The Futility Infielder

Salon.com writer King Kaufman, whose work I've dug for a long time, has an excellent article today about the dearth of football blogs compared to baseball ones. Pointing out that while there are no fewer than 155 blogs linked via Baseball News Blog, he notes that the pigskin sport is quite neglected online. As he writes, "[S]earching for football blogs is like looking for Metallica fans at a Clay Aiken concert. There might be a few around, but you're not tripping over them. After quite a bit of searching, I know of more blogs devoted to the Detroit Tigers than to the NFL."

That's a scary vision, but anybody who saw the Tigers lose 15-5 to the Yankees last night knows that in terms of the dark oddities of the Web, Tiger blogging has to be right there with fantasy fishing, midget porn, and trepanning cults.

Based on interviews with bloggers from both sports (including some recognizable names, such as Bronx Banter's Alex Belth and Bambino's Curse's Edward Cossette), Kaufman cites four reasons baseball outpaces football on the web: the game's literary tradition, its season length, its daily nature, and the popularity of sabermetric analysis. He pulls a couple of great quotes comparing the two sports, including this one from the Washington Post's Bob Thompson: "Baseball is a fat Victorian novel, replete with colorful minor characters and discursive subplots, into which a fan can disappear for months; football is a series of quick- cutting TV cop shows."

Answering Kaufman's premise, Belth is even more succinct, drawing upon one of my all-time favorite quotes from Oriole managing legend Earl Weaver, as told to the Post's Thomas Boswell years ago: "This ain't football. We do this every day." I think that hits the nail on the head. For those of us in the world of baseball blogs, this stuff -- whether it's spring training, the dog days of August, the World Series, or the Hot Stove League -- is as essential as the morning cup of coffee. You don't stop drinking it just because it's December.

And there's the stat thing. Baseball history is a river of statistics, and its vast body is accessible online via Baseball-Reference, Retrosheet, ESPN and the like. You can track down the box score of your first major-league game, sponsor a favorite role player's stat page, analyze the numbers until your eyes cross, or discuss and debate recent news articles with intelligent fans. On the other hand, Baseball-Reference's historical pigskin counterpart, Pro-Football-Reference, is a thin gruel by comparison, listing only ballhandlers who meet certain qualifications and ignoring the guys in the trenches who give the game its character. Punters aren't even included! Where have you gone, Ray Guy?

One thing that's worth noting is that Kaufman's own style is very blog-influenced; his column went daily back in June, and unlike many mainstream columnists, his work is full of hyperlinks; most established media entities (the publications, not the writers) sweat in fear that if you click on a link -- gasp! -- you'll vanish into the ether of the Net, never to return to their site. Kaufman's even made minor sabermetric splash with his own contribution, the Neifi Index. Named after stathead whipping boy Neifi Perez, he of the career 686 OPS, the Index measures a team's winning percentage with and without a player in the lineup. The better the record without, the higher the Index. In other words, a stat that's very compatible with the world of the futility infielder.

One of Kaufman's interviewees notes that football has traditionally lagged behind baseball in other interactive areas like fantasy leagues and trading cards. Again, a very telling remark. When was the last time you heard somebody fretting about that long-lost Roger Staubach card from their childhood? For all of the ways in which the sport lags behind in its current marketing, baseball's connection to its fans is so much more intimate, individual, and multifaceted, it's no wonder that it's so easily intellectualized. While that may be a lot to digest (in every sense of the word), it's worth knowing that the game and its devotees are always there for you, ready to provide sustenance at the push of a button, 24-7-365.