Sports journalism is awful. Simply dreadful. It is full of cliches, empty rhetoric, and utter nonsense.
While at the gym today, I saw a segment on Sportscenter (the premier sports journalism show) about the firing of Seattle Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon. In the segement, one of ESPN’s top baseball experts Tim Kurkjian said more General Managers are willing to fire Managers today because the relationship between GM and Manager is more important than ever before. Kurkjian was asked a simple yet (would be) illuminating question: why is this? That is, what has changed to make this relationship more important.
Kurkjian gave a classic non-answer, offering up “the GM and Manager need to be on the same page” for five minutes, which is essentially repeating the question. An absolute garbage answer. I can’t say I’m too surprised. Kurkjian didn’t present any basic statistics about the rate of manager firings in the MLB over time so I have no reason to believe his claim is even true. If I had to guess, if pressed, Kurkjian would admit that deep down he doesn’t really know either.
My inner economist speculates the incentives for good or poor sports commentary are too weak. Sports journalists aren’t forced to revisit their predictions (that means you, John Kruk). I’m a big fan of prediction markets because of the power of price signals to share information. I wonder how a sports analysis website centered around a prediction market would fare. It should provide more accurate insights and predictions, which would lead to greater viewership if other sports fans are looking for that.
My favorite criticism of sports journalism came from the blog FireJoeMorgan.com. In over 1,000 posts over 3 and a half years, the bloggers pointed out the absurdities of baseball “experts”. The blog was named for Joe Morgan, who was one of the most high-profile commentators who fit their profile, but addressed many other sports pundits (Kurkjian included).
The blog ran from 2005 to 2008 in which Michael Lewis’ Moneyball was topic of debate within professional baseball. There was a common thread between the sportswriters profiled by FJM: they criticized Moneyball without having a rudimentary sense of what it was really about (Morgan even showed his ignorance regarding Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane’s role in the book: he is the subject matter, not the author). While they did not identify themselves at the time, Michael Schur and Alan Yang (who went on to create Parks and Recreation) were contributors to the blog.