When the flow of baseball news slows to a trickle over the offseason in the absence of game action, it becomes a challenge to maintain a stream of interesting content. After we baseball bloggers are done debating not whether the awards voting was poorly done but whether we should even care about it to begin with, we are left with a few means of filling content aside from playing whack-a-mole with an RSS reader until something intriguing finally materializes. One of those techniques is to keep hitting "refresh" over at MLBTR and pray the word "Yankees" appears (something we generally avoid), while another is to scroll through the newsblog over at BBTF and hope something strikes our fancy. Of course, there's another common method of finding something to write about that doesn't require aggregators to deliver the typically baseless speculation of Ken Rosenthal or Jon Heyman, or the work of other columnists and bloggers. The more enterprising of us internet scribes go out and drum up interviews with well-respected writers and bloggers to carry us through the cold winter months.
Since we have yet to secure any interviews this offseason, we took the liberty of rounding up some of the better ones from around the baseball-related interwebz:
- We linked to Larry at the Yankeeist's interview with Alex and Cliff from Bronx Banter a while back and he has continued his efforts to interview the cream of the Yankee blogosphere by talking with all three guys from River Ave. Blues and SG from the Replacement Level Yankees Weblog. Larry has done an excellent job in these pieces and you won't be able to read them without finding out something new and interesting about their subjects.
- DRay's Bay has also done several excellent interviews this offseason. They talked to Jonah Keri (who is in the process of writing a book which culminates with the run of the 2008 Rays) about some of the economic realities present in the MLB and also some more specific topics about the AL East and the Rays' future plans. They also (digitally) sat down with Rob Neyer and picked his brain over the course of 16 questions.
- Our buddy Jason from IIATMS got to ask Darrell Rasner some questions about him time playing in Japan.
- Via Jason, Pete Toms from the Biz of Baseball has a great conversation with sports economist Roger Noll who is also a professor emeritus and Senior Fellow at Standford.
- Similarly, the Braves blog Chop-n-Change asks some questions of Sabernomics blogger J.C. Bradbury.
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Ugh, that Rasner follow-up bothered me and I own it...
ReplyDeleteHere's a lesson for anyone doing interviews: Get someone on the phone or face to face. Or at least have the ability to probe and follow-up a given answer.
I sent my Q's to Rasner via his agent. I sent MUCH more than got answered. All the "good" questions were ignored and the boilerplate ones were answered with no chance of following up and pushing for an answer that was good.
Let that be a lesson to ya!
Jason, I got that impression from your post when you said, "Here are those he was able to answer".
ReplyDeleteI think part of the problem is having a subject who is willing to play along. Neyer and Keri and Noll all seemed to be interested in the questions and invested in how they came across. I got the impression that Rasner was just going through the motions. But that's because Rasner is a player and these other guys are analysts/writers/economists and answering questions is a lot closer to the line of work. It would have been the equivalent of getting some catching gear on and having Rasner groove you a couple of fastballs. Email works a lot better when you having a willing participant.
Jay,
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the kind words; much appreciated. The interviews have been a blast; glad to see people have been enjoying 'em.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Best,
Larry