A Tale of the Second Sportswriter

The counter to the likes of Patrick Reusse is to go to the Kansas City Star's website, and read some Joe Posnanski. Posnanski is a decent writer, who actually uses that thing on top of his neck for something other than listening to cliches and feeding himself. He isn't a brilliant analyst, but we have plenty of those. What he does do, though, is think about what other people say and try to evaluate it.

Now, I'm somewhat biased, since it is known that Posnanski reads Baseball Primer (which you might see is linked over to the right), and I'm just happy that someone in a mainstream daily newspaper takes us seriously. Still, I go to Primer for a reason, and that's because they take an analytical approach to baseball.

For instance, it's been well known among statheads for a couple of decades that batting average is a hopelessly overrated stat. Posnanski doesn't break any new ground with this column from a couple of weeks ago. Still, it's really nice to see this in a column by someone in the same profession as Reusse.

As I said above, Posnanski is a decent writer. While this puts him ahead of some of those getting paid to cover the sports beat, he's not a great writer. His human interest stories are good, but he's no Mitch Albom. As an assemblage of qualities, though, he's probably my favorite sportswriter working a major beat today.

An honorable mention goes to King Kaufman, but I don't think that writing for Salon really qualifies as a major beat. Some newspaper really ought to hire him, though.