The Decline and Fall of espn.com

Once upon a time, espn.com was the very first site I would visit after popping open my web browser. Though depressingly corporate, the site nonetheless offered a cavalcade of interesting and/or entertaining columnists, and provided a wealth of useful information. Over the past few years, however, espn.com's most glaring faults -- endemic commercialism, East Coast bias, ignorance of groundbreaking new methods of baseball analysis, and increasingly irritating columnists -- have rendered the site virtually worthless.

Currently, espn.com's front page barrages the reader with flashy, slow-loading, content-obscuring advertisements; at this point, I doubt anyone without high-speed Internet service can load the site in less than five minutes (assuming it doesn't crash their computer first). Ever cognizant of the bottom line, and apparently not content with the myriad advertisements that obscure every page of the site, espn.com's overlords recently chopped every column and news story into several pieces, requiring the reader to click links to new pages to finish reading a single story -- a way to guarantee more page views, more ad revenue, and more pissed off readers.

Speaking of revenue, I can't even rationally discuss ESPN Insider, the ridiculous $40-per-year subscription portion of the site, which began as a small section where interested readers could pay to read exclusive news and rumors, and has now swallowed up most of the site's remaining worthwhile columnists and services. espn.com's former best baseball columnist, Rob Neyer, along with the entirety of the site's fantasy content and chat wrap-ups, and anything authored by the Sports Guy more than a month ago are sequestered behind the elitist Insider wall.

Upon examining the site's content, it quickly becomes apparent that, like the rest of the mainstream sports media, espn.com's editors are convinced that New York and Chicago are the only two cities in which professional baseball is played. Even the site's best remaining baseball columnist, Peter Gammons, devotes the majority of his articles to bloviating about the Red Sox and Yankees, occasionally paying lip service to small-market clubs like the A's and Twins.

With the exception of Gammons and a few occasional glimmers of sanity from other writers, espn.com's baseball content is now uniformly atrocious. Mirroring the outright ignorance of ESPN's moronic televised talking heads like Joe Morgan and John Kruk, the majority of the site's writers steadfastly ignore and/or criticize Sabermetrics, a method of statistical analysis that has revolutionized the baseball world. I don't expect espn.com's writers to routinely spout obscure stats like the Baseball Prospectus crew, but when certain writers dismiss Sabermetrics as "fuzzy math" while preaching the values of "small ball" and "clutch hitting," they expose themselves as ill-informed, arrogant blowhards. Particularly loathesome are Buster Olney, who has his head buried so far up Joe Torre's ass he should be paying rent; Tim Kurkijan, who amounts to little more than Gammons lite; Jayson Stark, who's occasionally interesting but frequently misguided; and Jim Caple, the most inexplicably employed nationwide sportswriter this side of Skip Bayless (more on him later).

Caple and Bayless make for an effective segue into the issue that originally inspired this post: the complete and utter ruination of a formerly excellent facet of espn.com, Page 2. I've already voiced my consternation regarding the decline of the Sports Guy, but even more depressing is the fact that I can only read articles by two other Page 2 writers on a regular basis without having to physically restrain myself from punching my computer monitor. Aside from Simmons, Brian Murphy is consistently entertaining (and a former Bruin to boot), while Eric Neel is evolving into an excellent and informed writer.

The rest of Page 2's regular columnists run the gamut from unfunny to obtuse to rage-inspiring. The unholy extent of Jim Caple's blatherings has been effectively catalogued here. Articles by Tim Keown and Skip Bayless skillfully demonstrate why they were fired by the San Francisco Chronicle. Reading the poker misadventures of "Jackpot Jay" Lovinger mirrors the effect of watching someone else play an exciting video game -- it's interesting for a few minutes, then quickly descends into tedium. I abandoned Dan Shanoff's "Daily Quickie" column after growing tired of his constant, desperate need to wax hyperbolic about sports events that just happened, and instantly declare such accomplishments "the greatest" or "more important than" anything that came before. If an African-American athlete makes an ass of himself, you can always count on Jason Whitlock to blame white people for it. As for John Kruk, reading his Page 2 column closely follows having invasive dental surgery on the list of Ways I Love Spending My Spare Time.

I always had a love-hate relationship with Ralph Wiley, who, prior to his untimely death, frequently made interesting arguments in his columns, but unfortunately couched his writing in that most useless and reductive of memes: the hip-hop slang spewer. I have no problem with hip-hop slang in an appropriate context -- my nerdy ass is certainly guilty of uttering hip-hop phrases in conversation in an ironic (and frequently feeble) attempt to be funny. On the most widely-read and influential sports web site on earth, however, incessantly infusing an article with hip-hop slang is an annoying, inappropriate, and lazy way to write.

Today, espn.com sunk to an impressive new low. I can virtually guarantee that the inexplicable popularity of TV talking heads Stuart Scott (a.k.a. The Dark Prince of Inopportune Hip-Hop Slang Usage) and Stephen A. Smith (a.k.a. The Dark Prince of Screaming to Get One's Point Across) is directly responsible for it. Emblazoned across espn.com's front page is an announcement that "Page 2 is expanding its roster, signing a slick new point guard just in time for March Madness." This immediately left a sour taste in my mouth; espn.com devoting its front page to announcing the hiring of a new espn.com columnist (complete with a swanky photo of said columnist) is roughly meta-equivalent to when MTV aired an "MTV's Top 20 Most Shocking Moments" show a few years back, in which the most shocking moment in MTV history was deemed to be...the debut of MTV!

Lo, but I had no idea what I was in for. In just three paragraphs, the "slick new point guard," Scoop Jackson, manages the impressive feat of ensuring that I'll never read another one of his columns:

They asked me to intro self. To take 900 words to explain I.

Well, first off – I is not that important. I am just a writer from Slam, XXL, NBA and Nike who found his way into ESPN's backdoor. Lucked up. Spit a few verbs, convinced 'em that Stephen A. wasn't the only one.

So instead of wasting space on Page 2 ducking my own sic, I figured if I told you some of the things I believe in, that would give you a better idea of what I intend to flip once a week for the Worldwide Leader. Because it ain't where you at; it's where you coming from that matters. Right?

Read those first two sentences (if you can call them that) again. They provide sufficient evidence that Mr. Jackson's style will consist of synthesizing the most grating aspects of Wiley, Scott, and Smith into a voice more annoying, distracting, and unreadable than those three could have ever possessed individually. Following this breathtaking introduction is a list of "edgy" statements. One example: "I believe marketing is the best thing ever to happen to sports." Next example: "I believe marketing has ruined sports." See what he did there? Isn't the contradiction just oh-so-clever?

If you've read this far, you're probably wondering why I even bother reading espn.com anymore. Frankly, I can't provide a logical answer. I've been reading it for something like six years, and still cling to the writers -- Simmons, Gammons, Murphy -- who remind me that the site never used to be this unintelligent, this corporate, this downright useless. The average sports fan has no idea that sites like those on my sports blogroll provide more analysis and insight in a day than espn.com has in the last month. Because of the preponderance of the ESPN name, however, the site's writers possess an unequaled power to influence public opinion regarding sports.

I wish the espn.com honchos would recognize what a pathetic, money-gobbling shell of its former self the site has become, and make a commitment to hiring columnists who consider modern methods of analysis instead of blindly clinging to antiquated worldviews, and whose stylistic choices serve to bolster the strength of their claims, rather than enhance their own hipness cachet. Lamentably, the honchos' apparent focus on the bottom line above all else, along with their hiring and hyping of Scoop Jackson, indicate that these hopes will never come to fruition.

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