Hi. My name is Mike. I’m a sportswriter. Remember me?
I’ve been deep undercover the last couple weeks doing preseason football stuff (Penn State holding its media day the same day as Lancaster-Lebanon League media day for the first time ever really screwed me, man). But the school year begins tomorrow, and soon, praise the Lord, there’ll be a semblance of weekly routine around here, and yeah, that routine will include BPR.
I wanted to say a few things about changes at LNP. I’ll be covering Penn State football for all three papers, probably including a story in the Intell Mondays after games, Wednesdays after JoePa’s weekly teleconference, and Fridays previewing the next day’s game. The game coverage in the Sunday News will be essentially the same, a game story with a column and grades.
This probably means I won’t do much with Joe’s teleconference on the blog, just a mention if news breaks or Joe says something amazing/funny/stupid. Maybe I’ll be doing more than I think.
Just as important is LNP’s new, amped-up Internet presence, which I mentioned in the paper today. From what I’ve seen, this has the potential to be far beyond what anyone else around here is doing. Once they start playing high school football this week, you’ll be able to, for each Lancaster-Lebanon league school, access the schedule, a game story and box score for each game, photos and videos for most of them, and a clickable roster that will provide stats and even biographical information on the players, plus columns, blogs, etc.
The address is lancsports.com (although the public can’t access it until Friday, when high school football starts). It’s a brave new world.
Wanted to say a few long-overdue things about Jimmy Rollins’ comments on the Philly fans.
Rollins wants the fans to show up and be supportive no matter what. Fantasyland.
The fans want to the team to win but, failing that, they want to entjoy themselves by indulging their resentment of pro athletes’ fame and riches. Dumb and unhealthy, but whatever.
I want fans, when the product is substandard, to just stay home. “Frontrunner,” to me, is another word for “intelligent consumer.” If there were more frontrunners, big-time sports would be smaller, cheaper and better.
When a player fails to hustle or otherwise behaves in a clearly unprofessional way, it is not only fans’ right but arguably their obligation to express disaproval. But that’s not what most booing is. Eighty percent of booing is not constructive. If you really, truly want a player to succeed but boo him when he simply fails you’re not helping, so don’t tell me you want to win more than the players do.
On “Baseball Tonight,” tonight, Steve Phillips did a little feature, with examples from today’s games, on how important “the little things,” are.
Of course that set off my radar, and of course Phillips didn’t disappoint. From Cardinals-Braves today: 2nd inning, Braves up 2-1. Yadier Molina leads off the Cards’ half with a single. Aaron Miles singles. Pitcher Braden Looper bunts Molina to third and Miles to second. Brian Barton doubles, two runs scoring. Cesar Izturis makes the second out with a ground ball to the right side, and Joe Mather lines out to left to end the inning.
Phillips’ point is that Looper’s bunt was the key, or a key, to the whole thing. OK, but think about it - Reconstruct the inning with Looper utterly failing to do the Little Thing and striking out instead of bunting…. Molina and Miles probably score from 1st and 2nd on Barton’s double and even if Miles doesn’t, he scores from third on Izturis’ grounder to the right side (it’s the second inning, so there’s no way the infield’s in). With the bunt, the Cardinals score two runs. Without it….. they score two runs.
Ye Gods.
