gleefully toss at the BBWAA is why so many in the organization have taken this position to leave out the players with even a hint of PED scandal attached to their names. Having interviewed more than a few of these voters, it should be noted that they vote the way they do because they feel like they don’t have a choice. They believe that Major League Baseball and Bud Selig dropped the ball so egregiously in the 1990s, creating a hypocritical moral swamp, that they are the last group of people who can do anything to provide some kind of clarity to the era. I disagree with their reasoning, but it is a rationale that actually is rational. It is certainly more rational than finding a place in Cooperstown for Tony LaRussa, while his own players like McGwire need a ticket to get inside. I wish people taking their potshots at the BBWAA would reserve 99 percent of their ire for Bud Selig. For that matter, I wish members of the BBWAA were more public with their disgust for Selig and everything he has done to create this collateral damage across baseball’s history. That would be a profoundly more principled and more honest take.
Spirits of St. Louis. Richard Sandomir of the New York Times has a terrific story on settlement talks concerning the outrageous NBA TV money still going to the owners of the ABA’s Spirit of St. Louis.
On Tuesday, the Silnas, the league and the four former A.B.A. teams will announce a conditional deal that will end the Silnas’ golden annuity. Almost.
The Silnas are to receive a $500 million upfront payment, financed through a private placement of notes by JPMorgan Chase and Merrill Lynch, according to three people with direct knowledge of the agreement. The deal would end the enormous perpetual payments and settle a lawsuit filed in federal court by the Silnas that demanded additional compensation from sources of television revenue that did not exist in 1976, including NBA TV, foreign broadcasting of games and League Pass, the service that lets fans watch out-of-market games.
2014 sports media forecast: Matt Yoder and the crew of Awful Announcing look at the possible big stories for this year.
6) Fox Sports will have to get creative to increase its live sports rights
Fox Sports will come up empty handed in landing Big Ten rights (to the delight of Clay Travis) and will find itself with a marginal NBA package, if any at all. With not much in the pipeline in terms of sports sports rights, Fox will look to either buyout the UFC or take a stake in the Pac 12 Network depending on who is more motivated for a liquidity event.
– Ben Koo, @bkoo
NFL Ratings: Richard Deitsch and MMQB with the numbers on another big year for the NFL.
While the football-airing networks strive for production excellence and quality broadcasting each week, the ultimate scoreboard is ratings. For television executives, your best opportunity for that winter house in Vail is when viewership numbers are rolling, and the opening week of the playoffs could not have gone better for the networks thanks to a combination of frigid weather across the United States and matchups decided in the final minutes. Last weekend NFL games averaged 34.7 million viewers, the most-watched wild-card weekend ever.
ESPN Megacast: Joe Favorito gives his assessment of ESPN’s coverage of the BCS title game, and how it likely portends to what we’ll see in the future.
ESPN offered a very unique litmus test for what fans die hard and casual would want in a major event, not just a sporting event, going forward. Some may say ESPN had nothing to lose on such a light sports night; what could possibly be of note on ESPN News, ESPN2 would have been replete with shoulder taped programming and ESPN Classic would offer some distant replay which would draw flies, but diluting an audience for the sake of one rating, as well as making a bit of a mockery of the BCS Championship Game was certainly somewhat of a question.
In the end, the night became a screen of a blank canvas per se, full of lots of test ideas that down the line could mesh into an event that isn’t about the TV screen, but is about the mobile, the digital and the social environs that can be created. And not even in just English. Welcome to the Megacast.
Tim Tebow: Tomas Rios of Sports on Earth writes on Tim Tebow’s first day as an analyst for ESPN.
Nothing breaks Tebow’s outward obsession with preparation and routine. That is, nothing except his desire for a Diet Coke, which is a near-constant state. No vending machine goes by without Tebow stopping for his favored corn-based sugar-water and looking down upon the aluminum vessel with honest appreciation. As he navigates a fraught transition from one public career to another, his moments with a frosty Diet Coke are about all the time he has to escape inside his own unknowable, internal expanse.
Two Diet Cokes later, Tebow glides through his ESPN debut, because of course he does. The man charmed his way into confidential materials and spent months studying them, for no reason other than to know his way around. That’s past neurotic and on the way to borderline psychotic, but it’s a reliable standard for success as long as no one’s asking you to throw a tight spiral.
Bob Costas: Steve Lepore of Awful Announcing talks to Costas about the upcoming Olympics and voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Steve Lepore: What do you think about what’s happened to the Hall of Fame ballot. Obviously, there’s the controversy of Deadspin buying a ballot, and writers becoming more transparent with their ballots, what should be done?
Bob Costas: Tyler Kepner wrote something very interesting [Monday] in the New York Times. He said that we need to expand the diversity of the electorate, but contract the size of it. You need more people from the sabermetric community, you need more bloggers — not just random bloggers, but people who’ve been vetted and cover baseball over a long period of time and have credibility — perhaps it should include people who aren’t just traditional members of the BBWAA.
But at the same time, he thought that with nearly 600 voters, inevitably some percentage of them aren’t taking it as seriously or following it as closely as some others. Maybe they’d do better to have a smaller number but draw that number from a wider pool of possibility.
Jimmy Roberts: Pat Donahue of the Povich Center for Sports Journalism does a profile of ’79 Maryland grad, Jimmy Roberts.
In his early years with ABC Sports, Roberts had the opportunity to work closely with Howard Cosell, writing and producing features for SportsBeat, an Emmy award-winning show. He then transitioned into news and from 1985-87 worked as an assignment editor and producer for ABC News, before returning as a writer and producer of features for ABC Sports.
Roberts credits his years with ABC and being around journalism icons like Cosell for teaching him how to be a professional journalist, especially when it came to interviewing.
“[Cosell] had the ability to interview people, ask the difficult questions, and not lose them,” Roberts said. “Television is filled with people who don’t want to ask difficult questions because they don’t want to upset the person they are interviewing. But you’re the viewers’ surrogate and you have to ask the questions that people at home want to know, and if you’re doing any less then you’re not doing you’re job.
“The years that I spent at ABC really did a lot to influence me. I met a lot of incredibly talented people and I kept my eyes open…I’ve always thought I’ve had a bit of a hybrid style, and it’s because of the time I spent around these people and the influence they had on me.”
Marty Schotennheimer book: Sports Book Review Center reviews the coach’s new autobiography, Martyball.
The book, then, becomes something of a hymnal of praise for Schottenheimer and his career as a coach. Sometimes it’s others doing the singing, and sometimes it’s Flanagan himself. But it’s relentlessly positive, to the point that the reader knows pretty quickly what’s going to be coming for the 300-plus pages.