I still have an ESPN Insider subscription, mostly for Neyer/Stark/Gammons and Gary Gillette when he does write for them. I am still sort of angry that the blogs are Insider though.

ESPN seems to be the only one who doesn't notice the free content strewn all over the Internet.

Clueless.

ESPN deadens its impact in baseball by putting its best content behind the Insider wall.

What if ESPN College Gameday was pay-per-view? Think ESPN would drive the college football conversation like it does?

A pox upon ESPN.com for putting Gammons behind the Insider cloak. I refuse to pay for it. I also go to the web page about 1/4 as often as I used to. I hope their b-suite numbers are down and thier advertisers start re-considering their advertising dollars. Maybe then they'll realize that some of us used to go to their page to read Gammons... and that if we have to pay for it there is plenty of other free content on the internet... where other websites will get our "hits" and reap advertising dollars as a result.

Yeah, I used to ready Neyer and Gammons religiously, until they got moved behind the wall. At that point, I had to give up on sports, and starting reading about politics from people like Tom Friedman and David Brooks, until ABC/ESPN or whoever took over the New York Times and came up with the great idea of Times Select. Now I have a whole internet and can't find any place to read about sports nor politics. What's next, I have to pay for nudie pictures?

Peter had this to say in his blog:

David Pinto's Baseball Musings is one of those blog sites that must be read, daily. In an era when teams such as the Red Sox, Athletics and Indians invest a lot in trying to define defensive players, Pinto has been unveiling his own system for rating defensive performance. And like the research done by teams, he often shows that the players our eyes tell us are great defenders aren't necessarily great defenders.

On Wednesday, he ran his chart on teams' runs saved per nine innings. The Astros and Athletics ran 1-2, with the Cardinals, Indians and White Sox right behind them. The worst? The Reds and Royals -- my eyes worked! -- with the Yankees, Padres and Nationals right ahead of them.

until ABC/ESPN or whoever took over the New York Times and came up with the great idea of Times Select.

Nope, the NYT is still owned by the Sulzberger family, as it always has been. They came up with the stupid Times Select thing on their own.

Like readers EricF, Soxfan1, Matt, et al, I'm not pleased with ESPN for putting their most read talent behind whay you guys are referring to aptly as "the wall." I've written them as well, but now as a blogger myself, I risk some hypocrisy. David here is a professional blogger and thus dependant on advertising. He recently took a stand with respect to Google's China buckling. But like everything else, we all in one or or another, in business. I'm hawking a book and starting a career in writing. And yes, I want to paid one day. Like Pinto, ESPN is indeed in business and most assuredly compensates Peter Gammons quite well. Perhaps he's even paid a percentage of hits he gets. Nonetheless, individual creativity and talent are marketable commodities. I pay for my Blues CDs, my favorite mystery novels and pay-per-view wrestling for my son. Alas, I'm now going to see my credit card with a monthly automatic payment now to ESPN. Hopefully the suits won't stoop as low to having to pay to see box scores.

I think ESPN made a smart business decision.

There concern should be a bulky website.

My thoughts on the Gammons/Strak move to blogdom here:

http://rotomusing.blogspot.com/2006/02/peter-gammons-jayson-stark.html

David - Speaking of making a blog difficult to reach, when are you going to use full feeds rather than just headlines for your RSS feeds? Your blog is one of the most frustrating to read as I have to visit you site for each post rather than just those that I find most interesting and want to read the comments. This in turn means that I have to wait for each overly bloated page to load. Is there anyway you could reduce the loading time of your pages? The number of links, ads, etc on this website is astounding.

Chris,

That's the first time I've heard that criticism. I actually don't like blogs that put out the entire article in their feed. I want to skim the headlines and summaries and just read the posts that look interesting.

The blog loading slowing is becoming more of a problem. I'll see what I can do to fix it. However, one suggestion is that instead of loading a particular post, you load the whole site, then scroll through the posts. That way, it only loads once.

And remember, this is my full time job. The ads pay for food and clothes and heat and other essentials.

Well, I just found 75KBytes that I was able to knock off the page. That should make it load a bit faster.

ESPN.com has become so bloated that its not worth visiting anymore. The last straw was espnmotion launching automatically when I tried to catch a score while at work, busted. While they do have some worthwhile stats available, I've switched to hardball times and of course Baseball Musings is a mandatory daily visit.
If Gammons and Neyer were free I would consider putting up with the bloat as they are usually worth a read, but by trying to wring admittedly small change from my pocket, ESPN loses out on my eyes and clicks. It seems to me that if you are charging customers to visit there should be no advertising, since I won't pay I don't know if that is the case or not but I suspect not.
FWIW, you can catch a 20-25 minute Gammons interview weekly on WEEI.com every Thursday (usually between 3:00-5:00 pm eastern time) still free so far.

I find it somewhat amusing that "Oh my God, they're blogging!" is considered a big deal. How exactly is this different than their columns? Oh right, now it's called a blog, so other bloggers will take them more seriously or something.

Same content, new term.

I agree with Steve, Neyer's daily column was in many ways a blog. They are relatively long essays but how's that different from baseballanalysts.com? The point with putting blogs behind subscription walls is that it cuts down on the audience. Face it, most writers crave attention, and it helps their book sales. What's the point of shouting in forest when no one else is there to hear it. I certainly think this has hurt the NYT columnists in that their articles are no longer on the most emailed list for NYT. I certainly have stopped using ESPN as my source of baseball news because of every other artilce is In$ider. Would I have bought Neyer's books now if I never read his earlier writing, I doubt it.

They should not even be allowed to call these "blogs" when they are charging to read them. Blogging is about "free" speech and an open exchange of ideas. These aren't "blogs"... they are more like scams. Who are they kidding?

One thing that's making me visit ESPN even less now - their new interface is no good for tab browsing.

I used to hit up ESPN several times a day for Gammons, Stark, Sickels and other content. As of about a year ago, I went to read Stark's numbers and some Page 2 stuff. Now, I pretty much just visit once a week or so (more often when I'm bored) to read Simmons and a couple of other Pg 2 guys.

e$pn