Mainstream media

From Wiki Gonzalez

Mainstream media in BTF parlance refers to journalists whose work appears in newspapers, newsmagazines, and on TV.

The term includes sports columnists, beat writers for daily papers, TV commentators, etc. It excludes Internet-only work such as what appears on Baseball Prospectus, The Hardball Times, BTF, and various baseball blogs.

Generally, Primates and other statheads have considered the MSM an annoyance, or at worst an enemy -- cliched, unenlightened, oversimplifying, shrill, hostile, and tendentious. Jay Mariotti, Bill Plaschke, Joe Morgan, Phil Rogers, Rick Reilly, and Skip Bayless are examples of mainstream media people whose baseball coverage has received strong criticism.

The popular stereotype of MSM has been that they completely disregard performance analysis, covering baseball using non-sabermetric analyses of clutch hitting, veteran presence, and heart and soul, and virulently attacking online baseball journalism as the preserve of amateurish numbers geeks obsessed with spreadsheets. Michael Lewis has famously labeled this brand of MSM the "Ladies Auxiliary" in his afterword to Moneyball.

Of course, this is an overstatement, and in recent years the lines have been blurred. Quite a few mainstream media people like Joe Posnanski and Peter Gammons have begun using sabermetrics in their analyses. Similarly, online-only guys have begun adapting their work to be published in mainstream media -- for example, Will Carroll and Joe Sheehan of Prospectus, and Derek Zumsteg and Jeff Angus of their respective blogs.

Rob Neyer is said to have been a key figure in building bridges between the MSM and the "new media." Writing exclusively for the ESPN.com site, he painlessly introduced many baseball fans to the concepts of sabermetrics, and parlayed it into appearances on ESPN's various TV/radio properties. With his success at finding an audience, it became more difficult for mainstream media to ignore baseball journalism on the web.

Also see: Celebrities for a partial list of some popular mainstream media figures.