Deadspin is, by my lights, the most important and successful blog in the history of the medium. What blog has been more influential within its sector of the media? What other blog has had a larger impact on the subjects it covers? Even the traditional media types who hate Deadspin the most read it religiously. They have to. That’s success. And it’s a very necessary success because of two enduring realities of the sports media: a) the ubiquity of stupid loudmouths in the ranks of sports reporters and b) the utter dominance of ESPN, which is so powerful and self-involved that you need an insurgent force like Deadspin to counter them with asymmetrical warfare and insoucience. And they’re very good at it.
Lately, though, I’ve been bothered by the tendency of Deadspin’s writers to find whatever appears to be the dominant narrative– which they often refer to explicitly, as The Narrative– and pick the exact opposite side. So if the national narrative is that performance enhancing drugs are a plague on sports, people at Deadspin tend to argue that PEDs aren’t a big deal. If the narrative is that Alex Rodriguez is a huge jerk and cheat, people Deadspin argues that he’s unfairly maligned. If the narrative is that baseball has unwritten rules that are part of the game and have to be honored, then people at Deadspin go on at length about how they’re all bullshit. And since your average fan dislikes the Miami Heat and hates the idea of their adding Carmelo Anthony to an already dominant team, of course, people at Deadspin think it’s a great idea. I wrote a comment that I thought was a very reasonable point about how this might undercut competitive balance, and I was swiftly rebuked by one of their bloggers. (They’re underdogs against ESPN, but in my experience Deadspin is not above big-timing and bullying people themselves.)
The thing is that I very often agree with them, and it’s often refreshing to get these perspectives. They’re right more often than wrong. Lord knows, I’ll take any opportunity to read people opposing Skip Bayless. The problem is that picking up the conventional wisdom and arguing literally the opposite is very rarely a way to really approach a situation critically and usefully. And Deadspin is so (deservedly) influential, their tendency to gravitate to the perfectly opposite opinion of the conventional narrative spreads out into the broader sports media world. I think that’s a mistake, and it leaves people vulnerable to a simplistic contrarianism that doesn’t make us much smarter or better informed.
Meanwhile, the phenomenon of the Heat as a wedge between fans and elites in the media is part of my least favorite aspect of sports today. Once a haven against the social and cultural positioning that seems to be all anybody cares about anymore, sports are now right in the thick of it. Everyone postures and positions themselves on every issue, looking to demonstrate that they’re better than other people who think conventional, populist things. The NBA has become a league for snobs. It’s the FreeDarko effect, where loving basketball is insufficient, and you have to love it in a different way from all the rubes and squares. You have to be evolved or advanced or whatever other conceited synonym. TrueHoop and Grantland are essentially professional rooting sections for the Heat. Glamour market bullies are celebrated and small market fans are dismissed as unimportant. It’s an ugly, class-based dynamic.
This is how we live now: any difference that can be represented as indicative of who and what you are will be. The smallest and least significant consumption differences become matters of incredible importance to your personal definition. And everything about you is always posed in opposition to other people, either the squares and the regular jerks who are beneath you or the snobs and elites who you think are sneering down from above you. Culture war in everything. Culture war in everything.
I was confused when you cast Grantland as “essentially” a professional rooting section for the Heat, because lord knows they publish fawning pieces on the Spurs just as often. So I went and read your piece on Medium. I see what you’re getting at, and I think I basically agree.
I was wondering, though, if guys like Zach Lowe and Bill Barnwell (I don’t read ESPN proper nearly as much, so I’ll refrain from comment) would cast their approach as (I realize this is going to sound absurd) a kind of sports cosmopolitanism instead of snobbery. Their point seems to be: “rooting for a team is all well and good, but recognize that it is fundamentally irrational; once you do, you have an obligation as a rational actor to appreciate x about team y that you don’t root for.”
Sports are hardly the only area where some kind of parochialism runs up against cosmopolitanism, with the most obvious being actual states. Can patriotism be rational? etc. I wonder if their mentality–their snobbery–manifests as such because of a borrowed language or mentality that they may not be fully cognizant of.
That said, I’m probably overthinking this.
I’ve heard the argument for sports cosmopolitanism before, and the essential problem with it is that it’s too damaging to the finances of sports. Sports relay on fan attention and fan dollars. And only the kind of irrational love that comes from real fandom can inspire people to pay the kind of money they pay into sports. People buy season tickets to teams that are destined to be terrible. They festoon their homes with vast amounts of expensive team bric-a-brac. A sports “rationalist” doesn’t do that.
I was just trying to think about what was motivating the “snobbery” that you identify in Barnwell and Lowe. In other words, they both seem like smart guys, and generally aware, except for this large pretty glaring point–so what’s driving it?
Obviously the NFL and NBA like it when their fans are partisans, and I agree with you about competitive balance. I’d buy season tickets if I could afford them!
My favorite part of this is definitely how you’re dishonestly framing getting told that you’re wrong as being rebuked for disagreeing, and eliding the part where you reacted like a baby and insulted one of their writers. That’s a great look.
Hey, friend– there’s no stars for comments, here, and nobody to impress. You don’t have to front for anybody or put on a show. This is a safe space.
It’s almost like you set out to write what passes for a witty comment over at Deadspin.
“The smallest and least significant consumption differences become matters of incredible importance to your personal definition.”
Well how else am I supposed to define my personal brand, and then subsequently increase my brand awareness if I don’t constantly trumpet my consumption preferences on various social media outlets using a carefully calibrated mixture of snark, sincerity, aloofness, and passion, which will evolve to suit current tastes, but not too much so that I could be accused of being a follower, unless of course I’m pushing back against contrarian-hipsterism and/or embracing my true normcore aesthetic, in which case I DO want to be a follower, but only of things that aren’t excessively quirky, but also not too mainstream!
Second ‘graph: citations, please? Your first three examples are all dominant narratives in the sports media (or subsets of larger narratives), and each of Deadspin’s positions are perfectly legit on face value. I’m not saying they’re not being sloppy in their coverage and/or reducing the argument to contrarianism for its own sake. But just noting that they’re pro-A-Rod in this one instance doesn’t really tell us anything, especially in the overall context of their A-Rod coverage.
As for the Anthony-to-Miami post you link to, I don’t follow basketball, so I can’t offer a broader perspective on the article. But on its own merits, it didn’t strike me as favoring the potential deal. The pre-emptive snark against knee-jerk anti-Heat venom – I don’t think that position (such that it even rises to the gravity of “position”) and criticism of the NBA’s state of competitive balance are mutually exclusive, and I’m not sure what about the post makes you interpret it as status-quo boosterism, let alone pure contrarianism.
Agree about the influence of Deadspin. One reason it may have the proclivity you identify is hat they’re not really a competitive brand to ESPN. They’ve crafted themselves as the anti-ESPN. Their biggest story of all time was the Manti Te’o expose, but a big part of the score for Deadspin was their exposing of the ways the sports behemoths made and maintained the false Te’o narrative through their sloth, avarice, and general disregard of journalistic principles. That’s their wheelhouse: exposing the nakedness of the emperors of sports journalism.
…is Freddie criticizing a publication for being contrarian????? My mind just exploded…
I don’t think your examples are very good either. You don’t need to be Slate to think the quest to ban ARod is a witch hunt, or that the unwritten rules of baseball are asinine (ESPN baseball writer Keith Law is equally enraged by the stupidity of both of those. Love following his twitter feed as he mocks “smart baseball” every time some team tries to uphold those sacred rules and gets crushed for it).
But seriously, you who criticizes everyone on the left as not being left enough, or pure enough…this argument doesn’t work coming from you.
I am wondering what is snobby about Lowe and Barnwell, the two primary sports writers for Grantland. Is it because they break down the game instead of just talking typical sports BS platitudes? I don’t get it.
Flesh out your ideas better.
Thanks for the input, bro!
No, seriously, what is snobby about them? Lowe breaks down games, detailing what happened in a play, letting casual fans see how these things happen. I think he does a great job. I don’t see anything snobby about his work.
I like Barnwell’s work on NFL as well, especially his “Thanks for not coaching” stuff, where he details good and bad coaching decisions.
Maybe i’m just missing it. But i don’t think i am.