Best of the Baseball Blogosphere: AL Central
With Spring Training rapidly approaching, it’s time to familiarize ourselves with the best of the team-specific baseball blogs out there. Need to know the down-low on how that rookie starting pitcher is going to fare against your team? Better know where to go. In the second of a six-part series, I’ll go through the AL Central, and highlight my picks for the cream of the crop.
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Minnesota
Much can be said for the writing of Aaron Gleeman on the Twins, but I can’t say I’ve enjoyed his site as much since he began working for NBC Sports. It’s become more of an intermittent linkfest than a regular Twins blog. Oh, and Aaron, it might be time to update the look. You’re going on five years with the same basic plain text website.
Thankfully Bat-Girl is there to hold up the banner for Twins bloggers. Bat-Girl combines the writing prowess of a published author with the endlessly entertaining Lego-vision. Bat-Girl is simply one of the best blogs out there, and it’s become a very frequent read for me. And I don’t even like the Twins. At all.
Chicago
This was a close one between South Side Sox and The Bard’s Room. South Side Sox is another sbnation site, who are the dominant force in baseball blogs these days. It boasts a good community of users, which is the inherent strength of sbnation sites, but I went with the well-written The Bard’s Room as my pick. The tipping point? The Bard’s Room referred to Andrew Sisco as a SCUD; that is, a powerful yet inaccurate missile. Perfect.
Detroit
I was tempted to go with Mack Avenue Tigers or Roar of the Tigers. Both are well written and updated frequently in the offseason, which I consider important. The aptly named Detroit Tigers Weblog gets the nod from me based on the interesting research done on depth of plate appearances, and the fact that he posted the spreadsheet for others to use. Nicely done, good sense of community.
Cleveland
Cleveland suffers from underrepresentation in the baseball blog world. Tribe Report and Let’s Go Tribe are about the only blogs even worth mentioning. Tribe Report has become somewhat of a transaction monitor lately, with little original content. My pick doesn’t go to Let’s Go tribe by default, though, because there are some good reasons to head over there. In the sidebar, LGT author Ryan has posted some interesting links to salary issues and a pull-down menu that will take you to every 40-man roster player’s Baseball Cube page. That’s useful stuff, there.
Kansas City
Rob & Rany / Royals Review (tie)
I was tempted to go with just Royals Review, on the strength of the Mark Redman All-Star article alone, but I couldn’t. Rob Neyer and Rany Jazayerli have such a good thing going that I’m compelled to pick them, too.
Royals Review is one of the more consistently funny baseball blogs I’ve read (it has to be, they’re the Royals), and the only knock on Rob & Rany is that it’s infrequently updated. I know, picking the blog of someone who works for ESPN is a blogger faux pas, but c’mon, I dare you to read it and not agree with me. They make you almost care about a team as putrid as the Royals. That’s got to be worth something, right?
January 22nd, 2007 at 1:56 am
Thanks for the kind words. I’d have gone with Detroit Tigers Weblog, too! Bilfer runs basically the flagship of Tigers blogdom. So he’s gotta be the first choice.
Good luck to the A’s this year. If you look around my site long enough, you’d find I’m quite a fan when they’re not playing Detroit.
-Kurt
January 22nd, 2007 at 3:31 am
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