A long time ago, Greg Connors called for more sports blogs, a request met with skepticism by Glenn Reynolds.
The almighty Professor was wrong. Specifically, baseball – the sport I know best and thus will confine this discussion to – is absolutely perfect for blogging, and there should be more baseball blogging than there is at present. Some thoughts on why:
1) Josh Marshall recently criticized the tendency among some bloggers to assume that they automatically know more about a given subject than ignorami like reporters for the New York Times. While that criticism is certainly unwarranted in many cases – many of the best bloggers are those who are knowledgable specialists in a given subject and can outclass reporters with less experience in the field – it’s something important to keep in mind. It’s not crazy to assume that a reporter’s experience covering a field gives him special knowledge of that field, that many bloggers wouldn’t have. (For example, a political journalist’s knowledge of inside gossip is a specific source of knowledge, often relevant to the story, that many bloggers can’t match.)
This is less true about baseball than most fields. Journalists who cover teams do have inside knowledge, but that knowledge is often less valuable than performance analysis in analyzing the game. Outsiders can and do performance analysis – or “sabermetrics” – better than most baseball journalists. The intellectual action in baseball analysis is with the outsiders, at places like Baseball Prospectus or Baseball Primer. It’s not that outsiders have access to special knowledge – just that most inside journalists don’t use sophisticated analysis, making it easier for outsiders to compete. (It’s getting better, but slowly. Some mainstream journalists – most notably Joe Posnanski – use all the tools at their disposal, but they’re the exceptions.) The single most important insight into baseball analysis in the last few years was developed by a college student, working with numbers that had been freely available for decades. He was just the first one to ask the right questions.
2) The Godfather of sabermetrics, Bill James, contributed more than specific insights into the game, which systematically undercut decades of received wisdom with no empirical support. His work - most notably in his annual Baseball Abstracts and two editions of the Historical Baseball Abstract, and more recently with Win Shares – introduced a generation of fans to a methodology of critical thinking, which – as explained by Eric Neel – had ramifications far beyond baseball. Describing the experince of reading James' New Historical Baseball Abstract:

The experience reminded me of the winter of 1983, when my friend Matt Welch first introduced me to the "Bill James Baseball Abstract" books, and the two of us spent the better part of several gray Long Beach weekends playing Strat-o-Matic, eating microwave burritos, listening to Beatles records and reading James with the zeal of revolutionary converts.
We loved the way he spoke plainly, and said smart, provocative things that cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. If he thought a player was underrated or overrated, or believed a theory was nonsensical, he said so and then set about demonstrating why. It wasn't fancy, but it was rhetorically sharp and intoxicating.
...We were 16, and we heard in James the clarity and wit we wanted to fashion in our own voices.
We grooved on his mathematics, too, on which statistics are actually significant in terms of understanding how the game is played. He made basic claims that were nonetheless revolutionary, like, "a hitter's job is not to compile a high batting average. The job is to create runs. That is what all hitters are trying to do in every plate appearance: They are trying to create runs."
Working through James' formulas gave us a chance to cut our teeth as problem-solvers, and it gave our devotion to the game a kind of scientific weight; it made us believe we were doing real work in the world when we examined and debated the relative offensive value of Don Mattingly vs. Wade Boggs, or Henderson vs. George Brett. And we were exhilarated when we assumed, along with James, a kind of iconoclastic, fight-the-powers-that-be attitude.
...It sounds silly, and my wife laughed that "oh, sweetie, you're so cute" laugh when I told her, but I don't think it's too much to say that James' approach to baseball helped a lot of us decide what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.
"I devoured those early abstracts," Matt said when I talked to him last week, "because they were reorienting my thinking about life, believe it or not." Matt's a terrific journalist now. He and some friends started a newspaper in Prague in the early 1990s, and he's since come back to the States to work as a freelance political writer. He told me that reading James was the beginning of his own life as a writer. "There are a lot of journalists out there who don't write about sports who are directly influenced," he said. "James really is my No. 1 journalism guy because the thing that mattered to him the most was finding a way to the truth, regardless of how he got there." For guys like Matt, James is part of the 1960s New Journalism, along with Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and a bunch of others. He got our attention because he talked about baseball, which we were already interested in, but his approach helped launch us into our own so-called adult lives, too.
I've been an English teacher and a writer most of my so-called adult life, and though I hadn't thought about it until now, I like the idea that my tendency to turn texts inside out and to stretch ideas thin enough to see their hidden underpinnings is somehow the product of reading Bill James.

Yes, that Matt Welch. In an e-mail to me about a year ago, Welch opined that a “huge number of warbloggers are Bill James freaks.” I know of Welch, Dan McLaughlin, Aaron Haspel and Max Power, but that’s about all I know of. (Any other warbloggers who wish to be so classified should let me know.) When you consider his methodology and the amount of BS he hacked through, Bill James has a valid claim to be the first “anti-idiotarian.”
I was reminded of that thought by this article, arguing (mostly tongue-in-cheek) that James should turn his attentions to politics:

[W]hen President George W. Bush makes a statement like, "Today, the women of Afghanistan are free," as he did in Tuesday's State of the Union address, there is no way to establish the veracity of that statement short of traveling to Afghanistan or doing lots of dull, boring newspaper reading, which almost no one can be bothered with anymore. You've got to take his word for it.
It would be harder to be cynical, both from a producer and consumer point of view, if we had better stats for politics. Sure, groups like the Americans for Democratic Action and the Sierra Club rate politicos on their lefty-righty percentages (that is, whether they lean liberal or conservative on key issues), but those only scratch the surface.
We need the kind of numbers that announcers toss off casually in baseball and football games: "The congressman has made 28 misstatements and 12 deliberate falsehoods out of sixty statements in this address for a calumny percentage of .667. The all-time record of .812 was set by Senator Huey Long (D-LA) in his Jefferson Day address, 1933." Or more appropriately, "Afghanistan population: 26.8 million. Afghanis living in freedom: 4. That would have to be classified as something of a misstatement, wouldn't it Bob?"
Baseball has a Manichean transparency that politics lacks: the proof is in the standings. A team can claim a good faith effort at contention, but a 72-90 record is what it is. On the other hand, a president can propose a tax plan and say that it will give a break to everyone, but unless you're prepared to wade up to your elbows in the U.S. tax code, it's hard to know whether the plan will be good for some, all, or none -- and often that's just what the plan's proponents are counting on.
This would no longer be the case if James (now a consultant for the Red Sox) could be convinced to turn his attention away from the horsehide sphere for awhile and produce a new magnum opus, the Bill James Political Abstract. Your senator is running for reelection and says he's working 24 hours a day to pass legislation for you. Not sure? Pick up your copy of the BJPA and flip over to the attendance tables, then head to the back of the book for the all-time records and see where your guy ranks.

It’s a seductive argument, but I don’t think it would work out as well as the author hopes. In the end, baseball’s results are objective and easily found on the scoreboard. Empiricism in political analysis rarely reveals objective results as easily, a basis for the existence of many competing think tanks in Washington (even after accounting for the inevitable self-interest). It’s easier to demonstrate the efficacy of a strategy in baseball than in most public policy, and it’s not so easy even in the former case. (This helps explain why George Will’s writings on baseball are infinitely more convincing than his political columns. And I like the latter, but the comparison is still true. Will is a big Bill James fan, by the way.) And finally, political weblogs try do the fact-checking which the author deems impossible. He must not be familiar with the blogosphere...
3) Prof. Reynolds has compared the potential impact of blogs to the newsletters of I.F. Stone, which had a narrow but influential readership and thus had influence disproportionate to its circulation.
Many baseball fans of “sabermetric” bent will recognize a historical parallel – James’ early Baseball Abstracts, especially before they enjoyed national distribution. More contemporaneously, Baseball Prospectus has built up an influential following - including among baseball insiders - even though they’re not yet a nationally recognized brand.
And the Prospectus, along with Baseball Primer, has been using the Web for years to develop its ideas in shorter form before putting them into their annual book.
UPDATE: This post has been revised slightly to correct some sloppy writing pointed out by Matthew Yglesias. And check out the comments - Bill James fans of the world, unite!