Borders started an interesting e-mail thread on the recent Costas Now show on blogs v. the mainstream media (MSM). DeadSpin.com has the video up here. Short story: Costas and sports book author Buzz Bissinger (“Friday Night Lights” among others) HATE bloggers and assume that blogs exist only to provide vitriol and snark in a glib fashion, with no value add compared to the MSM. I don’t agree. Trying to put sports blogs in a box and assign one label to them is like trying to do that with hedge funds. They come in all kinds, serve many different audiences and some don’t even have audiences. I get more value from the blogs I read than from Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Mag, NY Times, Detroit Free Press, etc. I’d rather keep the blogs and give up reading MSM. So here’s a listing of my favorite blogs.
- MGoBlog. My mainstay for Michigan (U. of) sports news, esp. for football.
- Sunday Morning Quarterback. Great, serious college football site.
- Every Day Should Be Saturday. Hilarious college football blog. Maintains the Fulmer Cup in the offseason, which tracks the criminal infractions of college football programs. I think Missouri is currently leading. Here’s a recent post covering headbutts. I learned from EDSBS that an Oregon player was arrested last year for stealing livestock to have sex with it. Love it.
- Detroit Tigers Weblog. Provides pitchFX analysis of Tigers pitchers and minor league reports, as well as a reasoned take on Tigers’ happenings.
- Detroit Bad Boys, a Pistons blog.
- Baseball Prospectus feed 1 and feed 2. Great stats-focused baseball site. Not sure if this is a blog, but the lines are blurred. Some Baseball Prospectus stories are premium, requiring a membership.
- Buster Olney’s blog at ESPN.com, part of their Insider feature. Hmm, Buster Olney was the Yankees beat writer at the NY Times and wrote a real book published in hardcover format. Crazy Buzz B., where does Buster fit into your world view?
- Rob Neyer’s blog at ESPN.com Insider.
- Hardball Times. Another baseball site. Similar focus to Baseball Prospectus.
- James Mirtle’s hockey blog. He’s the hockey guy at the Toronto Globe & Mail paper.
- TrueHoop blog, which Borders reads. Henry Abbott aggregates a lot of links and provides some insight. I learned about the fascinating William Wesley here.
Thanks for this list. I have a firefox bookmark folder and once a day I’ll “open all in tabs.” That opens these sites: hopp stop, TX lotto (only relevant 2x per week but I forget which days so I always check and I always hold my breath doing it – I won $3 yesterday), filmdrunk, crossfit, lifehacker, GG’s blog, ESPN deportes TV listing, and the mlb box scores (I had to cut out other baseball and politics sites because it was too much of a time suck). It takes me about 10 minutes to whip through the new content (I’ll either print or paste articles to a “to read” word doc to read later). This blog is a great example of why Buzz is way off on this point; mix of MSM and other content, broad range of topics, and the linked articles are always amusing or interesting even if I don’t agree with them. Plus I wouldn’t be exposed to them but for it. Kudos to Hopp. Good luck managing denny’s.