...when I watched my first Cubs game on WGN. It was towards the end of the 1988 season, and I remember nothing at all about the game. I don't know if the Cubs won or lost. I don't even know who they played. But what I do know is that, twenty years later, I'm still watching baseball, talking about baseball, writing about baseball, complaining about baseball, reading about baseball, and obsessing about baseball, particularly my (now-)hometown Chicago Cubs.
But as I have grown as a fan, from my humble beginnings as a six-year-old with the attention span of a gnat to a twenty-six-year old who is happy to spend hours upon hours culling through statistics, I have become increasingly frustrated at the low level of discourse maintained by most sportswriters, commentators, and other "baseball people." In the baseball world, cliches, truisms, and tradition are too often substitutes for research and analysis, and unsupported claims and groundless assumptions prevent anything even resembling a well-conceived argument from emerging in far too many columns and interviews. Put simply, most of the discourse surrounding my favorite sport is, from an argumentative standpoint, held to lower standards by the media and the general public than the standards to which I hold my eighteen-year-old freshman composition students.
I don't mean to suggest that there is no good sportswriting out there. But for every Peter Gammons there are hundreds of Jon Heymans and Murray Chasses, people who, though they may be good reporters and are sometimes even good baseball reporters, are terrible baseball analysts.
This blog is not an attempt to rally fans beneath the banner of better baseball analysis, nor is it an attempt to show up all those evilnastyjerkfaces whose columns and commentary so often infuriate me; instead, it is simply a place for me to vent when I feel like venting and write when I feel like writing. Sometimes I'll write about baseball in general. More often than not, I'll probably stick to what I know best: the National League Central and, more importantly, the Chicago Cubs. But I have no specific goals for this blog, and am curious to see what (if anything) it becomes.
And with that said, welcome to the (NL) Central Stage.
But as I have grown as a fan, from my humble beginnings as a six-year-old with the attention span of a gnat to a twenty-six-year old who is happy to spend hours upon hours culling through statistics, I have become increasingly frustrated at the low level of discourse maintained by most sportswriters, commentators, and other "baseball people." In the baseball world, cliches, truisms, and tradition are too often substitutes for research and analysis, and unsupported claims and groundless assumptions prevent anything even resembling a well-conceived argument from emerging in far too many columns and interviews. Put simply, most of the discourse surrounding my favorite sport is, from an argumentative standpoint, held to lower standards by the media and the general public than the standards to which I hold my eighteen-year-old freshman composition students.
I don't mean to suggest that there is no good sportswriting out there. But for every Peter Gammons there are hundreds of Jon Heymans and Murray Chasses, people who, though they may be good reporters and are sometimes even good baseball reporters, are terrible baseball analysts.
This blog is not an attempt to rally fans beneath the banner of better baseball analysis, nor is it an attempt to show up all those evilnastyjerkfaces whose columns and commentary so often infuriate me; instead, it is simply a place for me to vent when I feel like venting and write when I feel like writing. Sometimes I'll write about baseball in general. More often than not, I'll probably stick to what I know best: the National League Central and, more importantly, the Chicago Cubs. But I have no specific goals for this blog, and am curious to see what (if anything) it becomes.
And with that said, welcome to the (NL) Central Stage.
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