Just curious.
These days, there are less than a handful of annual baseball magazines that are not devoted to the fantasy aspects of the game. While the features and team profiles are the same from each publisher, they often have different covers depending on the market to which they are distributed. I almost bought the Athlon version twice because I thought it might be different from the one I purchased a while back which had a Met on the cover rather than a Yankee.
Yesterday, the baseball preview issue of Sports Illustrated arrived bearing a picture of Francisco Lindor, the new Mets shortstop. It made me wonder: do different regions of the country carry different players and stories? Because Lindor is pretty NY-centric.
Used to be that I would have some fun comparing the baseball previews of the weekly SI with the biweekly ESPN the Magazine. But the former is now a monthly while the latter ceased its print publication last fall. This is kind of sad. I’m sure the powers that be came to this conclusion after spending lots of money on market research that concluded that today’s sports fans are not interested in, you know, reading. At least not anything as long as an article of any great length, the infamous acronym TLDR (“too long, didn’t read).
As you might suspect, the SI BP isn’t what it used to be. The three main features are about Lindor and the new breed of shortstops (another new breed?); Kim Ng, baseball’s first female general manager; and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece about pitchers at the plate. There’s no real team-by-team section, just a couple of lines about each club with charts of payroll vs. performance.
At this point, buying such glossies is more of a tradition than an attempt to learn something or be entertained.
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.