Who's smarter: Abraham Lincoln or Dusty Baker?

~Alan in Columbus

but I have noticed a definite slip in quality there. Maybe it's just because it's a slow season, but it's become little more than a compilation of newspaper and Ken Rosenthal articles coupled with generic and insanely repetitive analysis. Tim Dierkes, the guy who runs the site, said it's because he's been working harder to verify rumors he hears, but by golly I'd rather hear completely unfounded rumors than mediocre analysis of a move that has already happened or the same news over and over about Brian Roberts. And the Cubs/Mets/Sawx/Yanks slant there is kind of annoying.

I feel compelled to find you some sportswriters to replace the sorry lot of us in your esteem. These are some who make me jealous that they don't cover the Reds.

Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star is pretty much the best newspaper baseball writer going right now.
http://www.kansascity.com/180/
His blog touches on any topic under the sun and it's becoming increasingly Cincinnati-centric since he's working on a Big Red Machine book.
http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/

Brian O'Neill of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette mixes in a lot of entry-level sabremetrics into his columns--along the lines of what Rob Neyer used to do, although obviously it's mostly about the Pirates.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pirates/statsgeek.asp

Tim Machman of the NY Sun does a fantastic job of avoiding the usual NY rubbish and bringing actual insight to the fishbowl (maybe because he's at the city's 5th or so largest paper). He's one of the generation of young writers coming up who really understands the advances in baseball analysis, although I think he tries to hide it some for fear of being outed and locked in the basement.
http://www.nysun.com/authors/Tim+Marchman

I've only recently discovered Todd Zolecki of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but he does a great job of educating his readers which is important because Philly has a lot of players who are Roschach tests for the changes in baseball thinking.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/phillies_zone/

There's also a writer in Seattle--I think at the Post-Intelligencer--who I'm impressed with, although apparently not enough to remember his name.

Without question a lot of the really interesting baseball writing is happening online (that would be a very long list), but these are some of the best of the old media coverage.

he picks only the douchebag questions to answer.  ive counted no fewer than 3 times this offseason he's answered the question "what happened to elizardo rameirez?"  the dude is just lazy.  and a jerk.