Baseball Writers Brace for the End.

Granted, I know a lot of sports fans didn’t see it, but that was the main article in Tuesday’s sports section of the Wall Street Journal. (Yes, all one page of it — seriously, their sports section is just one side of one page. Believe it.) To me, it shows that sports world is not quite ready to move on and unyielding to the coming storm.

The game is about to change. Most newspapers — save for a few stalwarts — are going to join the dinosaurs, dodo bird, and black skin on Michael Jackson as extinct species. As Darth Vadar said to Luke before he died, nothing can stop that now.

Maybe they weren’t expecting the industry to topple over on itself so quickly. Who could have predicted the immediacy of it all? We all knew that the Internet would replace most newspapers  some day, but it seems like every day brings more bad news for the industry. I guess the economy is part of it, as every business can feel the weight of the Great Recession. Or maybe it’s just me, but I wasn’t ready for it to come this soon.

(Time Out)

If I knew that the toppling of newspapers was so imminent, I would have created a sports journalism Web site a little sooner.  Just saying.

(Time In)

In hindsight, however, the reason for their demise has become plainly obvious to me. The newspaper industry — namely sports writers — was just unable to adapt quickly enough. I know that a lot of people don’t believe in evolution or Darwinism (the word ignorance comes to mind), but adaptation and natural selection are central themes to biology.

Sure newspapers are adapting now. But just as the dodo bird failed to reproduce enough to sustain its species — and how Michael Jackson kept taking his nose under the knife to the point that there was nothing left to cut — newspapers have waded too close to the waterfall. Publishers can paddle as hard as they want now, setting up blogs on newspaper Web sites for instance, but the current has gotten too strong for them. They’re about to go over the edge.

It’s a shame, too, because people don’t want them to go. There’s no public outcry for the systematic elimination of our nation’s newspapers. But everyone knows that it’s happening. It reminds me about the end of college. We didn’t usually go out partying in the last few weeks of school because more important things were happening. Instead of throwing a fraternity party, people were cramming for finals or searching for full-time jobs, and alucky few were already beginning their careers. In the newspaper world, those lucky enough to remain employed as journalists are cramming to keep their paper alive. Some recent layoffs are either looking to catch on somewhere else or are contemplating a career change, and a lucky few have already moved on to new jobs and new careers on the Internet.

Funny how things work.

But back to that Wall Street Journal article about baseball writers. That well-written article — by Russell Adams and Tim Marchman (funny how the best papers use two writers for one story; I never got that) — cuts to the heart of this whole problem: the failure to adapt in the sports journalism world. Most of the developed world now gets its news, information and entertainment instantly from across the globe on the Web. Why aren’t these press boxes filled with baseball writers from baseball Web sites?

My best guess to that question is that the numbers will only grow in the future, and I hope that Taking Back Sports is a part of that.

But there’s also a dark cloud over the entire sports journalism industry. Professionally trained sports writers are sometimes writing about the same things as Joe the Sports Fan does on his sports blog. In world where everyone’s voice is equal, anyone with a computer and internet access can play Sports Guy. Coincidentally, Bill Simmons is the sports journalist best suited for today’s world: He’s always watching sports on TV, he keeps up with current events and pop culture, and he probably is never far from his laptop.

The center of the universe in sports today is either in front of a TV or your computer. It’s no longer relevant whether or not you’re at the game live and in person.

Truth be told, I would prefer to cover an event live than to watch a whole day’s worth of sports on TV. It’s just a personal preference. I believe that part of the game gets lost over the airwaves, and the truest way to experience life is to live it, not watch it on TV.

In today’s ADD infested world — where infinite quantities of information are at your finger tips — time is of the essence. Hours wasted while waiting for the newspapers to be delivered in the morning chase potential readers to more immediate news sources, likely regardless of the quality.

That is why great sports sections everywhere have become out-of-date along with their obsolete newspapers. That isn’t to say that sports journalism is on the endangered-species list. Sports journalists need merely to adapt.

Hopefully, they’ll do so quicker than newspapers have.