MacGregor gets it wrong, even though he's right

You know, I could have sworn the war was over when it cames to statistics, bloggers and sportswriting. It's been three years since the Oilers kicked a blogger out of the Rexall Centre and 15 since the first Baseball Prospectus came out (and about a decade since it started to become mainstream). Teams, leagues, newspapers and TV stations all have bloggers on staff. Some, like The Score, not only have blogs for every sport, but they've even given them broadcast slots.

I thought the war was over, could have sworn stats and blogging were accepted now. After all, aren't stats like On Base Percentage on TV now? Don't box scores include things like Faceoff Percentage? So why is Roy MacGregor contemplating them as the end of sports journalism?

His piece, The Dumbing Down of Sportswriting, argues that things like "Blackberry Journalism", over-reliance on statistics and social media are destroying good storytelling and hard-hitting journalism. From his piece:

"It is called, derogatorily, “BlackBerry Journalism.” Television, ironically, is the worst offender, with the most visual of tools reducing so much of sports journalism to talking heads reading off rumours or various crumbs of minutiae handed off to them by those in a position to control such information..."

He argues great storytellers like AJ Liebling, Gay Talese or Roger Kahn would have been hamstrung by today's requirements: posting information on Twitter, transcribing tape, shooting video, etc, ad infinitum (Never mind that, for one, Liebling's habit of making stuff up wouldn't fly in today's landscape). That as networks start to rely on statistics provided by the respective leagues, they can lose sight of the message. And that more people need to read Paul Gallico's Farewell to Sport, a very cool book written by a guy who quit sportswriting to devote his life to writing novels.

It's not as troubling a column as the reaction would have one believe. MacGregor makes some very good points about how easy it can be to lose sight of the big picture by focusing on small, irrelevant details. And he's absolutely right on the overburden some reporters now have. The always-cool Rosie DiManno said the same in her column last week. To wit:

Perhaps young’uns just entering the business enjoy all this multi-platform clutter and embrace the challenge of reinventing newspapers. From my perspective, it takes the eye off the only ball that should matter to print journalism: words.

Both DiManno and MacGregor rightly argue that reporters have to do a lot more these days and it's harder to tell good stories as a result. Hell, when I was in J-School, I experienced it first hand: I once went to an interview adorned with a digital SLR, a handheld camcorder, a digital audio recorder, about 20 feet of assorted cords, notepads, pencils and cell phone. I had to shoot video of the interview for the online news segment, audio for the part to air on campus radio plus shoot still photos and make notes for the written story, too. And that was 2008, before social media. Now I'd have to tweet, live-blog, etc., ad nauseam.

I don't mean to give MacGregor a complete pass, though. His column is wrong in how it argues nobody cares about small details like suspension length or that statistics get in the way of things. Thanks to the rise in popularity of fantasy sports, even the most mundane statistics can be meaningful. Even Face Off Percentage.

When he suggests the media needs to focus more on storytelling, he omits mention of all the great writing going on right now, from Spencer Hall to Joe Posnanski to Jeff MacGregor. One might refer him to Grantland or The Classical, where such storytelling is the norm. Twitter has hurt none of today's Taleses. Hell, thanks to sites like SportsFeat, Longform or Byliner, it's helped make it more popular.

It's too bad he's used such a broad brush because he makes a lot of good points. Sports reporting on TV now is a lot of noise and not much signal: take TSN's heavy reliance on ex-jocks, for instance. And newsrooms are understaffed, leaving reporters overworked, thanks to a shrinking media market.

The reaction to his column is kind of ironic: it's easier to pick up what he missed and spread it through Twitter than it is to sit, read and think about what he wrote. Nowhere does he actually say blogs are killing sportswriting. It does say he respects the power of Twitter and that too many are focused on getting hits rather than doing good work. But it's easier to pick out and focus on the smaller, more mundane things in his column and focus exclusively on those: a snide comment on Talese tweeting DiMaggio 140 characters at a time, a quote about statistics he took from a book.

That reaction's exactly what his column is warning against.

Not buying the Bills in Toronto

Sunday's Buffalo/Washington game was awful, horrible and boring beyond words. It was such a dull game it should count as an act of international aggression. It was Must Not See TV. It was brutal.

With any luck, it'll be one of the last Bills games in Toronto.

When the series started a few years ago, in 2007, the inclination was somewhat towards optimism. The series was conceived by a group that included heavy hitters like Larry Tanenbaum of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and Ted Rogers. It came at a time when the Argonauts were doing poorly (they’d finish 2007 with a 4-14 record) and Rogers was upping their financial commitments to the Blue Jays: they had recently added AJ Burnett, BJ Ryan and Frank Thomas to the team.

Enter the Bills. They’re a team with a sizable chunk of fans in Ontario and, it appeared, an uncertain future. Owner Ralph Wilson was just shy of 90 when negotiations started; once he left the Bills, it was far from a given that the team would stay in Buffalo. After all, Buffalo’s one of the NFL’s smallest markets and it’s shrinking, too. Between 2000 and 2010, Buffalo’s population dropped by over 10 per cent. Ralph Wilson Stadium is old, too: it first hosted games in 1973, nearly 40 years ago. Earlier this year, the National Football Post ranked it 20th among all NFL stadiums, saying, “When it comes to architecture and amenities, RWS is going to rank at the bottom of the list.”

It was a great match: a team with a bad stadium, a group that wanted to bring pro football to theirs and was willing to throw money around. It was such a good match that the NFL issued a statement saying the Bills were not going to permanently move to Hogtown.

But nobody was really suggesting that was an option. While the Rogers Centre is an okay place for an exhibition game, it’s capacity of 54,000, is too small to regularly hold NFL games. A new stadium would solve that problem, but who’s going to build it? Toronto’s government is slashing budgets all around – the gravy train, as their mayor put it – so don’t expect a hand there. Why build one? For just eight NFL dates a year? The Argonauts are locked into a lease at the Centre and the TC have their own stadium.

The games have always been a way to make money. Tickets at a Toronto Bills game are more expensive than a game in Buffalo (at one point, costing three times as much: $180 Canadian to $51 US). A Rochester newspaper was blunt, calling the games cash cows. Indeed, the Bills made $78 million from the five-year deal. How much is that? A 2011 Forbes valuation put their yearly operating income at $40.9 million.

It’s been successful on that front. It’s less successful on the field. Sunday’s win was the first time the Bills won in Toronto. It came only a few days after Buffalo’s George Wilson suggested that it’s not really a home game, because the fans don’t care who wins.

And Wilson’s right. Toronto is not a Bills town. It’s not even a football town. It’s also not a Raptors, Argonaut or Blue Jay town. It’s a Leaf town. Hockey will always come first here. Yes, NFL fans will show up for the game, but that doesn’t suppose they’re Buffalo fans. Just take the moment when Scott Chandler jumped into the stands and was greeted by indifference (I distinctly remember one guy filming it on his smartphone).

At best – and one could argue with the Bills 5-2 record, this is their best – the games feel like a neutral field novelty. Despite how good Buffalo’s been this year, Sunday’s win featured a less-than-packed house.

Next year is the final year of the agreement. A lot has changed from when it was first signed. Ted Rogers is dead, the Canadian dollar has strengthened and the Bills are suddenly good. A new agreement would likely cost Rogers more than $78 million – and that’s even if the Bills want to keep giving up home games.

Simply put, the whole series feels like a tease. It’s a taste of NFL action, but without any of the payoff. It costs more than a game in Buffalo, but has little of the atmosphere: tailgating, packed stands, cold weather. It’s a sanitized, suit-wearing, straight-laced version of pro football, the equivalent of Mitt Romney. Yes, the Bills finally won a game in the cavernous Rogers Centre. But they couldn’t even make that interesting.

The Toronto experiment isn’t working: why pay more for games that feel like they mean less? That the players don’t even like? Next year’s series should be the last.