You can’t judge it one game at a time

Baseball has mattered in this town for more than 130 years. The famed Royal Rooters came into being in the 1890s. They traveled to Pittsburgh during the 1903 World Series and raised holy hell. They were the BoSox Club, only they drank more.

With that kind of deep interest has come media coverage. The passion has always been there. The only difference now is the method of providing interested fans with their daily fix of news and opinion. In the old days, fans had to vent through the printed press via letters and phone calls. Now a fan may vent by picking up the phone or jumping on a computer. Direct confrontation has always been an option, too.

There are two distinct items here. Media scrutiny is one thing, and a pure fan passion that can manifest itself in ways good or bad is another.

The idea of athletes and their bosses becoming upset when they are being panned is a given. Often people who appear to be enlightened do not, in crunch time, truly get it at all. Youk spoke the other day of the media “having our backs.’’ But that is not our role, and never has been.

Simply put, our job is to call ’em as we see ’em, and with that comes the assumption that we have the proper background to make judgments in the first place. No writer or commentator will ever be 100 percent correct. When a judgment turns out to be incorrect, it should be an easy thing to say, “Looks like I was wrong.’’ And I would say that in the majority of cases a writer or commentator is personally pleased to be proven wrong if it means that something good is going on. For, contrary to a prevailing school of thought, most writers and commentators I know do not revel in team failure and conflict. We value a happy working place, and winning normally enhances that possibility.