State The Obvious, Get A NY Times Column

9:33 am EST April 2nd, 2009 | Media, Sports | 9 Comments

Doug Glanville in the NY Times Op-ed:

Take a close look at the recent World Baseball Classic and you’ll see how far the sport has come in a short period of time. It is no longer a homogeneous, closed circle of local athletes, but rather an entire world of cultures.

Only 60 years ago, Jackie Robinson broke through a glass ceiling for African-American ballplayers, but since then there’s been a quiet inflow of many other cultures that has also changed the game dramatically.

Is this really an original thought? Surely in the last 60 years people have taken note of the cultural diversity of baseball – the fact that it has legions of fans in South America and Japan. Every year players come in to the league from those locales. It isn’t anything new.

And he winds up:

Because baseball’s power is unique. No game reflects the cultural diversity of our country on a day-to-day, team-by-team level as well as baseball.

Look, I know baseball fans love to rhapsodic about their game, but the exact same cultural diversity is true of the other two major sports in the country – football and basketball. Heck, even golf is more diverse than it used to be.

I wonder if sometimes the Times publishers don’t see any connection between lagging revenues and painfully obvious columns like this.

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9 Responses to “State The Obvious, Get A NY Times Column”

  1. ed says:
    April 2, 2009 at 9:42 am

    Because baseball’s power is unique…

    Yeesh.

  2. Andrew says:
    April 2, 2009 at 9:56 am

    There are nowhere near the same numbers of international players in the NFL and NBA as there are in MLB. Also, in how many other countries would basketball or american football be considered a dominant sport?

  3. Tyro says:
    April 2, 2009 at 10:28 am

    This sounds like those earnest, vacuous columns I’d read in the local twice-a-week community paper.

  4. SaveFarris says:
    April 2, 2009 at 10:37 am

    In no way is football as diverse as baseball. Other than Tony Gonzales and Dat Nguyen, the NFL is just white & black Americans. Basketball is at least a little better with a couple of Serbians, Argentinians, a Frenchman, and Yao.

  5. SaveFarris says:
    April 2, 2009 at 10:38 am

    That said, I agree with your basic premise that this column is just warmed-over pablum that tells us nothing we didn’t already know.

  6. White Whale says:
    April 2, 2009 at 11:07 am

    but Nothing is more diverse than soccer.:)

  7. Duros62 says:
    April 2, 2009 at 11:09 am

    Didn’t George Will write this exact column about 15 years ago?

  8. Oliver Willis says:
    April 2, 2009 at 11:10 am

    but Nothing is more diverse than soccer.:)
    But in America, not an actual sport.

  9. Jaim says:
    April 2, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    I enjoyed watching the WBC but yeah, this column is stupid. If we’re going to wax rhapsodic about the power of any particular sport, it’d have to be soccer which is by far the most popular game throughout the world. Biggest money-maker as well.