Sports Blog Review

I am an avid reader of many Pittsburgh sports blogs.

One of my favorite blogs is managed and written by Pat Lackey, who is not a journalist.

I find it to be very interesting that such a rich and in-depth blog is written by a non-journalist, and so here is a review I wrote of his site:

The owner and blogger of the website www.whygavs.com is Pat Lackey. Lackey is not a journalist. In fact, he doesn’t have any kind of formal schooling in writing or journalism. He is foremost a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Lackey majored in a science field at Duquesne, and realized in 2005 that he enjoyed talking about the Pirates whenever he had the chance. So he started up a blog that he called, “Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke?” It was an appeal to the last era of glory days for the Pirates, which unfortunately happened to be 17 seasons ago.

According to the ‘About’ tab on his blog, Lackey explains that he had only initially intended his family and friends to read his entries, but that it quickly found a dedicated audience online. In fact, in a yearly Pittsburgh sports blog “tournament”, WHYGAVS was voted as the second-best Pittsburgh sports blog; just narrowly missing out on 1^st place by a 50.7% to 49.3% margin.

But the great thing about WHYGAVS is that Lackey is by no means any less passionate about the Pirates just because they are terrible, and have been for a long time. For someone who no longer even lives in the city of Pittsburgh, it would be easy for him to pick a new, contending team to follow.

Blogs are important in today’s media landscape because they fill a very specific hole in sports journalism. Now, this is not to say that bloggers should be considered journalists. There are gaping differences between the two camps, and rightfully so. But what blogs do so well is integrate a topic into the social networking nature of the Internet.

WHYGAVS has twitter feeds integrated into the sidebar, opinion polls, links to dozens of other top-notch Pittsburgh sports-related blogs, and an RSS feed. This means you are not just reading someone’s opinion on the Pittsburgh Pirates, but you can interact with the author and hundreds of other Pirates fans who are reading the same things. Discussion is at a premium. WHYGAVS’ twitter account and RSS capabilities also make it available to be read even when away from a computer, due to easy integration with today’s inundation of cell phones.

Being on the Internet also affords WHYGAVS other privileges over mainstream sports media outlets. More freedom means that embedded YouTube videos, pictures, and polls can accompany posts. This allows for a change of pace, visual complements, and yes, even humor to be injected into what could otherwise become tiresome walls of text.

As was previously mentioned, Lackey is not a journalist. Because of this, it is somewhat easier to relate to his perspective as a fan. Some journalists can take on a persona of their own, due to a perceived or real level of stardom. This is problematic, because fans often just want to read about the team, and not a documentary starring the author and his subjects. But Lackey, and most other bloggers, are just like us. They are die-hard fans, but ones with an ability to describe their opinions in a cohesive, written manner. And Lackey is among the best at this.

Because there are virtually zero restrictions on what bloggers can do with their web-space, some often devolve into crass, name-calling, childish mediums for expressing fan angst. Fortunately, Lackey has kept WHYGAVS free from such temptations. Each one of his posts are well-thought out, coming from a fan with an impressive comprehension of the team and sport, and easy to understand.

In fact, there are some elements to Lackey’s blog that I have not found on any of the professional Pirates blogs or websites I frequent. For instance, Lackey is a self-proclaimed statistic enthusiast, and when he feels intrigued about the direction a Pirate pitcher is moving in, he’s likely to plug in the information from each of their pitches into Excel charts and crunch the data.

A recent flurry of interest in whether Zach Duke’s production tailed off in 2009 due to fatigue prompted Lackey to analyze the break on Duke’s curveball in the first and second halves of last season. After explaining and showing his findings, he concluded that Duke indeed was not throwing as sharp a curve in the last two months of the season, as evidenced by a wider range of break than was present from April to July.

I have not seen such dedication and creativity on the columns or blogs of paid journalists, yet I am able to consume it free of charge from www.whygavs.com. If I fall behind in following the Pittsburgh Pirates by a day or two, I can just navigate my browser to Lackey’s 5-year-old site and be caught up in a manner of minutes.

While sports blogs may often receive a bad reputation, it’s clear from blogs like WHYGAVS that they have an important role to play in the upcoming sports media culture shift. And, with more and more newspapers instructing their regular columnists to start blogging on the side, or even hiring degree-less bloggers straight from popular websites, it is also clear that mainstream news outlets are realizing this.

And as long as quality sports blogs like WHYGAVS outnumber the irresponsible ones, the future relationship between sports journalism and the sports blogosphere looks very bright.