Some links and thoughts

I wanted to have a longer post up today, but the power’s been out in my apartment for about 12 hours. That means no internet, which means no WHYGAVS.

There’s a few interesting discussion points about the future of baseball and internet media that I’ve seen the last couple days. With the news that the Rocky Mountain News is closing up its print operation, Dave Cameron wrote a piece for FanGraphs about how the move towards more open and free media is good for baseball fans:

Much like the open source movement in software, there’s been a revolution in the baseball community. The best content available isn’t being written in books or newspapers, or even behind subscription walls that require payments to access – the best knowledge available is free to everyone who wants it.

It’s an interesting point so long as you don’t misinterpret it “Bloggers > Beat Writers.” I certainly don’t think that WHYGAVS could ever replace the service that Dejan gives to Pirate fans and since Dave is an excellent team blogger at USS Mariner, I assume he feels the same way. But one point (and it’s not entirely my own, though I can’t for the life of me remember where I read it to give the original author credit) that needs to be made is that the internet as a medium is in its infancy. Think about television: it existed relatively unchanged from the late 1930s when it was concieved until the 1980s when cable changed it forever. Now consider that the internet has only really been used as a form of communication for about ten years and blogs have had an impact for less than that. Nothing good ever stays free.

The Bucs are rolling at 4-1 in the spring right now. It’s meaningless, but somehow it’s also better than 1-4.

I’m going to be running WBC previews at FanHouse all week and they should start popping up in the sidebar soon. And the MLB Video Previews also start up tomorrow at FanHouse, so keep an eye out for that.

Despite my narrow loss in the Elite Eight, I will continue to link to Sean’s Ramblings for the Final Four of the Pittsburgh Blog Tournament. Four good blogs left, including two fellow Bloguins (Bloguinites? Bloguinians?)

Bucsburgh has a question for everyone in the forum, which you should all sign up for and use.

That’s all I have for links (for now), but if the weather breaks (it’s cold and actually snowing) I’m hoping to get to a UNC baseball game sometime soon to see potential future Bucco Dustin Ackley in action on campus here.