Moderating Baseball Talk

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Hoot45
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by Hoot45 »

I blame Leroy

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CardsofSTL
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by CardsofSTL »


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themiddle54
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by themiddle54 »

Do y'all mods ever wonder why there's not better baseball talk on the board, and consider the people like pebbles and haltz and the guy who always lied about working for the redsox then whenever anyone said he claimed he worked for the redsox would be like "who said that?" and, y'know, me, and a few others don't come around much?

In part it's because BT is the same as politics. You have people here who construct straw men and argue nonstop on that straw man. It's because back when we lost the guy who said he worked for the redsox the board was a place where his ideas (even though he lied about the redsox stuff he was pretty sharp) drew hostility at times, to the point that he (justifiably) questioned the board's intelligence in his "F-you I'm out of here" posts. You guys let that jim buffoon make personal attacks at me pretty much whenever he wanted, and every time I reported one of his posts it went unanswered. You have made your metaphorical bed. The people with little to no quality to add ( but oh SO MUCH quantity ) are still around, and the people who offered quality in BT are all gone. I have NO interest in talking about analyzing the game on this board, and haven't made any kind of meaningful post in BT in about 2 years. Kinkaid drops in occasionally and that's about it. For the most part you are left with barstool fans [expletive] about a mediocre team and now you're complaining that the quality of BT is gone. This board favored the barstool fan, and the average barstool fan doesn't have much meaningful to contribute beyond "that was great!" and "these guys suck!" and now that's your BT forum. If you wanted a BT forum with intelligent discussion, you'd not have banned me when that Richie Allen dude made a series of personal attacks against me, and I then defended myself. You'd not have let people pile up on the guy who lied about working for the redsox after the HOURS he put into research and writing his posts . You'd have banned the hostile idiot who was making personal attacks because he didn't like some know it all talking fancy about baseball analytics instead.

For what it's worth, this is the bed this site has made for itself.

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Schlich
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by Schlich »

themiddle54 wrote:Do y'all mods ever wonder why there's not better baseball talk on the board, and consider the people like pebbles and haltz and the guy who always lied about working for the redsox then whenever anyone said he claimed he worked for the redsox would be like "who said that?" and, y'know, me, and a few others don't come around much?

In part it's because BT is the same as politics. You have people here who construct straw men and argue nonstop on that straw man. It's because back when we lost the guy who said he worked for the redsox the board was a place where his ideas (even though he lied about the redsox stuff he was pretty sharp) drew hostility at times, to the point that he (justifiably) questioned the board's intelligence in his "F-you I'm out of here" posts. You guys let that jim buffoon make personal attacks at me pretty much whenever he wanted, and every time I reported one of his posts it went unanswered. You have made your metaphorical bed. The people with little to no quality to add ( but oh SO MUCH quantity ) are still around, and the people who offered quality in BT are all gone. I have NO interest in talking about analyzing the game on this board, and haven't made any kind of meaningful post in BT in about 2 years. Kinkaid drops in occasionally and that's about it. For the most part you are left with barstool fans [expletive] about a mediocre team and now you're complaining that the quality of BT is gone. This board favored the barstool fan, and the average barstool fan doesn't have much meaningful to contribute beyond "that was great!" and "these guys suck!" and now that's your BT forum. If you wanted a BT forum with intelligent discussion, you'd not have banned me when that Richie Allen dude made a series of personal attacks against me, and I then defended myself. You'd not have let people pile up on the guy who lied about working for the redsox after the HOURS he put into research and writing his posts . You'd have banned the hostile idiot who was making personal attacks because he didn't like some know it all talking fancy about baseball analytics instead.

For what it's worth, this is the bed this site has made for itself.
To be fair, we've undergone an entire regime change since then. Also to be fair to you, there's not any indication that these attitudes have changed. For me the jury is still out though. I've admittedly only skimmed BT while the cards have been teh suck.

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sighyoung
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by sighyoung »

I think multiple issues are involved here. I do agree that discussions are repetitive and too often based on straw-man arguments. Game-day threads now drive a lot of the discussion here, too, and let's face it, there's been a lot of disappointment.

But some of these issues are persona-driven, too. People construct online versions of themselves, and keep to that character at all costs. Too often, the argument doesn't matter at all. The point is to position oneself as smartest, most honest, most loyal--whatever. Their arguments lack consistency because there is no consistency--it's all to win the particular argument with a particular poster at a particular time. They offer lots and lots of rhetorical questions that are veiled insults: "I'm not a chump. Are you?" "I'm not sheeple. Are you?" "I'm not drinking the Kool-Aid. Are you?" There's no argument here: there's just the need to portray themselves as the smartest, most critical, most loyal fans ever, and to purposely distort others' arguments. "Oh--you must have a relative in the front office." "Well, you just have to defend everything the front office does." Variations on a theme of Boyer14 having to be the tough guy in public.

The Red Sox guy (Steve, or Steverino) was persona-driven, too, and that was his downfall. He was smart and usefully contrarian, but he needed to be the smartest person in the room. I remember him because I still have pm's about him--not because I was an attacker, but because he was the private subject of discussion. I enjoyed his posts, but he staked his reputation on a foolish assertion: he made the gambit of declaring that the Cardinals were a junk organization that he could no longer follow--only to have the Cardinals win the World Series. After that, he largely ghosted the place. A lot of people ragged him, but many others were quite deferential to him and encouraged him to come back--you can find that in the posts. It didn't matter--some saw him as a quisling, and he'd undermined the authority on which his persona was based. And that was that.

Look, I'm one of the bar-stool fans. That's what I am. jim felt that way, and others have felt that way. I post what I can post. I'll try not to attack others, and I'll try to stick to substance. That's all I can contribute.

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vinsanity
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by vinsanity »

Schlich wrote:
themiddle54 wrote:Do y'all mods ever wonder why there's not better baseball talk on the board,
To be fair, we've undergone an entire regime change since then. Also to be fair to you, there's not any indication that these attitudes have changed. For me the jury is still out though. I've admittedly only skimmed BT while the cards have been teh suck.
Why is the jury out? No policies have changed with a new set of mods that would change the quality of the baseball talk.

In the early migration from Cards Talk I remember having this very discussion. Plenty of ideas kicked were kicked around - having a "rookie" forum to avoid a brand new account from trolling Baseball Talk was one and maybe one worth considering. Maybe more heavy handed moderating would keep things more on point. Maybe that's too authoritarian. Maybe the nature of sports "fandom" means an open, democratic discussion forum is bound to be a low value echo chamber and quality analysis is best found in reading articles.

But to his point threads like Paul DeJong: The Comp Treatment seem less frequent each passing year.

Freed Roger
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by Freed Roger »

sighyoung wrote: Look, I'm one of the bar-stool fans. That's what I am. jim felt that way, and others have felt that way. I post what I can post. I'll try not to attack others, and I'll try to stick to substance. That's all I can contribute.
Bar stool fan on GRB here too, epitomized by how I'd rather listen to a Mike Shannon-type take on a game than the ESPN stat wonk.

I sometimes enjoy reading the stat driven threads. The minor league stuff blows my mind, projecting out from A or AA ball to the MLB.

But a key aspect of stats is stacking it up vs $ side and ROI for player. I generally can't get into that, and prefer to believe in magic $ and superstition for my entertainment.

I do appreciate how sabremetrics enhances how others enjoy baseball. Meanwhile I still want to believe Lou Brock and his stolen bases were the greatest.

Since we point out defectors from baseball talk- it also includes most the female posters. I can't remember who it was that said she didn't feel like she could put a word in there.

Anyways if the point of the OP to this thread is: all kinds of baseball chatter can exist here, just don't be an ass -then I agree.

Go Cards!

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Farewell Friends
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by Farewell Friends »

Did Steverino lie about working for the Red Sox? I don't remember this coming about, but I wasn't active during that point.

Honestly, I don't think the baseball discussion at GRB is much different now than it was 5-10 years ago. The decorum is probably better, in fact. I wasn't innocent back in the day and fully admit that I enjoyed the dick-swinging aspect of message boarding when I was right about something. But I was also in my early 20s and having fun. My biggest beef was that people like Richie Allen were repeatedly allowed to take cheap shots that would draw myself or ICE into a flame war, then cry like babies when they were attacked. To the mods' credit, they eventually cleaned that up and I haven't noticed it much over the past several years.

I said this yesterday, but there's always been angsty, anxiety-ridden discussion at GRB over the team's direction. It's just different now because some really good members have left or post less frequently and it's the same handful of people stuck in a never-ending loop of the same argument. Before arguments about the team's financials based on reports from Forbes, there were arguments about Rolen vs. Glaus that went on forever. Some of the arguments get tiresome, but this place is still miles apart from other forum cesspools.

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lukethedrifter
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by lukethedrifter »

I don't remember Richie Allen being such a [expletive] disturber but he's been called out twice in this thread.

Richie, care to return serve?

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InvincibleCakeEater
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Re: Moderating Baseball Talk

Post by InvincibleCakeEater »

lukethedrifter wrote:I don't remember Richie Allen being such a [expletive] disturber but he's been called out twice in this thread.

Richie, care to return serve?
Yeah, he was kind of the first shot guy that threw his hands up while the return shot got the flag.

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