No Wonder Newspapers Are Dying

Today’s Chicago Tribune provides more evidence as to why print is a dying medium…

First, Mike Downey reports that “all 27 men who have managed the Yankees have had a common pigmentation, one that is the same hue as a shiny new baseball.”

Uuuuhhhhhh…OK. I guess. Is that a bad thing? A good thing? Does it make the Yankees hierarchy a bunch of bigots?

I don’t know, because Downey steadfastly refuses to draw any conclusions about the situation. I won’t either, because I’m not smart enough to discuss the sociological implications of the Yankees’ decision-making process.

I’m not smart enough to figure out what Downey’s point was in this column, either. You’d think a guy who has an opinion column in a major metropolitan daily newspaper would, you know, tell people his opinion. If he wants to write about nothing in particular and draw no particular conclusions from it, he should switch to blogging.

Next, Fred Mitchell unearths the desiccated remains of Dallas Green to “analyze” what’s been going on at Wrigley Field. “It sounds like a mess over there,” Green sagely tells the hapless Trib scribe.

No duh, as the kids like to say nowadays. If Mitchell had read this space, or any other Cubs blog, he could have discovered the same cogent “analysis.”

Green then goes on to offer some self-serving blather about the dastardly suits at the Tower:

Through the years, there has just been too much interference in baseball decisions. I understand some of that because of the money that’s involved. But [Tribune Co. executives] make as many mistakes as any baseball guys ever dreamed of making. So that’s not the whole answer either.

Hell, I’d settle for a fraction of an answer from Green, let along a whole answer. Is Green indicting the Trib execs here? Or is he saying that the baseball guys made their share of snafus as well? It’s hard to tell in this Zen koan of a response.

Mitchell doesn’t bother to follow up. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t bother to actually report the answer. Instead, he gushes:

If the Cubs had won or even made it to the World Series in 1984, Green might still be the team’s president/general manager.

Great. Judging from his later tenure in New York and Philadelphia, I have an idea of what would have happened if Green had stayed on in Chicago: he would have done his best to shred Kerry Wood’s shoulder beyond repair in 1999. If Wood survived that, Green would run him out of town anyway for being a wuss.

But really – what does Dallas Green know about what’s going on with the Cubs today? It’s been almost twenty years since he left town. The Trib execs he worked with aren’t involved with the team any more. Mitchell might as well have asked a psychic to contact the spirit of Joe McCarthy to get his take. Even a fake medium would have been able to come up with something equal to “It sounds like a mess.”