By Josh
Reporters/Bloggers
This one hits really close to home. For 8 years I have been a baseball blogger. For 8 years I’ve tried to be a benefit to the game of baseball. I truly try to avoid negative articles. Writing this series has been really hard. However, I needed to say everything that I have written in this series.
I know that baseball reporters and bloggers want to see baseball grow and flourish in ways that it hasn’t before. We want to see a new generation of fans rise up talking about how they watched the great Mike Trout when they were a kid. We want the game that we love to be even stronger for our kids than it is for us.
We don’t always do that. Reporters are quick to put out any little rumor they hear, regardless if there is any truth to the matter, simply because being first is more important than being right. Even though I love rumors this, just like with real world news, can become a negative.
We are quick to point fingers at owners, GMs, coaches and players for things we think they did wrong without having all the information. I understand that reporters and bloggers can only write about the information that they know but it seems like a lot of articles are written to fit an agenda. Writers will get the information they want and ignore everything else if it doesn’t fit in the box they have created.
I don’t remember it always being this way. It used to feel like reporters cared more about getting the right story instead of trying to get the ‘shocking’ story (real or not). I’ll be honest, I’ve moved away from writing as much as I do and focused on doing interviews and photos partially because I didn’t want to try and keep up with every shocking story that came out. I didn’t want to be a blogger that jumped on every story giving my reaction, only to find out a story wasn’t true or only had limited facts right.
I know that is somewhat different than what 9 Inning Know It All started being, but that is okay. I truly believe that the photos I take and the interviews I do encourage players more than any article I’ve wrote. I’ll keep doing the photo thing until I feel like it isn’t an encouragement and then I’ll either find a new way to encourage the game of baseball or I’ll move on from 9 Inning Know It All.
Along with the articles that reporters rush out, the members of the BBWAA have also been the center of some controversy with the Hall of Fame voting. I don’t put this completely on the reporters because the voting rules given them by the Hall of Fame aren’t the clearest and don’t really help to define what a Hall of Famer is. With that being said a number of voters have gone out of their way to create their own set of rules. Instead of asking if a player is a Hall of Famer, simple yes or no, they say that no one is worthy of being a first ballot vote.
Really this one has been talked about over and over again so I’ll let everyone decide on their own about this one.