For the last few years, Baseball Prospectus has had a happy and productive partnership with the New York Sun, contributing content to what has been one of the best–if not simply the best–sports page found in any daily paper in this country. Sadly, today is the last day of the Sun’s publication, an unhappy end to what had been a glorious enterprise.
Admittedly, there’s the risk of seeming a bit overly self-referential in commending the Sun on the quality of its writing team in sports. It has been my pleasure to work with many of the Sun’s contributors in past projects, either here at BP or in my previous incarnation as an acquisitions editor: Allen Barra, John Hollinger, Sean Lahman, Jonah Keri, Aaron Schatz. From among the BP stable, the Sun has published the writing of Steven Goldman, Kevin Goldstein, Will Carroll, Jay Jaffe, Caleb Peiffer, Marc Normandin, and even a few odds and ends by me. These are authors most of you know and enjoy, and to bring them all together on a single sports page was and remains something of an ideal.
Key to making that relationship as fruitful as it had been was our editor at the Sun, Geoff Foster, as well as his tireless associate, Jayanthi Daniel. We can only wish them the best in their futures, knowing that, for a brief while, there was a print paper singularly delivering the kind of quality the audience deserves from a daily newspaper. It was a fine attempt that reflected Geoff’s ambition and vision, and it was an honor for those of us here at BP who participated to be given the opportunity to take part. Godspeed, good luck, and most of all, thank you.
I'm a founding member of the Steven Goldman fan club, and the Sun did have great baseball writing, but I shed no tears for that right-wing rag. No offense.
No offense taken, G-MOTA. I too had major issues with being seen in the paper. I once had the mind-bending "pleasure" of reading a piece I wrote facing a call for Dick Cheney to run for President. That was the last time I wrote there.
Thank you, G-Mota. I know you're still waiting for that elusive second member to join you in that club. The interesting thing about the Sun is that the conservative bent of its editorial page was not reflected in its fine arts and sports coverage, and I always told people who pointed out the incongruity of my writing there that it was the most progressive sports page in the country -- a thought they let me get into print in today's last edition. I could take pride in being part of that, even though I disagreed with other sections, and if you think about it, that's the way it should be - is there an incongruity in any paper if the chess columnist is not in political sync with the stock market analyst? I don't think so.
That absolute hatred for conservatives always baffles me. To me the NY Times and Washington Post are worthless papers -- I feel bad for the trees that get cut down to publish it -- but I don't really spend any time hating them. Why is a conservative paper so threatening to the liberal world-view?
Here's an interesting thought exercise: Is there a left slant and right slant in baseball? That is, can the traditional political spectrum be superimposed on the game? And if it can, how does that affect our knowledge of it?
Baseball's the only capitalist game--everything else with one ball is zero stum. Individual success and failure is the only clock, and optimizing your personal behavior creates the most efficient outcome for the team. Adam Smith could have wrote the rules
And what about "wedge issues"? Would DH or no DH count as one? And how could that be determined as left/right? For example, if I support the DH, is it left leaning (job creation in the vein of a government job and often for otherwise "unemployable" people) or right (creates elite jobs, very high paying ala wallstreet)? Or does even having an opinion show bias (opinion = gov't intervention, no opinion = free market)?
Is there, can there be, a political slant on the way the games are reported in the papers or on websites? How can we deduce this? And this can not include anything about stadium construction/funding as this is a political-only discussion, not a sports discussion, IMHO.
I never really saw BP rightings as leftist, although I suppose some of the work (especially Sheehan) can be construed that way. Instead, I saw the BP way as being a more humanist view of the game and its periphery.
I guess humanism and leftism do go together on many occassions, though.
I'd certainly say that opinion on BP tends to slant towards the players and against the owners when it comes to the game's economics. But it's hard to peg that to a left/right spectrum--on the one hand, it's in favor of labor and against management, but on the other, it's in favor of the free market and against intervention by the "government" in the form of a salary cap, the draft limiting amateurs to one potential employer, etc.
I think a good amount of any confusion over BP's political leanings would reflect a goodly amount of heterogeneity in-house. I think it's a happy thing indeed that there's not groupthink among my colleagues on politics any more than there is as far as baseball. We used to have a pretty strong libertarian bent (if anything), and there have been some accusations about being liberal that would true of some of us, but even in those broad strokes, this might only be true on certain issues or subjects.
Generally speaking, like the game itself, we're simply American.
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It could be worse. Keith "Lefty" Olberman could be writing here.
You hate to see any dead tree outfit bite the dust. I swear to God if I couldn't sit down and unwind by reading the paper every night I would just chuck all. Even if it is getting harder and harder to find a paper that isn't written by the "Blame America First" crowd or the "Neanderthals".
I want to second what cooberp wrote - Sheehan's politics have been elusive to me. If anything, they seem more conservative - the main argument for not having a draft and ending the six-year control of players is belief in the free market, and not in "government" regulation, which liberals are quite in favor of. Being a far-lefty myself, I have trouble with the fact that I consistently agree with him.
I really have never had a problem with any media that has a point of view, right or left. I have strong political views, but I would feel shortchanged if I was not able to access the views of the "other side". I enjoy arguing and I never want to shut down anyone's speech. I just like to disagree with it. NYC, or America for that matter, is not better off for losing a great publication.
An American should not be satisfied to hear views from only "your side" we need views from all sides, I simply won't trust any one media institution to look out for me, I won't cede my brain to another man's views ever. Give me information and let me make up my own mind. Give me more, not less. It is shortsighed to view the end of the Sun as a win for liberals, instead it is New York's loss, culturally, that the Sun is gone.
I really concur with BC's view about the importance of diversity. As one of that rara avis, a Mass. Republican, I really enjoy confronting my Boston friends with the views of the Economist and Wall St. Journal, and appreciate their pushing on me contending views from Slate or Sojourners.
While I have no clue what the politics of BP are (and the question itself may be meaningless), I do know that my discussions of baseball are often more heated -- and better informed -- than most of the debates I get in over politics.
Why has this thread degenerated (I use the word advisedly) into a discussion of politics? I'm sorry, to me finding "politics" in baseball is like those hysterics who find the face of Jesus on the side of a barn. Give me a break.
So, we were talking about The Sun. R.I.P. The best sports section of any paper in the country- IN TWO PAGES! The guy who did that is a genius. The thumbsuckers The Times, the Post and the News try to palm off as sportwriters weren't fit to lick the boots of Red Smith, Tom Boswell (or Joe Sheehan or Tim Marchman). The feeling I had when I opened the Sun sports page for the first time was like first opening up a Bill James Abstract in, I don't know, 1986? It broke the souind barrier right there. Tim Marchman was consistently the best baseball columnist in the country- he so clearly loved the game and his favorite players. (OK, maybe that just shows, like a lot of New Yorkers, I don't get around much?) So, let's play Taps for the Sun (which had so much more going for it than the occasionally spoony editorial). We shall not see its like again, I'm afraid. Sunt lacrime rerum.
I love it when people make comments like this; they remind me of those fools that yell and scream about those terrible shows on tv that are ruining their kids.
TURN THE FREAKIN' CHANNEL IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT!
Same goes here. Some people find the topic interesting, others don't. Peter, if ya don't like it, let it go. Leave it for the others to enjoy.
Up here in Canada, the two leading national parties have not such abstract names as "Republican" or "Democrat", just Conservative and Liberal. Hence, it is easy for me to see Baseball Prospectus has generally supported a liberal use of new statistics and even supported some radical rule changes. The sportwriters who vote for MVP awards based primarily on the old fashioned ways: Wins, RBIs, or "guts" are the conservatives.
Interesting this. I agree that John Adams would have reveled in the rationality of BP baseball analysis and discussions. But then, in these times, "reality has a liberal bias" and that would suggest a liberal leaning on these pages.
But I don't think that the political framework is best suited to characterize BP; perhaps the distinction between evolutionists and creationists is more appropriate to label BP, and I'd say they're with science, as they should.
Christina, I don't know about copyright issues, but would it be possible for BP to create a "New York Sun" archive on line here that we could access? Many of those articles have a strong analytic element and aren't bound by time.
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Any clue on where Marchman is headed? His stuff was always a joy -- & an insight -- to read.