A Cheap Shot at the Pittsburgh Market?

Our tour of the AP and newspaper industry is taking a quick detour to the Sports page, today, because the MLB Trade Deadline is coming fast and furious in the next 30 hours or so (I even admitted in a tweet last night that my Desert Island news source until July 31st is MLBtraderumors.com).

Friends and any other people out there know that my favorite convenience is when all my worlds collide into one fantastic display. So, special thanks to my friend and resident Blogadilla contributor Brian Roundy for pointing me to this gem buried in a Yahoo! Sports notes section on the fantasy (yes, remember, geek here) recommendation for a pitcher recently acquired by the Seattle Mariners Ian Snell. Make sure to read the highlighted part closely.

I got a chuckle out of this inclusion for one reason: Seattle has been the center of a lot of my watching because one of its papers went online only this year. However, the presence of the additional media from overseas in Japan as a distraction? A little stretch, and certainly not “recommendation worthy.”

There’s a common divide in sports between major market teams – LA, NY, Boston being the standard bearers, but also Philly, DC, Miami and Dallas – your mid-markets and minor ones. The idea of “playing under the lights of a big city” as a distraction to some players is a common complaint. This new development is a first to me, at least in terms of two cities that actually have a lot in common as the mid-major markets.

If I’m Pittsburgh, I’ve just been told that we’re a smaller market than a city that lost one of its newspapers. Ouch. Then again, you have a Lombardi and Stanley Cup to keep you company, so, I’m not going to leap to very much more defense than this.