Thanks for Being Awesome, Grantland
ESPN announced today that they are suspending operations — in other words, closing down — Grantland, the site that was originally built around Bill Simmons but grew into a place with some of the best sportswriting on the planet. Their baseball coverage was phenomenal, as Jonah Keri (hired away from FanGraphs when they decided to bring in a full-time baseball writer) and Ben Lindbergh regularly put out the kind of in-depth, intelligent-but-still-approachable writing about the sport that made me jealous of their abilities.
So, as a celebration of their work, here are some of the best baseball pieces I read at Grantland over the last few years. This is just off the top of my head (and a few of FG authors who kicked in suggestions while I was writing this), so I’m certainly going to be missing a good number of great pieces, but feel free to add your own favorites in the comments below.
The Art of Pitch Framing — Lindbergh’s seminal piece on the topic.
Grand Theft Baseball — Keri’s terrific piece on stealing bases with Coco Crisp.
Rocked — An oral history of the 1989 World Series earthquake.
The Tragedy of Derek Jeter’s Defense — Lindbergh on The Captain’s glovework.
Ty Cobb as Detroit — Anna Clark on the Tigers legend.
The Website MLB Couldn’t Buy — The story of Twins.com.
Before Beane — Lindbergh on the early days of analytics in baseball.
The Year of Living Less Dangerously — Lindbergh on MLB’s changing home plate collision rule.
The Curious Case of Mark Buehrle — Rany Jazayerli on the guy who gets outs throwing 83.
Eephus Influence — Keri on the most fun pitch in baseball.
Just so much great work was published over there, because Grantland hired really talented people and gave them the ability to do creative interesting stories. I’ll miss Grantland as a one-stop place for this kind of writing, but with writers this good, I’m sure we’ll keep seeing great work from them at other places in the not too distant future.
Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.
Really enjoyed their baseball writing and writers, from the offbeat stuff (like the Twins’ website) to the harder analysis. I hope all the displaced writers speedily find new homes.
http://grantland.com/features/clayton-kershaw-best-pitcher-league-blasphemy-compare-sandy-koufax/
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/pedro-martinez-letter-to-clayton-kershaw/
It’s fun to read that… and then realize that since it was written, he has has by far the best stretch of his career.
Farewell, Grantland. That site introduced me to a lot of talented writers and phenomenal content. It will be missed greatly.
Also, it was THE place to read Charlie Pierce long pieces, sure not all on MLB but always among the site’s best writing. Now Pierce fans are down to his politics blog – yeesh.
I can’t wait to enjoy content from some of these folks again that doesn’t require me to give a pageview to “The Worldwide Leader”
In the case of the immovable object vs the unbearable bloviating manchild I think the discerning reader wins hands-down.
To me the Bill Simmons that was worth a damn died when he took that gig with Kimmel.
Do yourselves a favor and read this: http://deadspin.com/bill-simmons-is-a-shitty-writer-1703163076
A clarification: my distaste for Simmons really compromised my ability to enjoy the work of folks who wrote at Grantland. Great work was done there despite Simmons/ESPN.
Is Simmons really that intolerable? Sure he can be obnoxious at times, but generally I enjoy his nba content and espn railings.
Even if I hated him it wouldnt stop me from reading other grantland authors.
Maybe certain things dont bother me as much since Im a New Englander.
goodbye, grantland. no one read you when you were alive, and no one will miss you now that you’re dead.
Funny how this has so many down votes, when this is by far the most accurate post of the article and comments. No surprise that cameron is way off base, nor is it a surprise that so many lefties think this is a horrible development. Reminds me of the end of the prior host of the daily show (what was the peon’s name?), which basically was a circle jerk of liberal elites and wanna-bes.
Damn straight! Let’s take back our country that they stole away from us!!!!
and give it back to the rightful owners…Native Americans!
How the hell did this dope make this political?
Maybe this is selfish, but in a way I am happy that some of my favorite MLB and NBA writers will probably no longer be associated with ESPN.
I read that they are honoring the contracts of these writers, that is, having them do other work for ESPN rather than firing them.
Boo!
Also you are quite well-informed in addition to your more than adequately beered status.
Like Bender from Futurama, my brain is alcohol-fueled.
This is not hardnosed analytics or really all that much about baseball at all. But here is one of the best pieces I’ve read in 2015/ever.
http://grantland.com/features/yankees-suck-t-shirts-boston-red-sox/
I never read Grantland b/c I never click ESPN and only subscribe for college football. Never believed ESPN would support something like Grantland long-term (I have read many articles about Grantland and Simmons). When your business model is partnerships with sports leagues and the NCAA, you have to regulate your employees and content to keep those partners willing to work with you. If you have to set aside certain topics and arguments for financial profit, how can you also have the mission of being a trustworthy and comprehensive news and analysis organization? Throw in a loose cannon leader, and Grantland never made business sense to me.
Damn, that wasn’t meant to be a reply to that post.
Time to start a #draftKeri campaign to bring him back to Fangraphs?
Keri will definitely be staying put since he seems to do a lot of TV stuff for ESPN already.
#draftLindbergh
won’t he just write ore for Baseball Prospectus again? unless, you know, he becomes an assistant GM somewhere
Oddly, reading Grantland, specifically Keri and Lindbergh, landed me on FanGraphs to begin with, via some link or another. So if nothing else, I’ll always have Grantland to thank for introducing me to some really unique analysis at FG, ProFootballFocus, and FootballOutsiders. I’ll probably miss Barnwell’s NFL columns the most, but I’ve found Keri and Lindbergh’s stuff to be really, really interesting.
I think I’ll miss Barnwell the most as well. Over time, I gravitated to listening to podcasts rather than reading articles. But I would usually make time for his.
I couldn’t do Jonah’s podcast though. I know it was good, but something about his voice grated on me. I don’t mean that to be insulting, so Jonah if you’re reading this, don’t take it that way. Just a personal thing, and I still read the articles by Jonah that interested me.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Jonah Keri is on the phone.
Why would you ever miss Bill Barnwell? He’s very much like his old boss (aside from not being funny</i) in that he adopts the tone of expert despite being frequently wrong. To be clear, everyone gets things wrong, yet Barnwell makes easily foreseeable mistakes due to personal assumptions and frankly not being that knowledgeable about the sport he's covering professionally. I'll give an example in the column that originally made me aware of his existence: http://grantland.com/features/bill-barnwell-carolina-panthers-offense/
For three years, the narrative had been that the Panthers needed to upgrade the receiving corps. It had become a running joke among Panthers fans, as every year before the Olsen trade ESPN and others would project the team taking a tight end in the draft, and every year after that had them taking a wide receiver. Yet if you look back at the receivers who were actually on that team, no such upgrade was necessary. What makes this quoted section so egregious is that Steve Smith had just finished 12th in the league for receiving yards the previous season and 5th before that. Obviously he has gone on to continued success in Baltimore since this was written. Barnwell then doubled down on his hyperbole:
Greg Olsen already had become one of the league’s best receiving tight ends and has performed at an even higher level since this piece, yet Barnwell inexplicably limited him to doing a “bad impression of Owen Daniels.” Meanwhile the guy Barnwell called “a fifth wideout on some teams” finished with 953 receiving yards and 7 touchdowns last season. And again, this was foreseeable. Even in Carolina, LaFell had been consistently average to above average for a starting receiver in catch rate and yards per target. What limited his statistical production with the Panthers was a relatively low number of targets. Similarly, the narrative on Ginn is that he was done as a receiver when in truth he had simply been miscast in San Francisco (and later Arizona) when he’s been a more than competent downfield receiving option with the Panthers. Barnwell spent one paragraph in the middle of the column addressing what any true student of football knew was responsible for the drastic change in Carolina’s offense performance in 2013: the shift from an above average offensive coordinator to one who was so bad in his only previous stint that he had to wait twelve years for another chance.
The point of this isn’t just that Bill Barnwell was laughably wrong about a team he probably sees only twice a year, it’s that Barnwell replicated Simmons’ pattern of presenting the popular narrative as a self-evident truth without actually doing any of his own analysis. I have never seen any indication that Bill Barnwell can break down film to study a team’s performance. Instead he, like Simmons, appears to be an exuberant fan of a sport who adopts the posture of an expert due to an unearned level of self-confidence and a complete lack of self-reflection. That, unfortunately, was all too characteristic of some Grantland writers. The one defining trait they all shared was unwavering belief in their own work. Some of them had earned that by being brilliant (Zach Lowe) but many of them displayed the attitude without the substance to back it up.
Sure, he’s wrong his fair share of times, just like any other writer who gives opinions. I’ve read his columns for almost the entirety of Grantland’s existence and he’s right far more often than he’s wrong. And it’s not like he was the only writer in America who thought Steve Smith’s career was winding down or that Carolina needed wideout help. I think he does an acceptable job breaking down film and explaining why some things work and others don’t (a piece on Philadelphia’s offense a few games into Chip Kelly’s tenure is the first example that comes to mind). Where he really set himself apart from other writers in my mind was the Thank You For Not Coaching columns he unfortunately stopped doing last year. Those were really interesting to me, examining the in-game decision making and the math behind why they were optimal/sub-optimal decisions. Those were fun.
As I said:
If you think that Bill Barnwell is very knowledgeable about the NFL or even football in general, it’s because you know even less than he does and are being impressed by the confident manner in which he is presenting his assertions. Even the “Thank You For Not Coaching” bits were ripped off from Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, with the difference being that Easterbrook acknowledges that he’s an enthusiastic fan of the sport rather than pretending to be an expert. My point is that Barnwell makes frequently mistakes that anyone who does study football immediately recognizes as mistakes. Even worse, Barnwell doesn’t cop to his mistakes after they have proven to be wrong. Grantland has some excellent writers but Bill Barnwell was not one of them.
OK, well I guess I’m sorry for being too dumb to dislike the same thing as you. I like watching football (when I can) among other sports, and reading about it as well (when I can). I happened to enjoy his writing, along with many other writers at Grantland.
But yeah, this is a sad day for high-quality (and long-form) sports reporting, and a test in the battle between serious essays and simplified clickbait.
P.S. I wanna say Bring Jonah Back! but they apparently are honoring the contracts of their writers and reassigning them to other corners of the ESPN intertubes.
I would bet they have the ability to opt in a situation like this… and I’d be surprised if a great deal of them don’t.
Not all the writers are on contract though.
https://twitter.com/MJ_Baumann/status/660178572594667520
Either way, I’m with Sean C. I can’t imagine a lot of the writers wouldn’t choose to opt out of their contracts because of this, assuming that option exists.
Of course, there’s also the dark reality that there’s no guarantee they’d find work outside of ESPN. Unemployment is rarely fun; bills need to be paid and mouths need to be fed. It just sucks that a lot of writers (and other workers) are forced to make that type of call.
Here’s hoping everyone lands on their feet.
A joint venture led by ESPN and Rogers Communications have agreed to acquire FanGraphs.com. “We are pleased to be taking this thing over and now we’ll get started” said venture CEO and chairman Rob Ford.
Effective immediately, the Fangraphs site will reorganize as follows:
TechGraphs. Led by former Fox Sports 1 director of broadcast quality Herman Clusterbuck, TechGraphs will provide updates on the latest technological advances from innovation leader Rogers Communications
TechGraphs2. Led by former Red Sox first-base coach Ruben Amaro Jr., TechGraphs2 will deal with all that other tech stuff. David Temple will report directly to Amaro.
FanGraphs. Led by Marlins Guy, FanGraphs will present news from a fan’s perspective. Dave Cameron and the whole FanGraphs team will report directly to Marlins Guy.
RotoGraphs. Led by Pete Rose, RotoGraphs sponsored by DraftKings will cover all baseball-related competition not involving actually playing baseball.
FotoGraphs This new initiative, led by Dan Shaughnessy, will cover and be covered by writers who seek visibility above quality. Carson Cistulli will permanently report to Shaughnessy.
(release date 10/30/2015 12:15PM PDT)
WHERE’S NOTGRAPHS?!
what happened to the hardball times? 🙁
We needed room on the page for TechGraphs2, TechGraphsU and TechGraphs Classic. As a result, the Hardball Times is leaving the page to pursue other opportunities. We thank it for its many years of valuable service to the Fangraphs community.
I got to deliver the news to THT!
This is hilarious.
How droll and predictable. Of course, lefties inluding contributors to this site may think it’s amazing satire. Pathetic.
Wait, we have to be a lefty to realize that ESPN is terrible, and in what ways?
Just About Everyone: Is there a reason you’re so rude and insulting? Next time you’re tempted to post a comment like that, do everyone here a favor and jump off a bridge.
What about SteffiGrafs, led by Jim Rome, examining the sometimes troubled relationship between fan and athlete?
Or PollyGraphs, led by [insert troll name here], led by Jack Sparrow, where trolls acting like Cubs fans are tested to see if they’re actually lying Pirates fans.
It looks like your auto-linker swallowed the link to the Ty Cobb piece: http://grantland.com/features/ty-cobb-detroit/
#KeepGrantland #Kllcistulli
Sayanora Grantland. Bitter ESPN cutting all Simmons ties.
Derek Jeter’s Diaries were among the funniest baseball writing done this century
agreed, particularly loved Selig as the grim reaper for the captain.
https://grantland.com/tags/captains-log/
This is a good post, Dave. Hopefully the links will continue to function.
I’m certain a man who writes a fair amount of B.S. would be willing to fill the void with a pop-culture / sports website that he has direct control over…
Not a shock especially with the cuts ESPN has been making
This whole series was pretty cool
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/welcome-to-baseball-scout-school/
Maybe my favorite piece of writing on Grantland was Hua Hsu’s lengthy study on Mike Gimbel, the non-handsome, deeply weird pre-Beane.
http://grantland.com/features/sabermetrician-mike-gimbel-moneyball-revolution-forgotten-man/