Following sports through the media is a funny thing. Back in the early 1990’s, you’d never know what a player was doing during their off time. You’d never know when a clubhouse flare-up would happen. You’d never rarely find out when a player wanted to be traded, why, and you’d rarely find out what management had to say about it.
Today, sports in a 24/7 news industry with daily news cycles. For better or worse, one of the consequences of these cycles is having the ability to know more about our favorite athletes and teams. It is common place for you to know why an athlete wants to be traded, or when a team might release a player. You know why a player might skip a start or what nagging injury that player is playing through.
The 24/7 cycle has also sprung a new phenomenon: The Offseason. Professional drafts are becoming more popular. Trades, free agency, contract negotiations, all are treated the same, if not higher than stats & box scores. Take for example, ‘transactions’. What used to be a small blurb in the paper suddenly has become an entire industry. There are websites, such as MLBTradeRumors.com that analyze and detail every transaction in the majors (while its sister site, RotoAuthority.com, analyzes these from a fantasy baseball perspective.).
Honestly, I can’t look down at it either. I love to see when a player is in contract negotiations—what their demands are and what the team is willing to shell out. I followed the Jake-Peavy-to-the-Cubs saga daily last winter. I can truthfully say that I spend more time following the non-sports part of sports more than actually watching games. <./p>
The question remains, though: Is the offseason over taking the real season? As an observer of SportsCenter since the early 1990’s, I can tell you that the actual amount of game footage and highlights from the previous night has dwindled over the years. Instead of spending 30-60 seconds per game, not a lot of time as is, many games are represented by a single highlight and a brief score update. In it’s place: Offseason updates of the NFL, analysis deconstructing the latest “big game” between the Yankees-Red Sox, or some new promotion from ESPN (re: “Who’s Now”, “Who’s Next”, “The Budweiser Hot Seat”, etc.)
Again, for better or worse, it’s just the new sports media landscape. I doubt there will ever be a harkening back to the “Golden Era”, when I would get a 60 second update on a Kansas City- Oakland game in the middle of May. To answer the orginial question: Is off the court coverage overtaking on the court coverage? Yes, I think so. But to quote Bruce Hornsby (or Tupac, depending on your age), “That’s just the way it is, things will never be the same.”