The Major League Baseball playoffs lead off this weekend’s list of stellar sports reads from around the Web, starting with Nathan Fenno’s marvelous piece in The Washington Times about the last time Washington played host to a post-season game.

The year was 1933, still early in the Depression and late in the era of Prohibition. Fenno goes retro about a city with six daily newspapers, scalpers and pickpockets galore around the stadium grounds, and the Senators falling to the New York Giants in the World Series:

“Three hundred and fifty policemen eyed the crowd. Prohibition would end in December. Concern about the nation’s whiskey supply — 18 million gallons — loomed. Would there be enough? Three-point-two-percent beer, the only alcohol 26-year-old Senators manager and shortstop Joe Cronin drank, already was legal. Pabst Blue Ribbon insisted its brew ’soothes jaded nerves, develops fresh energy and helps build a sound, healthy body.’ But Griffith Stadium remained as dry as the afternoon. That was a good thing for home plate umpire Charley Moran.”

Next week, 79 years later, the Nationals will end that long home drought against the Cardinals. To quote a clergyman cited by Fenno all those years ago:

“A new hope is evident in the hearts of the people.”

More Baseball Goodness

• Author and former pitching prospect Pat Jordan writes in SB Nation about his last game of his career being the biggest game of his life.
• Bruce Arthur of The National Post on Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout and the new math of the Triple Crown.
• Charlie Pierce of Grantland on the miserable throwback season of the Boston Red Sox.
• Diana Moskovitz of The Classical on how to survive on hope as a Pittsburgh Pirates fan.
• Dave Kaufman, writing in the Montréal Gazette about the ultimate loss — of a team, to become the Washington Nationals.

Weekly Rewind

On the blog this week, I wrote about the continuing existential probing of the NFL; a new rash of books about the Dallas Cowboys to relieve fans of the awful present; the mockery of sports justice by some ultra-powerful governing bodies; and resisting the temptation to place politics above sports.

The one post I’d like to have back, or many need to expound on in a future post, is the emergence of fan sports mega blog sites and the rap they get for low quality. Geting the worst rap of all is the commercially lucrative Bleacher Report, the subject of a scathing story in a San Francisco alt-weekly. In response have come some thoughtful defenses of BR, including King Kaufman, the site’s writer program manager, who wrote a solid sports column at Salon for many years.

After I wrote that post, I took a deeper look around BR and noticed a vast improvement, much different than the impression I’ve had. There was some bad old-school bias that came out in my post, but more than anything I was beleaguered by the rote demands for high churn and a formula dictated by reverse-engineering. It’s hard to develop a distinctive voice under the duress of running with the SEO-driven herd. My first instinct is to run from it. Like hell.

But BR and SB Nation are evolving into even more powerful entities as the legacy media’s struggles continue, and it’s far too tempting for someone from my background to be dismissive of that reality.

Other “printies” like to lambaste the blogging masses for not being exactly like them. At the Awful Announcing blog previewing the ongoing Blogs With Balls Conference, Andrew Bucholz takes exception to the “replacement journalists” sneer in declaring that the bloggers have won. But this shouldn’t be about picking sides:

“People on both sides are becoming more cognizant of the other side’s value, and it’s those people in turn that are doing well. Lots of mainstream reporters on the rise are the ones who get the web, get blogging, understand Twitter, etc. Many of the bloggers who have gone on to greater prominence are those who can use mainstream content effectively to build something new, and those who can use mainstream techniques when it adds value. The lines have become so blurred that it’s very hard to find many people who can be described strictly as ‘bloggers’ or ‘journalists.’ Most are doing both.”

The glee that comes with knowing that the 2012 edition of The Best American Sports Writing is now available didn’t last long.

I downloaded it onto my iPad (this is 2012), eager to dig into Wright Thompson on cricket, Thomas Lake on Darrent Williams, S.L. Price on Aliquippa football, Jeré Longman on Leo Messi, Alex Belth on George Kimball, Taylor Branch on the NCAA and Ben McGrath on Nancy Lieberman, among others.

The general editor, as usual, is Glenn Stout, who’s fighting the good fight bringing high-quality reads to the SB Nation blog network, as I wrote about last week.

(And today’s longform feature there comes from the wonderful Pat Jordan, an author and frequent contributor to Stout’s anthology, about the end of his brief minor league baseball career.)

Surely the remaining pleasant evenings of back porch reading this fall will be filled with such bliss as all this.

But so will the nagging thought that the books and contents of the devices that I hold in my hands are feeling like luxury items. That these, and not the race-to-the-bottom gruel that drives some of the most lucrative precincts of the sports Web, are the guilty pleasures.

Especially after I absorbed all of what SF Weekly writer Joe Eskenazi has to say in his damning report on Bleacher Report, another very popular site with most content written by unpaid fan contributors.

That’s because Bleacher Report is not only ridiculously profitable, Eskenazi reports it was designed precisely to be what it is. Paid writers with reputations for providing quality material have come later, not long before the site was purchased by Turner Sports.

Tom Ley at Deadspin took a few shots of his own: “What’s depressing about Bleacher Report is that it’s handed its editorial brain wholesale over to the marketplace and reduced the business to its most lamentable impulses.”

Oh really, this from Deadspin, which gave the world flood-the-zone coverage of Brett Favre’s schwanz? (I’m sorry, there’s no delicate way to put this, and my Teutonic blood nearly came to a boil over the laughable irony of Ley’s lament. Is he aware of how Nick Denton built his media empire?)

What is sobering is this paragraph from Eskenazi about Bleacher Report’s commercial success, as it sits at No. 3 on the growing heap of sports sites, far ahead of those run by newspapers and other venerable media organizations:

“After denigrating and downplaying the influence of the Internet for decades, many legacy media outlets now find themselves outmaneuvered by defter and web-savvier entities like Bleacher Report, a young company engineered to conquer the Internet. In the days of yore, professional media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on information. Trained editors and writers served as gatekeepers deciding what stories people would read, and the system thrived on massive influxes of advertising dollars. That era has gone, and the Internet has flipped the script. In one sense, readers have never had it so good — the glut of material on the web translates into more access to great writing than any prior era. The trick is sifting through the crap to find it. Most mainstream media outlets are unable or unwilling to compete with a site like Bleacher Report, which floods the web with inexpensive user-generated content. They continue to wither while Bleacher Report amasses readers and advertisers alike.”

I probably should be more bothered by this than I am, especially when I think about how those making The Best American Sports Writing of 2032 — if it’s still around by then — will earn their chops. Will they be living at home until they’re 35, blogging for free until they get a paying gig somewhere, anywhere?

But this doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game — some can have their crap “boobtastic” slideshows while others can be moved by the tragic story of Derek Boogaard. And all that’s in between.

I wrote hopefully last week that the longform evolution of sportswriting on the Web can be a very bright one. Dan Levy, a featured writer at Bleacher Report (and formerly with The Sporting News), has taken serious issue with Deadspin’s assertions, and, by extension, Eskenazi’s.

I do retain the cautious optimism “that chasing page views and appealing to the lowest common denominator just aren’t enough.”

Yet I also want to clutch my new book — or rather the tablet containing it — ever harder as a brace against the continuing onslaught of what prevails.