I don’t really want to generalize, and I know the answer is ultimately to get people to read their columns.. because more readers means more advertising revenues… but I really have to say that I think Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel went way too far in his column, No excuses for Rockies’ bush-league mistake. In it, Wetzel’s comments make the implication that the Rockies lost game 2 of the World Series because of Matt Holiday getting picked off of first base.

Just like his team, Matt Holliday was left sprawled out in the dirt, flat on his belly, flailing for safety that would never come. He was picked off, out by a mile in no-man’s land off Fenway Park’s first base.

His was another embarrassing mistake, another sorry bit of baseball, this time in a manner no one could miss, a little-league bumble in the big-league World Series.
…
This was all they had, this was their hope.

Really, all they had? That was one of 27 outs recorded in game 2. Not to mention the fact that the odds of scoring in any game with a runner on first and two outs is about 23% - if Matt was able to steal second base, it would have instantly gone to 35%. Also, no excuses for Holliday? How about the fact that he is the team MVP of a team desperately in need of a run and the pressure affected his play? How about the fact that this is a 27 year old playing in his first ever World Series and was trying to make something happen?

Not only that, right before the Series, analysts left and right were picking the Rockies as they were the “hottest team in baseball”. Now all I read are columns that put one win for the Rockies as a best case scenario, and the pessimism is so damn thick you could pour it over pancakes.

The bigger question to me is why our sports media - at least a quarter to a half of them - feel the necessity to come up with polarizing or controversial columns that are more critical of our athletes than their colleagues are of our own President? I don’t know, but when I skip through the blogosphere every day, I do come across some posts like that (I’m sure my critique of Woody Paige set a few off last week), but I really don’t understand why the media feels the need to be so polarizing instead of analytical; if anything it makes many of them appear petty, unprofessional, and if nothing else, that they are left with nothing intelligent to say.

Long story short… I need to stick to reading bloggers, not columnists.