SportsGrid Presents: The Top 25 Sports Bloggers, Writers, And Tweeters
The Key Reserves
Joe Posnanski, JoeBlog – Many people consider Posnanski, a Sports Illustrated senior writer, to be the best sports columnist in America. In addition to that unofficial title, he might well be the country’s premier long-form sports blogger. His motto for his personal blog is was “Curiously Long Posts,” and they are – but more importantly, they’re always good. He squeezes the maximum out of every topic, including many he just couldn’t fit into his SI pieces.
Posnanski has a definite regular-guy appeal about him, manifested in such tales as this one involving his childhood hero, mediocre 1970s Cleveland Indians second baseman Duane Kuiper, and uses his average, well, Joe-ness to expertly convey the human element of sports, which is what the best sportswriters do. Just as importantly, he does it with solid, funny, accessible writing. Just how readable is Posnanski? He made a 9,000 word opus on the recent history of the notoriously awful Kansas City Royals not only bearable, but engaging. That’s talent.
Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter, ESPN.com – Every football fan should follow one (or both) of these ESPN analysts on Twitter. Much has been made of ESPN’s stingy Twitter guidelines (let the Sports Guy live!), but Monday Night Countdown’s resident NFL insiders need not worry: they dish very little in the form of sports media criticism.
Instead, the two provide some of the best NFL tidbits under 140 characters – injury updates, lineup changes, and contract negotiations – as they happen. Nowhere is their mastery of Twitter more apparent than during the NFL combine. Wondering what Ryan Matthews ran in the 40? Bam. Want to know how high Tim Tebow can jump? Pow. What about coaches’ wives and their business cards? Whammy.
Dan Shanoff, danshanoff.com – Let’s get this out of the way – yes, he has appeared on Mediaite. But he’s more than worthy of inclusion on this list, connections to this site or not. He wrote for ESPN. He currently writes the Wake Up Call (Shanoff’s WUC) every weekday morning for the Sporting News‘ Sporting Blog. He has a personal blog, also linked here. But most interestingly of all, he has Tim Teblog, which is just as it sounds – a blog devoted entirely to ex-Florida quarterback/NFL hopeful/Super Bowl commercial star Tim Tebow.
It’s impressive that Shanoff is devoting this kind of energy to Tebow at all, since he’s already writing on every sports-related topic imaginable for the WUC, but if Tebow actually becomes an NFL star (still very much in question), Shanoff’s chronicling of him may become his most significant blogging contribution.
Grant Wahl, SI.com – The senior Sports Illustrated writer has some serious journalistic chops, reporting two classic SI cover stories: the famous Chosen One LeBron cover, and Where’s Daddy?, a detailed look at the mating habits of the North American basketball player. But his real value on your RSS feed will be measured in the mad scramble for World Cup knowledge this summer.
Wahl’s blog on Fan Nation delivers the goods when it comes to the other Football, and will provide a great study guide to quiet some of those guilty feelings while you cluelessly watch the most popular sport on earth you ignorant American.
Ives Galarcep, Soccer By Ives – There IS a market for soccer info in the U.S., as Ives Galarcep can attest. He writes for Fox Soccer (and previously worked for ESPN Soccernet), but his blog affords him the greatest potential for coverage – and he takes full advantage. His tagline is, “The world of soccer with an American voice,” which about says it all. He and his team do as thorough a job as anyone covering the Major League Soccer scene, but they also do yeoman’s work reporting on happenings from around the world.
They dutifully track the most relevant new developments with their ongoing ticker feature, and even better, they often actively encourage reader participation. When they do, the readers respond in full force. If you care about this summer’s World Cup (and you’ll get sucked in, just like you did with the Winter Olympics), Galarcep’s blog just might become destination viewing.
Jason King, Yahoo Sports – College basketball has a lot of teams, and unless you went to a perennial top 25 basketball school, it can be hard to keep up with the ebb and flow of a particular season. Enter college sports expert and Kansas City Star alumnus Jason King (a lot of those on this list), who will do the legwork for you. In addition to giving you confidence once your coworkers break out the brackets, King does a great job of interviewing players, as seen in this piece on Derrick Roland’s comeback from a gruesome injury.
Katie Baker, All over – Again, to get this out of the way, yes, she has appeared on Mediaite. And really, if this truly is a problem, we have to ask: are you questioning our taste in writers? Because that would hurt. Regardless, Baker has earned her recognition. We can’t help but find ourselves agreeing with her thoughts on postgame interviews (plus it’s surreal to a read a “normal,” pre-Thanksgiving account of anything involving Tiger), and her take on the New York Post’s perpetually irritated Phil Mushnick. She’s shown an uncanny Deadspin knack when guest-editing that site, and also has a Tumblr. And, impressively, on top of all this, “a day job.”
Spencer Hall, EDSBS – Do you love college football unironically while also wanting to distance yourself from the game juuuust enough to occasionally laugh at what a ridiculous (and corrupt) spectacle the sport can be? Then EDSBS is the team for you! Hall, along with Holly Anderson and Doug Gillett, are the squad behind Every Day Should Be Saturday (started by Hall under the pen name “Orson Swindle”), as funny (and snarky) a college football blog as exists.
Just check out this piece from a couple weeks ago – see? We told you this blog was funny. Notable running features include The Curious Index (or, “Orson Swindle’s Curiosities, Rumin-ations, and Various Eccentri, By Every Morn Ougtn’t Be Satur-day Morn”), and the Fulmer Cup (named after former Tennessee football coach Phil Fulmer), which ranks college football teams by their respective amounts of player lawlessness. And yet, these people genuinely love the game: in the Orson Swindle FAQs section (clearly written by Hall himself), he says of himself, “Has college football problem.”
