Spare Parts: The Athletic is down, the Athletics are up

I started Monday morning contemplating the fragility of knowledge on the internet while reading about Reddit’s inflection point on Defector. Reddit’s currently experiencing the online version of a walkout in protest of API restrictions on apps that made it a lot easier for moderators to manage their communities.

I had written off Reddit for years because I’d mostly associated it with cesspools that sprung up during election seasons or national tragedies, but just like a lot of other people, I eventually came around to append “reddit” on any search for advice, whether it was for a travel bag, a watch brand, a computer issue, local trades companies. Especially watches. My goodness, people know lots about watches.

Now those communities are at least temporarily dark, and it poses a big question about where that knowledge will go if the thing that consumed message boards now unravels in a search for profit. Here’s Alex Pareene:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.

Later in the day, The Athletic laid off 20 beat writers, including local favorite James Fegan, and it poses the same dilemma in sports form. Credit James for breaking the news in the funniest way possible:

The Athletic positioned itself as the new nationwide local sports market by poaching writers from local outlets. You may remember the founders wanting to drain the oceans to find and kill God in 2017:

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, said in an interview in San Francisco. “We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

Today, six years later:

The note said an additional 20 reporters would be moved from their current team beats to new ones, including regional coverage or general assignment roles.

That strategy marks a departure from the outlet’s onetime mission, which was to cover every team from every major league across the country with a dedicated reporter. The Athletic has been successful editorially, with millions of subscribers, but that coverage — and the travel and staffing associated with it — is expensive.

In fairness, The Athletic didn’t destroy local sports coverage at the newspaper level as much as it accelerated the self-inflicted demise. Papers that invested in their sports departments well enough for their writers to reject The Athletic’s advances seem to have maintained their staffs well enough.

Regardless of intent or success, The Athletic represented a similar shrinking of the internet that abandoned its promise once it had to start showing the ability to turn a profit, and now fans of teams — the White Sox included — are left without their best beat writer in the middle of the season.

James had the job I’d once wished I had and did it the way I’d want to do it, except he did it better than I would have, which was a secondary reason why I stopped wanting that job. The primary reason is that Sox Machine is more than I ever imagined it being, and that’s thanks to your support. I never take it for granted, but that’s especially the case when the industry keeps swallowing itself.

Spare Parts

• Is Philly’s pitch clock quicker than other MLB parks? The Phillies — and data — say so — The Athletic

Here’s another example of baseball writing that’s hard to replicate by somebody parachuting in on the proceedings. Philadelphia pitchers have been especially noisy about their discontent with the pitch clock, and when looking at the discrepancy between home and road violations, their complaints transcend mere whining.

• A’s ‘reverse boycott’ might go down in Bay Area history. Don’t miss it. — San Francisco Chronicle

While the White Sox play the Dodgers tonight, I’ll also be flipping to the A’s-Rays game, as Oakland fans will be packing the Coliseum to express how much they love the team, and how much they hate the ownership. When A’s fans originally set the date, this looked like a sad goodbye. With Nevada lawmakers a lot more skeptical about the ballpark funding plan than John Fisher and Dave Kaval expected, the Oakland fan base has a chance to state its case, and while their team is playing its best baseball of the year.

• How Elly De La Cruz and the Reds became must-watch in MLB — ESPN

I got my first look at Elly De La Cruz when I drove down to catch the Barons and Project Birmingham last year. He was playing for Double-A Chattanooga, and while it was easy to ignore his 1-for-4 line in the box score, it was hard to ignore him on the field. He seemed too large to play shortstop, but also too large to be so fast. I guess that means he’s right-sized.

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