Rob Neyer

When you hear someone talking about a Golden Age of something, usually they’re full of shit. Not always. But usually.

I say usually because usually it’s called the Golden Age for one of two reasons: merely because the something is old; or because that’s when whoever’s calling it a Golden Age were kids, or fell in some love with the something. The Golden Age of comic books falls under the former heading; the Golden Age of baseball, the latter.

The problem with dubbing something the Golden Age is that most things, or least most of the things we care much about, just keep on getting better. Movies. Television. Comic books. Dental anesthesia. So we can say we’re in the Golden Age ... but then tomorrow (if we’re honest) we gotta say, "Oops, I mean this is the Golden Age."

Baseball writing’s like that, I think. Baseball writing’s changed a ton in the last decade or two, which is actually what I’m here to write about. But I also should say this, straightaway: While I have many complaints about the current state of baseball writing – because, you know, I’ve got complaints about everything, except for the wife and the kid – whatever’s missing today in quality is more than compensated by quantity and (especially) variety.

But hey, don’t trust me! Here’s John Perrotto – who first covered the Pirates (for the Beaver County Times) nearly 30 years ago – on the state of baseball writing: "I think it’s tremendous, better than ever. I think it’s better for the fans, better for the game."

Baseball writing is tremendously healthy, and (in related news) I will happily argue that there’s never been a better time to be a reader of baseball writing.

Still, while only the foolish long for "the good old days," it’s also foolish to believe that nothing has been lost; that everything is better than it used to be. I think we’ve gained more than we’ve lost. Probably a lot more. But that doesn’t mean nothing good has been lost.

Many of the old rhythms simply don’t exist any more ... and those old rhythms might have resulted in better journalism. For example, as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in most cities there were morning and evening newspapers. As Perrotto told me, "When I started, we were an afternoon paper; I would hold my breath that the morning paper didn’t have it. Then when I was at morning paper, I’d have to hold my breath that the afternoon paper didn’t have it!"

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Most cities now have just one newspaper (and some of those newspapers don’t even publish every day). And with the loss of all those newspapers – and yes, some morning newspapers are gone, too – there’s of course been a loss of many, many good-paying jobs; according to the Pew Research Center, newsroom jobs fell by 42 percent from 2000 to 2014. And there have been real job losses even at the papers that haven’t gone under. When current A’s beat writer Susan Slusser started at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996, that paper had more than 20 full-time sportswriters on the staff; last year, she told me, that number was down to just 13.

There are fewer young writers with good salaries and benefits, and fewer editors to teach them. Meanwhile, that morning-afternoon dynamic has been replaced by ... well, there really isn’t much of a rhythm at all. Thanks, Twitter! "When I started in daily newspapers more than 20 years ago," the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold told me last winter, "a newspaper would have three deadlines, maybe four. You used to script your day by the deadlines. Now the metabolism is very different; now your whole day is geared around perpetual deadlines. You know, news could break at 3pm and you don’t say, ‘Okay, that’s cool. I’ll write it when I wake up in the morning.’ "

And while deadlines might sound onerous, deadlines and their attendant rhythms gave writers time to breathe, to write, to think.

"I think something’s been lost," Goold says, "when you prioritize speed over accuracy, speed over context. That’s not to say that accuracy and context don’t exist. I’m just saying that they don’t always coexist with speed."

Speaking of time, most (if not quite all) writers now spend at least some time interacting with their readers. "That started with e-mail," Perrotto told me, "which made everyone more accessible. But even more now with Twitter."

"I do welcome the interaction," Goold says of Twitter, "and I do think it’s brought increased accountability. But I don’t work for Twitter. Twitter does not pay my bills. Twitter does amplify my newspaper and its product."

Twitter also takes energy, both temporal and mental. I was in an ESPN meeting once, with all those big-name baseball writers you know and love, and there was some serious angst as they described the pain of getting a scoop, only to sit on it for an extra few minutes and see a competitor break the news on Twitter.

Why all this matters, I don’t exactly know. But I can tell you that sports reporters still attach a great deal of importance to "having the story first," even if it’s really just a "fact" rather than an actual story. Maybe that’s how they figure on justifying their salaries. Maybe they’re right. I don’t know. But I know that when Ken Rosenthal or Tim Kurkjian or Jon Heyman is the first to report that some .230-hitting slugger just signed a four-year deal for $63 million, within about six minutes hardly anyone else remembers who had it first. Let alone cares.

Twitter might actually be the single least interesting thing that baseball writers do, if only because most of them don’t seem compelled to actually be interesting on Twitter. Unless you’re interested in links to their stories (fair), and routine play-by-play (please, no). Granted, Dodgers beat writer Andy McCullough can’t help being witty, whatever he’s doing. But he’s part of a tiny minority.

Which isn’t to say beat writers -- who by the way, now represent a small percentage of "baseball writers," at least if you include ill- and unpaid bloggers -- aren’t doing interesting work. Because many of them are. "I think it’s just different, Goold says. "I feel that, increasingly, writers are looking where their strengths are. Beat writers are doing different things." Goold, for example, co-hosts a weekly podcast about the Cardinals, which I am sure would be essential if I were a Cardinals fan. There are some tremendous young (or youngish) beat writers out there, skilled reporters who also write with verve, like Andy McCullough, Pedro Moura (Angels), Nick Piecoro (Diamondbacks) and Alex Speier (Red Sox). Just scratching the surface there, by the way. Those are some guys I’ve actually met, and admire.

Is baseball writing "better" than it used to be? On average? I don’t know. I don’t think baseball writing’s analogous to (say) television drama, which seems almost infinitely better than it was when I was growing up.

What I’m fairly certain about? Today there’s more baseball writing than ever before. Yes, even with the loss of all those newspapers. There are 30 major-league teams with their attendant newspapers and fan-centric blogs and MLB.com writers, plus the various sabermetrics-oriented sites, plus the various scouting/prospect-oriented sites, plus the generalist sites like ESPN.com and their competitors … which means there are some hundreds of folks writing about baseball, with many (though not most) of them getting paid real money to do it.

It’s not all good. There are team-centric, unpaid bloggers and writers for mainstream, or wanna-be mainstream sites, some of them even making decent money, who do little more than regurgitate passages from other sites’ stories, maybe adding a few sentences of "analysis" that add nothing of value. All that "content" does is crowd good writing and original analysis out of the sports space.

But there are also low- or little-paid bloggers, especially those writing about their favorite teams, doing tremendously interesting, entertaining work. Work that just 10 or 20 years ago simply would not have existed. The fact that there’s so much more baseball writing means more lousy writing, deficient in both style and intelligence, but also more excellent writing that enriches our lives and, at the same time, demonstrates to editors and team executives that talented people come from all sorts of places.

Which is why there’s never been a better time to be a reader of baseball writing, but also why there’s never been a better time to be an aspiring writer of baseball writing. As Goold says, if someone writes to write about baseball, "they don’t have to find a magazine or a newspaper. Now there’s an infinite number of ways to make your way into baseball writing. And if you’re good, you can build an audience."

That’s true, I think! It’s also tough darts for an old guy like me. As Perrotto says, "So many of the younger writers are willing to work for free, and young readers are more likely to enjoy those younger writers." I suppose that’s true, too; I mean, the first part is definitely true, as younger writers tend to have lower expenses, fewer children, etc. And yes, younger readers are more likely to share sensibilities with younger writers. On the other hand, don’t they keep telling us that younger fans don’t read nearly as much? Who is reading baseball content in 2017, anyway? I don’t believe anyone’s ever answered that question in a systematic way.

If I were (still) running a baseball site, I would love to know the answers to those questions. Then again, maybe the point shouldn’t be giving the readers what they want; maybe the point should be giving the readers what they don’t know they want, but will come to love when you give it to them. And while there’s hardly an organized effort to do that, the effect of today’s scattershot baseball journalism is essentially the same: If there’s something you want, or will come to want, it’s almost certainly out there. Gloriously so.