A few surprises in the 'favorite baseball teams' poll

A few weeks ago, Harris Interactive released the results of its annual poll on America's favorite baseball teams. It's almost a month old now, but anything that illuminates who roots for what team (even unscientifically, like Nike's United Countries of Baseball map) is still fascinating to me. A few things from the poll that struck me:

--I hadn't really pegged the Indians as a fanbase full of bandwagon jumpers, but they haven't shown themselves well this year. The team dropped from a nearly perennial top-half team in terms of numbers of fans all the way down to 25th, tied with the Florida Marlins(!). You'd think that if a franchise had gone a half-century without a World Series title, one awful year wouldn't be enough to cause fans to leave in droves, but that's apparently what happened to the Tribe.

--The Angels are even lower, at 27th. And they've always had no fans, never finishing higher than 16th. I guess I had always thought of them as a pretty strong fan base. It's tough to end up with the fourth-fewest U.S. fans in baseball while playing in the second-largest market, but the Angels' brass must have done something seriously wrong. And don't tell me it's the Dodgers' fault.

--I'm amazed the A's have hung tough, solidly occupying the 19-23 spots for nearly all of the past six years. That's certainly not great, but I always thought of the A's fans as sort of a ghetto of "Moneyball" enthusiasts or the unwanted stepchildren of Giants fans.

--The Tigers were much higher than I expected. I didn't think they had much appeal outside the state of Michigan--or even all that much within it, until they started winning again a couple of years ago. Turns out they apparently have more fans than the Mariners, who own the Pacific Northwest, or the Mets, who partly own the national media.

--I thought Braves fandom had dropped off since that dominant run during the 1990s, especially since TBS doesn't broadcast all their games anymore. But they're almost as strong as ever, even remaining in front of the Cubs. As Nike's map shows, if you're in the South and you like baseball, chances are you're a Braves fan.

Anything that struck you?

It's all RSS' fault.

Instead of apologizing for not posting in way too long, I thought I'd take a closer look at why. It may actually be illuminating. (Well, that's the goal, anyway.)

I had planned to post once or twice a week on here, but other things--lack of a coherent focus on the blog, lack of motivation, lack of readers, a much busier life in general--have kept me from doing that for most of this blog's life. But now I haven't posted since June 14, the longest drought since I started this blog.

When I started thinking about why I haven't posted so long, I realized the reason went back to a change in the way I read blogs. Namely, I stopped posting because I started using RSS.

I actually started using RSS--through Google Reader--late this spring. For the uninitiated, RSS provides a simple way to get all of the new posts from the sites you regularly visit sent to one place. The idea is that instead of visiting bunches of blogs to see if they've posted since you were last there, you can open your RSS feed and get all of the new updates in one window.

RSS is incredibly convenient--it saves you a lot of browsing time, while you still get all the information you were looking for. But it's also an incredibly passive experience--instead of having to go to the web, the web comes to you. I don't have to have the presence of mind and curiosity to go, "Hmm, I wonder if my friend MattO has written anything lately," because as soon as MattO posts anything, my RSS feed will tell me. Again, it saves a lot of time, but I lose a lot of the serendipity of spontaneous discovery, too.

So once I started using RSS, I also started unconsciously assuming (stupidly) that everyone else must read my blog through RSS, too. In other words, they don't need to wander over here to find out if I've posted anything, because their feed will let them know. A long break between posts is no big deal for them, since they'll know when the break ends, and it won't cost them any effort. But for readers who don't have RSS, of course, my gap between posts is going to lead them to stop coming here, since they're not rewarded for their effort with any new content.

So consider this my apology to those without RSS (shoot, I ended up apologizing anyway), and my lament that though RSS has added quite a bit of convenience to my web experience, it's also taken away a lot of spontaneity in browsing and my urgency in posting. And those are qualities worth lamenting.

My top 10 board games.

I got back from a vacation to Colorado with my family last week, and extended time with them means one thing: games. Lots and lots of them. We should just call our vacations what they are -- one big game tournament in an exotic location, interrupted by various other diversions (in this year's case, whitewater rafting, a baseball game and hiking).

So I was already in a gaming mood last week when I had a brief Twitter exchange with ESPN.com baseball analyst Keith Law about the board game Ticket to Ride. He referenced a December post on his personal blog with his top 10 favorite board games, and I decided to shamelessly steal the idea. The only difference is that mine includes card games. Enjoy, and add your own in the comments.

10. Carcassonne--You'll notice pretty soon that this list is heavy on German-style board games. My summary of Wikipedia's description of the characteristics of those games also serves as a pretty good rundown of why I like them: They downplay luck, they have mechanisms ensuring that they won't go on forever, they focus on economic rather than military strategy (I'm horrible at the latter), and no one gets eliminated before the end. Carcassonne is a relatively simple example of the genre: You're working to finish roads, cities, monasteries and farms as the game's map builds and builds. One downside: My brother always destroys me at this one. (That's a common theme among the games on this list, too.)

9. Power Grid--Another German-style game, but this one's much more complex. The goal is simple, though: Use plants, lines and raw materials to power as many cities as you can. What I love about this one is how richly it replicates real-world economic forces. A huge portion of the game is built on anticipating future supply and demand based on your competitors' past decisions and likely needs. The auction system through which power plants are bought heightens the interdependence of each player's decisions, too.

8. Dictionary--Most people know this game in its commercial form as Balderdash. I've never played Balderdash, but when I was growing up, my family played its own low-tech version, picking obscure words out of dictionary, then having everyone write their own ridiculous definitions and seeing if anyone could pick out the real one. We haven't played it in a decade or so, but I always enjoyed the excuse to make up stuff about poisonous shrubs in the remote highlands of northern Mongolia.

7. Boggle--My college roommate Mike turned me on to this one. Pretty simple word game--find short words in a small grid of letters. It's fast and fun, though. It's also one of only a few games here (maybe the only one) that works just as well with two players as with more--a big reason it's become popular among my wife and me. It just usually makes her angry when we play. Why? It's one of the few games on this list I regularly win.

6. Blokus--My wife got me into this one over the past six months or so. The rules of this game are about the simplest of any game on this list--you're just trying to fit all of your differently shaped pieces onto a grid by connecting them at corners. But it's the only game on this list that requires you to think spatially, and I really like that mental exercise. There's also zero luck involved, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.

5. Settlers of Catan--If you've only played a little bit of German-style gaming, chances are this is the one you know. There's a reason it's the most popular: It's got a gameboard that constantly changes from game to game, and it hits that sweet spot of not-too-hard, not-too-simple difficulty. For my tastes, it still relies too much on luck, which keeps me (along with my mathematically minded sister and brother-in-law) from embracing it as much as everyone else does.

4. Scum--In my mind, it's still the classic party game. So easy a 5-year-old could do it, yet it always entertained. It goes by a heck of a lot of names, but in our family, it was called Scum. You're basically just trying to get rid of your cards, and the higher they are, the better. I was unaware until I read the Wikipedia article on it just now that it's primarily a drinking game, but as we were a teetotaling family playing with four kids, that wasn't going to happen in our house. This was the game my dad would bust out anytime we were entertaining friends, and I can't think of anything that fit that purpose better. Oh yeah, and don't ever, ever let anyone make you pay to play this game. Guh.

3. Puerto Rico--I played this German-style game for the first time less than two weeks ago, and it's already at number three. That's a pretty steep climb, but this is a pretty sweet game. You're a governor in colonial Puerto Rico, and you're trying to produce crops, refine them, then sell or ship those goods. It's got a really steep learning curve (it took us almost two hours to set up and read through the rules the first time), but once you play it, everything just falls into place, because the game just makes sense. I have a feeling we'll be playing this one quite a bit at the next few family gatherings.

2. Pounce--If you want to understand my family--scratch that, I don't think anyone will ever truly understand my family. If you want to try to understand my family, participating in a nine-person pounce game is a good place to start. The card game is most commonly known as nertz (that's how my wife knows it), but holy alternative names, Batman! It's more or less simple solitaire modified for a multiplayer environment, but when my family plays it, it's transformed into the most intense and just downright ridiculous card or board game experience of your life. I'm not even kidding. We've suffered pounce injuries. Usually from diving across the table.

1. Ticket to Ride--I have yet to meet anyone who's played this game and doesn't like it. It is, quite simply, the most universally likable game I've ever played. You're trying to build trains across Europe (or the U.S., or Switzerland, or Germany, or Scandinavia) to complete routes that you've chosen. It has a beautiful board, simple rules, a ton of options for strategy, and just the right level of interaction. Color me hopelessly addicted.

Of course I'm not racist. Now what's so bad about segregated proms?

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating (if way too short) article in today's edition on the segregated proms at a rural Georgia public school.

What amazes me about the story is the nonchalant dichotomy in the white students' attitudes toward their white-only prom. (How is a white-only prom legal, you ask? Well, both proms are organized privately by parents, not by the school.)

On the one hand, it seems the students aren't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of splitting their proms by race. Interracial friendships and even a few interracial dating relationships are common, and it sounds like the kids have engaged in a few half-hearted attempts to end the practice in the past. "I don't think anybody at our school is racist," says one white student who calls the practice "awkward."

But when asked why the school still has segregated proms, the student gets all meh on us. "It's a tradition," he says, echoing the rationale many of his classmates apparently also gave.

This response, of course, leads to the maddeningly obvious question: If you don't like your segregated prom, then why don't you just do anything about it? Tell your parents you refuse to go any prom at which your black friends aren't allowed, and things will change in hurry.

So here we have the paradox: These white students have black friends, significant others and claim not to be racist in any way. Yet they don't care enough about the fact that these friends and significant others can't go to their prom by virtue of the color of their skin to do anything to change it. Are they just liars, or are the social pressures of the status quo greater than we're led to believe?

My guess: They don't really think their segregated proms are racist. They also don't think their black friends are hurt by the fact that they can't come to same prom as them ("After all, they get their own prom, and some of them even come to our prom entrance to cheer us on!"). So they see it as a minor inconvenience, a bow to tradition, something they have to do to oblige their parents, but nothing more significant than that. If everything's hunky dory between black and white students for the other 363 days of the year, these two days can't mess much up, can they?

Dead wrong, of course. By the time the more enlightened students realize that holding segregated proms (anytime, really, but especially in the 21st century!) is ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable, they're off in college and well beyond the point of caring about what their high school does anymore. I don't know much about how issues of race play out in the modern-day South (I've read this eye-opening book, but that's about it), but my initial guess is that the values behind this segregation are rooted so deep in the local culture that students have a difficult time realizing that there's anything wrong with them, even as they fervently disavow racism by name. 

Podcast #2: Get to know ... The Band

Back by popular demand (umm ... I think my sister said she listened to it) comes my second podcast. Same format as the first, but the recording quality is much better, thanks to a new computer.

I had fun putting this one together. Hope you enjoy it too.

Get to know ... The Band

Maybe we should be a little more discriminating in choosing our subculture's leaders.

My fellow Wheaton grad Sarah Pulliam had an entertaining Q&A with America's favorite plumber, Samuel Wurzelbacher (who is neither Joe nor Plumber. Discuss.) for Christianity Today. Most of it was the standard "the Republican Party has deserted true conservatism--let's get even more conservative and take back this country!!!1!" that we've been hearing from the Limbaugh crowd since November 5. Move on, nothing to see here.

But it did contain a few nuggets that were genuinely entertaining in their absurdity. The first was this gem toward the end of Joe's answer to the question, "What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?"

"I've had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn't have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they're people, and they're going to do their thing."

Joe's definition of "friend" must be reeeeeaaaalllly broad. Let's try a thought experiment: Think of all the people you're in reasonably regular contact with. Friends, acquaintances, mild annoyances, serious annoyances, enemies. How many of those people would you not let anywhere near your children? We're not talking about baby-sitting or even being left alone with your children; we're just talking about going near your children. Can you think of anyone who would fit this criterion? I sure couldn't (if I had children, that is).

What kind of level of distrust and loathing would you have to have to be at that point with such a person? Yet Joe calls people with whom he has this type of relationship "friends."* I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you won't let them anywhere near your children, they're not your friends. In fact, they're much closer to being your mortal enemy.

*Another question: Why exactly is Joe so afraid of letting his children even be in the vicinity of a gay person? Because they'll spread their gay germs? I'd love to hear Joe parse his reasoning out on this one.

Second, we have this question and response:

Who do you see as emerging Christian leaders?

James Dobson. I love Dobson. I love John Eldridge's [sic] Wild at Heart. The last book I read was The Five Love Languages [by Gary Chapman].

James Dobson?!? James Dobson is a lot of things (incendiary, influential, intelligent, old), but emerging is not even close to being one of them. The man's 73 years old, for crying out loud! It's been 32 years since broke into the Christian subculture with Dare to Discipline. He's already stepped down as president, CEO and chairman of the board of Focus on the Family. He's now essentially a figurehead who's preparing to retire. That's about as far from emerging as you can get.

Joe concludes by answering the question, "What are a couple of Christian books you like?" which, incidentally, was not any of the questions that were put to him. My guess: He really doesn't keep up with who's who among Christian leaders, so he named the only two he could think of off the top of his head, plus another Christian book he had read recently. And that's fine for a random plumber from Ohio, but if you're aiming to become a prominent Christian leader,* you sure as heck had better know whom you're inheriting that mantel from. This is what happens when we thrust uninformed Joe Blows into undeserved positions of prominence and influence, and when they insist, against their better judgment, on staying there.

*Guess why Joe was giving this interview in the first place? He's traveling the country on a book tour.

Adding value in a crowded media ecosystem

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York's journalism school and prominent media critic, had a fantastic post yesterday asking journalists a crucial question about the way they do their jobs: "Where do you add value?"

Here's the meat of it:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

I've tried to let that question guide my reporting for the last three years (and I'm pretty sure I've asked some version of it in a newsroom meeting at some point), and I think Jarvis is spot-on: We have less time and fewer resources to do our jobs than ever before, so there's less leeway than ever for the mindless, repetitive fluff that has made up so much of the daily grind of journalism since time immemorial.

I've been troubled at times by how much of my time at work is spent on stories in which my added value is minimal at best. I mean the stories that the local weekly is going to cover just as well as we will; the ones where I'm just retracing another paper's steps because I've been beaten on a story; the quick-turnaround, one-or-two-source stories that are there literally to fill space over the weekend cycle.

There's a reason we do these kinds of stories. As a small daily newspaper with just five news reporters, we need these stories just to reach that critical mass of news that keeps readers from opening their papers and saying, "There's nothing in here." And many of these stories are news to our readers: Just because we aren't the first or only outlet to cover them doesn't mean they aren't still newsworthy. (This is a fallacy to which I'm especially prone; I regularly have to remind myself of the previous sentence when deciding whether to follow on a previously reported story that I know I still need to cover.)

Here's where I think Jarvis' flaw lies: He seems to be operating on the assumption that if a story is out there, people will find it. That makes sense for much big-issue national coverage. No one wants to read the AP's summary of the State of the Union; they want to watch the speech itself and then read some trenchant analysis of it. (And no one wants to read the Washington Post's summary of the New York Times' warrantless wiretapping scoops; they want to read the Times' original.)

But on the local news level, that's simply not the way things work. A local TV station might be the first ones to report a kidnapping arrest last night and I might not have much to add to their account, but that doesn't mean the story is at the level of "commodity knowledge," as Jarvis calls it. I can't assume that most of our readers are voracious news consumers who will find a story soon after it's reported, no matter where. People have lives; they don't watch the news every night, and they don't constantly check the websites of several area newspapers throughout the day to spot the first iteration of every news story. Isn't that part of what we're learning in this new media ecosystem--that the news now has to find consumers, rather than vice versa? I think that's exactly what we're doing with some of these less "value-intensive" stories.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree with Jarvis that we simply can't afford repetition and stenography anymore. The shift is going to take a lot of tough concessions and inspire quite a few "But that's the way we've always done it!" objections. But it absolutely must be done. If old media institutions (or any media outlets, for that matter) want to play a role in the new media ecosystem, every inch of type and every second of video needs to add some value to the consumer. Anything less is not only bad business; it's a dereliction of duty.