Prospectus Today

The Tool of Ignorance

by Joe Sheehan

On Tuesday afternoon, the Baseball Reporters Association of America announced that Dustin Pedroia had won its American League Most Valuable Player award, the last of the BBRAA's eight awards for the 2008 season.

Before we go any further, let me make this point: "Reporters" and "BBRAA" are not terms of derision, but rather of description. Last winter, when deciding who to admit and not admit to its ranks, the organization drew a line that made it clear that it was an organization of reporters, and that it existed to facilitate access to parks and personnel, to ensure that those people for whom that access is important had an advocacy group.

Now, in practice, it looks a little bit different. You can be a beat reporter and not be allowed to be a member, as the talented staff of MLB.com knows too well. You can also be an editor, or cartoonist, or general columnist, or statistician, or a guy who once wrote about baseball, or one who does so as often as I write about NASCAR, and have a card. The standards for members once they're inside the group seem to involve the ability to grow fingernails, while the standard for new members now involves a number of tests that may continue to evolve, but which have less to do with baseball writing and more to do with baseball quote-gathering.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this; the organization can admit anyone it wants to based on the criteria that it defines. What it cannot do, however, is lay claim to the word "writer." You can be a professional baseball writer while defining your job in a way that doesn't involve passing on the banalities of ballplayers, or running sourceless rumors, or doing soft-focus features that make it easier to get those banalities and rumors. The job of being a baseball writer is not so limited in the year 2008 as to exclude many people for whom access to parks may well enhance their ability to do their job, but who, even if it doesn't, nevertheless should be brought under the organization's umbrella. The informed-outsider position is in some ways superior, and in some ways inferior, to the insider one, but it is no less qualified for its status as "new."

Until all professional baseball writers (where "professional" meets reasonable objective standards) are invited into the club, and until the standard for inclusion is something other than "do you take down quotes," I reserve the right to call the organization what it has aggressively defined itself as: the Baseball Reporters Association of America. I do so not to be snarky or insulting, but to make the point that the group aggressively excludes baseball writers for whom reporting is not a central or even tertiary part of their job description, but who nonetheless meet every other possible standard for inclusion.

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SaberTJ

(10045)

One of my favorite columns of yours ever Joe. Nice Work.

Nov 19, 2008 13:36 PM