Wednesday, July 25, 2012

The internet and it's affect on baseball trades.

 Back in the "good old days"  GM's of teams didn't have to worry about trades leaking out. It's not that fans didn't care.  But most of us were content with finding out whenever the game came on and the announcers told us about it. We weren't a clamoring horde of superfreaks gnashing our teeth to blog and comment on each and every deal.

 Also, there weren't 470,000 media outlets covering every baseball move either. basically you had beat reporters who sent out feeds that spread to AP or Knight Ridder and that was pretty much it.

 NOW, however, everybody is a sports reporter, every fan a blogging expert and in this mass of opinions,angles and the mad dash to be "first!!".  The world of deal making has changed drastically.

 Take the most recent Dempster unpleasantness.  It appears to everyone on the outside that the Cubs got bamboozled by a pushy, selfish, petulent child of a player.  it also appears the Braves got hung out to dry and some folks have even mentioned that " poor ole Wren has been got again".

 The truth is, this stuff happens ALL THE TIME in baseball.  Before though, we didn't hear about it.  The GM's didn't discuss busted deals obviously, the writers who knew about them didn't want to lose their access to the players and mgmt so they kept their mouth's shut.  Nowadays tho, people are talking, and blogging and yapping.

 I think it's bad for the game personally.  If I were a GM, I'd spend part of ONE offseason, leaking deals to specific people and waiting for a leak so I would know who to fire. IMO, the two places in life where leaks must not be tolerated are international espionage and baseball trades.

However, we have only ourselves as fans to blame for all of this.

 WE demand to know "NOW!!!"  WE demand to be "FIRST!!" WE, in other words, are a bunch of entitled spoiled brats.

 If you here that the Braves got Greinke at 7pm tomorrow when you turn on the game from Joe Simpson instead of at 2:34pm when it was first announced on a rumor site, are you somehow worse off for it?   I don't think so.

 I think we as a culture should lighten up a little bit on this need to "know everything right now"  at least when it comes to sports.  I'm sure that the farmers back in the 1920's could have cared less WHEN they found out they got Hanley Ramirez for a couple of pitchers.  They were just glad they got him!!!!

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