Q. Has the blog-o-sphere evolved in its ability to perceive what's going on in baseball?
A. I don't think so, not in the way the question's being asked, anyhow.
We all hope to improve, of course. If we cannot become more erudite second-guessers, we wither and die....
But Dr. D's point of diminishing returns, on sports movement, occurred after he studied aikido and Japanese pitching, following his golf and hoops kinda stuff. That was the late 90's.
Sabermetrically? By 1990 I'd already spent wayyyyyyy too much time on Bill James' paradigm analysis...
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Go back and google the earliest, sparkling, G-Moneyball posts he ever made, or Justin's, or Inside Pitch's, and you'll find that they were pretty much as erudite then as they are now.
Naturally, everybody tries to grow. The F/X stuff and the Pitch Values charts weren't up in 1999...
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One thing that has evolved, is Seattle's ability to report good coaching. ;- ) The local writers are in hot pursuit of Baker and his disconcerting tendency to put his finger on the difference-making ideas in a given baseball situation.
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Churchill knew baseball back in the year 2001. Sullivan, of course, was a pitcher himself and the Leone for Third shtick was real solid.
I think it's fair to say that we didn't suddenly all become alert to important things we hear. But it's also fair to say that the Mariners weren't particularly worried about whether we heard the stuff they were doing, or not ... :- )
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I think that if San-Man had followed the Mariners day-in, day-out, from close range... he would be more than a little startled at the difference between them and the Bobby Cox Braves. That's just me.
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I have to chime in one Sandy's side a bit here. Until recently we didn't hear bupkiss about the actual work that a player was doing unless that player was a blue chipper like Ackley. We never got a single scrap of information on the Mangini's and Liddi's, and Tenbrink's until recently (within the last year).
We could do our Monday morning QB stuff all day long, but what we were doing was just speculating on what was actually going on.
Lonnie