per an email from Paul this morning: From Dave Schoenfield’s blog today on ESPN.com about how the Angels are baseball’s most disappointing team:

I just returned from vacation and spent a portion of the weekend catching up on the HBO series "The Newsroom." The show has been a little uneven -- what's with all the personal discussions and arguments taking place right in the middle of the newsroom, in front of everyone? -- but a recent episode did present an interesting dilemma.

The theme of the show's first season has been the challenges the newscast faces as it transitions to broadcasting more legitimate news and less fluff. Set in 2011, when the newscast doesn't initially cover the Casey Anthony trial the ratings drop dramatically, so the producers have to decide: Do you give more air time to the trial or to the more important debt-crisis debate going on in Congress.

Well, the Boston Red Sox are Casey Anthony. The Los Angeles Angels are the debt crisis. It's a sexier issue to talk about Josh Beckett's golf outings than Ervin Santana's hanging sliders. It's a lot more fun to break down Bobby Valentine's personality conflicts -- misunderstood genius or funny-nose-and-glasses nutty? -- than to break down Mike Scioscia's bullpen usage. Tabloid headlines about chemistry issues and unhappy players will bring in more readers than stories about Dan Haren's earned run average.

At first I thought he was going to make a really insightful point about how sports journalist – with ESPN being the biggest culprit – focus on the bigger market teams that drive ratings (ie. Casey Anthony & Red Sox/Angels) while ignoring the real stories (ie. debt crisis & smaller market teams). Of course he didn’t and completely missed the point. The Angels aren’t the debt crisis in this comparison. In the Newsroom universe, the debt crisis was being almost completely ignored by news shows despite being a really big and important story, in favor of fluff like Casey Anthony. The Angels, on the other hand, still get a ton of coverage in sports media even if people aren’t necessarily focusing in on their struggles as much as they should (I think the Angels’ struggles are being talked about the appropriate amount anyway). Furthermore, the Angels’ struggles aren’t a more important story than the Red Sox struggles (both are equally important) so there is no comparison between that and the Newsroom thing.

Just really funny that a guy at ESPN makes that inaccurate comparison when the accurate and correct comparison – Casey Anthony is Red Sox drama/Mike Trout love/other fluff and Debt Crisis is A’s/O’s/Pirates/ect. playoff runs – is right there. Those guys are so blind to what they are doing they can’t even see that when they are trying to make a comparison, instead thinking that one of the “Casey Anthony” stories is actually the “debt crisis” story.

Orioles Observer