I was reading through the Seattle Times online today, and found a fairly disturbing piece written by columnist Steve Kelley, “Open season in Blog-ville if M’s lose“. Kelley essentially insinuates that bloggers are irrational sports fans who know little to nothing about sports and pretty much it is their job to over-hype and blow situations out of proportion.

Granted, I bet that there are some “blogs” out there that are casual sports fans who make random posts once a month or so, but its pretty obvious to anyone who reads the weblogs of the dedicated bloggers that they know what the hell they are talking about… maybe not experts in their fields, but they know enough to produce insightful commentary two, three, four or more times a day. And then there is Steve Kelley sitting behind a desk and has to write a column or two a day… and get frickin paid to do it! Steve, if you call yourself a professional, the least you could have done is actually know what a blog (or weblog) is… and what blogging is too for that matter:

“No doubt about it, against the Cubs on Monday, he got out-managed by Lou Piniella,” SafecoSlim blogs. “He pulled Richie Sexson in the fourth inning. THE FOURTH INNING. How does he expect to win games with moves like that? That’s not managing. That’s surrendering.”

You can almost hear a voice of reason trying to explain that this is only spring training. “Whatever happens in Peoria, stays in Peoria,” BringBackBone types.

But some other grouchy fan whose patience has been thinned by three straight last-place finishes finds the Hargrove quote from Tuesday’s newspaper: “We don’t go out there to lose. We don’t go out there just to play, to get our game in shape. We play to win. It just hasn’t happened so far.”

…

“You ask me, he got lucky out there today,” I can see CoraCoraCora blogging after the win. “I mean, how many times can Hargrove go to the Tony Torcato well? He’s not going to get three ribbies out of Torcato every game like he got against Texas.

I don’t know about anyone else, but that sounds a whole helluva lot like a chatroom or message board. Damn. This guy gets paid to do what I do for free in my spare time and he writes a column bashing bloggers, and doesn’t even know a blog from a chatroom! I’m starting to wonder if Kelley just hit the wrong link during his daily attempts to be on To Catch A Predator, and its very possible that he too thinks the internets is a systems of tubes.

I’m pretty much just appalled at what passes for journalism these days, and I’m not sure if I should be writing Stevie-boy to let him know how big of a moron he is, or the editors asking if they had a chimp proofread this thing. I really don’t want to be the one to tell him that more people probably read Deadspin on a daily basis than his sorry ass column, but if you are going to attack a network of people, at least get your damn facts straight.

[Steve Kelley can be reached at skelley@seattletimes.com]