Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Shameless Ploy for Big-Market Readers

Just your average pre-playoff Tuesday, waiting for the Twins/White Sox game to start, getting vaguely excited about baseball. So I went sailing around teh_interwebz, casting my nets about for the good fish to be had. I happened to trawl around to Lake MLB.com, where I found a pearl of great price and subsequently decided to abandon this stupid metaphor.

But really.

MLB.com's FRONT PAGE is pimping the following article: "Yankees Fans Divided on Cubs-Dodgers"

What?

The day before the division series starts, and there's a front-page article on the ostensible home page for ALL OF BASEBALL, and what do we find? Articles about Cubs fans, Dodgers fans, Rays fans, Twins/White Sox fans, Angels fans... articles about actual baseball that has been played, or baseball that will soon be played...

Nope. Yankees' fans opinions about the NLDS. Oh, sure, MLB.com, you're a place where people can go to get good, relevant, insightful baseball coverage.... Actually, MLB.com, you're a joke, a portal where MLB can shamelessly cross-promote its various products (which I wrote about recently here) with a smattering of shit journalism thrown in. I will now end the world's first apostrophe to a website. But honestly - if my byline read "writer for MLB.com", I might punch myself.

It's a sad day when media portals like this one have to resort to asking random fans in New York (who seem to be overwhelmingly Italian-American, though it's by any means a representative sample) what they think about a National League playoff series.

The conclusion I'm drawing: Yankees fans are not baseball fans, do not care about non-Yankee playoff baseball, but that MLB.com is desperate for readers, so they pander to these generally-apathetic baseball fans by putting Yankee coverage on the front page.

QED!

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's pretty funny. As a Yankees fan, I can say I'm rooting for the Dodgers to win it all. I love Joe and Manny.

Jarrett said...

As a Cardinals fan, I'm rooting for a bloody Cubs implosion. I love watching the Cubs fail miserably, and I would love to see Zambrano get lit up and/or impaled by a broken bat. Did you know that bats have been breaking a lot this season? Somebody should really tell the press, this is horrendously under covered. A fan could get hurt!

Iridescence said...

I'm rooting for the Red Sox to win it all again but I still love Manny for helping the Sox win 2 championships and being a great player. I would like to see him do well to piss off all the fickle assholes in Boston who are dumping on him now.

Also the Cubs are my second most hated team behind only the Yankees so I hope the Dodgers destroy the Cubs and win the NL pennant.

Fuck the Cubs and the Angels! Any team who blames a goat for losing deserves to suck...As well as any team with more than one city in their name.


Oh yeah fuck Yankee fans too...Go Red Sox [and Dodgers in the NL]

Unknown said...

OK, did a Boston fan really just insult another city for complaining about a silly curse? Cuz that shit's funny.

Iridescence said...

Well I also thought the Curse of the Bambino was pretty stupid but at least it was kind of poetic and interesting though unlike "the curse of the goat". Still, I agree it's ridiculous for anyone over the age of 8 to actually believe their sports team is cursed for whatever reason.Not all Boston fans took that shit seriously (and I realize not all Cub fans do either but it's still fun to mock the ones that do)

Derpsauce said...

That is just fucking unacceptable.

Nothing else to say.

JimA said...

Iridescence, name one Cub fan who believes in a curse. There may be a few who expect things to blow up, but they don't think about curses. You have to be stupid to be a Cub fan, but not delusional.

What is poetic about the Curse of the Bambino? Was the Babe reading T.S. Eliot when he was traded?

Tonus said...

Is it me, or did Dan Shaughnessy find this blog?

Go Angels! Let's validate small ball by OPSing 1.150 as a team, YEAAAAHHHHHHH!!!

Angelo said...

I think bartman believes in curses

Chris W said...

PS: JimA:

Poetic, as in poetic justice. As in, it was poetic justice that for a baseball team's owner selling the best player in baseball history because that owner thought the franchise had Championships growing on trees to come back and bite him and his franchise in the ass.

That said, everyone knows that Boston's institutionalized racism is probably the biggest reason their drought lasted so long ("You say we have a chance to sign a dark person named Willie....Willie Who? Mays? No we don't need HIS type on this team.)

Chris W said...

SOURCE!

http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2002/oct/redsox/

Iridescence said...

Yeah good point about racism being the real "curse" on the Sox for many years. I like the players and the team but some of the Red Sox fanbase is annoying I must admit (see my comment above ripping people who hate Manny now just because the Boston media tells them to without looking at both sides of the issue).

The curse shit was always annoying and the team is much better without it. Maybe the (stereotypical) Cub fans bother me because they seem to copy the annoying Red Sox pre-2004 fans I don't like and take it to an extreme unheard of even in Boston.
And Dan Shaughnessy sucks ass. I hate that douchebag He is like the perfect of example of that retarded segment of the Red Sox fanbase I wish we could trade to another team or something.

Bengoodfella said...

I just want to chime in and say I completely agree with Iridescence in that the stereotypical Cubs fan is about as annoying as the pre-2004 Red Sox fans. I am seriously dreading a Cubs-Red Sox World Series, I am not sure I could emotionally handle it.

I used to be fascinated with baseball history and i never heard of the billy goat curse until a few years ago, and even then I vaguely remembered it not as a curse but something really weird a fan did.

I am not so much worried about the fans believing in curses, I am more worried about the announcers ramming it down our throats. I am also many Cubs fans go to the game to drink and the game is just a sidebar to that. That being said, I have three friends, and one of them is a Cubs fan and he is not annoying.

Unknown said...

As far as Cubs fans, I don't really know any. My older brother and I both kinda like them, but I don't think I'd call us fans. We just mind them a lot less than other large market teams for some reason.

My hopes for the playoffs include stellar failure for the Angels. I wouldn't mind seeing K-rod blow a save in game 7 of the World Series. I think that would be funny.

And I hope neither Sox team does anything (with apologies to you guys that actually write here. I know you like the ChiSox, but as an Indians fan, I think I'm legally forbidden to cheer for them. If it comes down to a Boston/Chicago LCS, I'll probably boycott watching it :-/ )

Chris W said...

DAN BOB YOU JUST RIPPED THIS OFF FROM KEN TREMENDOUS WHO POSTED THIS SAME THING THREE DAYS AFTER YOU