Here at the sports desk located somewhere below decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState — yes, we’re still here; sorry about the lengthy silence — we take a moment from scolding Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken about not cleaning the fish cracker crumbs they keep leaving in the couch to take a look at the follies and foibles of mainstream media’s rolling train wreck they call sports coverage.

The New York Times, which last year bought subscription-based sports website The Athletic that skews so hard left it is to genuine sports coverage what MSNBC is to even-handed news reporting, has announced that going forward, it will no longer have a sports department. Instead, while it scatters its current sportswriters hither and yon across different departments, it will rely on The Athletic for local sports coverage and fold it into the Times’ online subscription plans.

While recent generations weaned on ESPN and variations thereof may find it hard to believe, there once was a time when sports coverage focused on … brace yourself … sports. Said coverage started at the grassroots level in your hometown newspaper or on the radio. You had your local coverage by beat writers, be it covering the nearest pro teams assuming such existed, college, or high school. City slickers are often surprised to learn that the big game isn’t on Sunday during football season in many parts of the country. It’s on Saturday, or in many places, Friday. Shocking, I know. This phenomenon also extends to other sports; for example, woe be to the Indiana Pacers’ chances of getting much local media attention while the Indiana high school basketball tournament is in action.

National coverage was there, albeit far more sparse than today, where with the right streaming or cable package, you can watch almost every team in every sport. Other than assorted games of the week, you had to rely on weekly wrap-up/highlights shows several days after the fact and national reporters brought to you via The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated. There were sportswriters of renown, such as Jim Murray and Frank Deford, whose writing transcended the games and athletes while entering the realm of superb literature. They took advantage of how sports offer such opportunities to expand and express sentiments that, while always remaining firmly rooted in the games, encompassed the human experience.

With sadly few exceptions, today’s sportswriters and broadcasters know nothing of this. They also know little, if anything, about the sports they cover. When was the last time you read or heard a quality analysis of individual players or team performance, discussing the strengths and weaknesses in depth? Endless SJW posturing, sure. Race rants, no problem. X’s and O’s? Maybe if they were letters commonly seen in the Alphabet Mafia’s mush.

Buried in the news about The Athletic and the now-dissolved New York Times sports department is this tidbit:

In June, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 reporters and reorganized 20 others to new positions. The website has yet to turn a profit and lost $7.8 million in the first quarter of 2023. However, the number of paid subscribers has grown by more than 3 million as of March, up from 1 million since the acquisition.

So you’ve laid off people and added subscribers. Yet you’ve never turned a profit, and you’re still losing money? Now there’s a business in which to invest, albeit solely for tax write-off purposes. Meanwhile, OutKick just hired Riley Gaines.

Strange as it must seem to today’s sportswriters, so many of whom boast degrees from the Narcissist School of Pseudojournalism, people sufficiently into sports to read websites allegedly devoted to same do so because they want to read about sports. We have zero interest in the writer’s opinion or politics. We want to follow the sports and athletes we like. We want to increase our knowledge about the games themselves. The local reporter covering the local team used to be a sports fan’s conduit into something they deeply cared about. With its endless vapid opinion and political/social proselytizing, The Athletic is not what we have in mind. That the New York Times believes it is reveals, once again, how utterly out of touch the liberal mainstream media is with the people it desperately desires to consume its content.