Life’s little disappointments

Every year since I was a little shaver, I looked forward to the period from February to April when the annual baseball magazines would come out. At one point, it was basically Smith and Street, but over the years others would crop up. Some would last, others would not. Among the baseball preview issues in my collection besides Street and Smith:

ESPN the Magazine
Argosy Baseball Yearbook
Sport
Inside Sports
Baseball Illustrated
Chris Schenkel’s Sportscene
Petersen’s Baseball
Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball
I know there are others, but I’m only counting the ones since I was old enough to buying these things.

Note: I don’t count Baseball Weekly or Baseball America since they were published on a regular basis, be it weekly or bi-weekly, and didn’t have a really dedicated issue devoted to covering the entirety of the forthcoming season.

A trip to the attic uncovered these representative gems:

The issues published under the auspices of MLB were usually tops when it came to production values, understandably.

Now, from what I’ve seen at a recent trip to Barnes and Noble, we’re down to two:

and

I understand the situation. The Internet has had deep impact on print publications. That’s pretty much why I lost my job at the New Jersey Jewish News: people didn’t want to pay for advertising any more. Many magazines and newspapers have gone out of business while others have raised their cover price to ridiculous levels (a newsstand price of $4 for the weekday edition of The New York Times? Yikes!)

The immediacy of the Internet has made baseball mags almost obsolete. Understandable since you can get up-to-the-minute info with the click of a button. Meanwhile, the rosters in the above issue of Baseball Digest were as of January 29, weeks before spring training even started. Back in the day, there were no other choices so putting up with data that was outdated by opening day was just the way things were.

And by the way, at the risk of sounding even more like a “get off my lawn” grump, the current iteration of BD is not a digest, which has more or less strict dimensions; compare old vs. current: