Re-BORTing with a Word on Steve Melewski

BORT (aka Baltimore Orioles Round Table) was originally designed to be a forum for a few Orioles bloggers and preeminent posters from a smattering of message boards.  As quickly as the solid gold idea was created, it came crashing down.  The platform was just not very conducive to everyone who was interested in taking part.  The interest probably was a bit too directed toward increasing traffic on our home pages as opposed to making genuinely interesting content on the BORT site.  So, after a couple years . . . why do we, or maybe just I, wish to re-BORT.


For me, the idea arose one year ago and has been festering since.  Then, an upstart and prominent Orioles prospect website was caught in a brew-ha-ha about blatantly plagiarizing professional prospect sites.  It was a typical story of a teenager who wanted to have more pull than he had the ability to do so.  Often with upstarts we see a craving to be important instead of organically growing.  It truly does take a lot of effort and loads of criticism to be a decent writer (I do not consider myself a decent writer).  Anyway, the aforementioned plagiatizing blogger repeatedly refused that he was doing such a thing when his site was completely borrowing from PG Crosschecker and other sites the would be unfamiliar to the common fan, but stick out like sore thumbs for many of us.  He even was selling all of this borrowed information as a book.  After a bit of a tedious runaround, he realized he had no avenue other than owning up and writing about how much he learned from the experience.  Apologies mean nothing to me (well, almost nothing).  What means something is how people change their behavior.  I consider that blogger reformed.  He now runs a relatively solid and popular website that is a great repository for information about Orioles prospects.  He does very little analysis because he is not well trained for that, yet.  He does provide lots of interview, focused information from Orioles prospects, pictures, and videos.  It is a blog that was needed within our loose group of blogs.  Again, though, it was tedious to get this change to occur.  A few of us joke how much effort it took to get this guy to act responsibly and how the large sites, like Jonathan Mayo and PG Crosschecker, did not care.  I thought then that a website that operated as a meta-filter reviewing and pointing toward other articles would have nipped this one in the bud.


However, a site just bent on a Puritan righteousness of how awful we are and our writing, but oh how we love our Orioles did not seem like a particularly fun concept.  What does seem like a fun concept however is a site that not only questions what some people write, but also praises what others write.  It is in this new incarnation that I suggest BORT now becomes a place where daily we try to highlight certain Oriole centric articles by bloggers ranging from Orioles Post to Baltimore Sports and Life to the School of Roch to Peter The Schmuck Stops Here.  Our ideas may not be grand or interesting, but hopefully this little experiment will work out.  Also, with great hope, we will hold our own articles on pillars and thrash them with equal measure.  To add more, the goal here is really to add discussion and to be more engaging as a community.  I hope this is not taken to be merely mean-spirited.

After the jump, a word on today's feature: Steve Melewski's Blog entry over as MASN.



As I was eating my lunch yesterday at work I read Steve Melewski's new blog post over at MASN.  I found it to be an interesting piece.  It was a simple interview structured in a way to accentuate the interviewee's statements.  In other words, pure Melewski.  That is not a complaint, but a description of style.  It can be considered an older purer form of journalism.  Not the pinnacle of letting the interviewee speak for him or herself, but just below that.  Seperating the wheat from the chaffe and making some bread.  However, one needs to recognize what part of the conversation is important and what is not.  Meleski's article felt a bit off centered.

He was interviewing Keith Law about the Orioles and their moves this past off season.  In no way do the quotes appear to be making Law say something that he is not saying.  These feel genuine as his words from my perspective.  What was interesting to me though was how blunt and clumsy the words were.  In talking about the Orioles inking up Vladimir Guerrero and Derek Lee:

The Orioles are not a club right now that is adding young talent, they have added veteran players to the roster. I don't get it, they are not winning 85 games this year and even if they did, what is that going to buy them? A couple extra fans in the seats? It won't put them in the playoffs.

Melewski presents various other permutations of that argument from Law's statements.  However, knowing Law and his tendency to explain things, something felt left out here.  Something that actually runs against his general tone regarding one year contracts.  He has in the past stated that for teams with money to burn, it makes sense to sign this type of player in order to leverage them for talent later.  As I imagined, I think it was verfied during Law's ESPN chat yesterday:

Phil K (md) - You seemed harsher than most about the Orioles' offseason, but I can understand each criticism. Would you like it more if the 1 year contract guys like Vlad/Lee etc were flipped at the deadline for prospects?

KLaw - Yes, and I made that exact point at length in an answer that wasn't included in the article.

Maybe it is just me, but that is an incredibly important clause.  It is an indication of a soft edge on the initial statement.  Ignoring that when writing the article is not completely encompassing the idea being brought forth.  Of course, not all articles can fully utilize entire interviews.  (I remember an interview last year during the Gulf Oil Spill and from two hours of talking, five minutes emerged, and certainly not the five minutes I would have chosen.)  However, I think it partially obscures the idea and changes the tone of Melewski's article by not acknowledging this.

The second piece was about Mark Reynolds.  It too follows Law's logic.  Veterans do not typically make young players better players.  Even if they did, players with massive holes in their game or those that are incredibly unique in how they generate value are not the ones that teams should be making their players emulate.  In the Melewski article it was boiled down as such:

The second thing is, Mark Reynolds strikes out 200 times a year and is a brutal defensive player. Is that really the guy you want teaching Matt Wieters? He shouldn't be leading anybody by example. If they had brought in Albert Pujols or Carl Crawford, I'm not going to argue with that. But we're not talking about that class of player. Mark Reynolds is not a very good baseball player. 

Well, that is obviously missing something.  I have a hard time thinking that Law did not provide some further clarification than going with a simple "200 strikeout" and "brutal defensive player" lines.  It is too simple and bitter for him.  His style is more long-winded and snarky--with a faint misting of bitterness.  This is really the quote that I thought had to be lifted out of context.  From Law's chat again, he replied:

BD - Keith, re the Orioles interview you mentioned earlier: I never you to be one who cared about batter strikeouts, but you are critical of Mark Reynolds? Is it his generalcontact rate that scares you, or what?

KLaw -
Again, the gist of the response was lost in the article. I don't care about strikeouts per se, but approach (bad) and contact rate (bad).

Again, it appears a lot is missing.  I imagine that Melewski just did not understand the nuanced point of view Law was presenting or was purposefully posting a column that would result in a great deal of responses.  Either way, he is getting page views and comments from many angry fans.  He is defending Law in the comments as well.  It makes sense for the fans to be touchy and Melewski to be defending against them . . . he seems to have done a poor job relaying the information presented to him.

So what do you all think?  Am I right in thinking that the way the article is presented that it slightly skews important aspects of Keith Law's perspective?  If it does, is there ever a time in which that is appropriate?