Here’s a piece/interview I wrote up on Aaron Gleeman, writer for Rotoworld, excellent blogger, busy dude, and all-around nice guy. Comment up!

On April 29 of this year, two people fought over an elephant in the room of the sports media. On that day, the hard-nosed, old-school, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger went on a profanity-laced tirade during a broadcast on “Costas Now,” a show on HBO where guests debate pressing issues in the sports world, attacking a 32-year-old baby-faced man named Will Leitch. Leitch, in April, was the founder of Deadspin.com, a sports blog.
A “blog” is an online journal or diary – short for “web log.” Many people use these blogs for writing about their own personal life, their children, or pets. Many people blog about sports – some talk every day about baseball, some on football – but Deadspin covers everything that has to do with sports. Blogs work differently than newspapers; while newspapers call sources and squeeze the information out of them, blogs call up newspapers and report the information that they’ve already sent to people, except they range over everything―more than strict sports news.
Leitch was trying to address a legitimate concern against blogs when host Bob Costas asked him what he thought of the mean-spirited potshots that people without journalistic credentials write on different blogs. Not 30 seconds after Leitch began defending his medium did Bissinger interrupt.
“I have to interject – I really think you’re full of shit,” he said. For nearly 15 minutes, Bissinger attacked Leitch without regard to common decency and gave him no breathing room to try to defend blogs. The show sparked a giant discussion across the blogosphere and in the national media about the validity of bloggers and the status of newspaper columnists. The entire world seemed to think of them as two separate entities, and argued like the Capulets and Montagues.

In the modern world of baseball, there is a movement among the more mathematical-minded fans and the old-school baseball fanatics. The former group analyzes players as if they were gears in a replaceable part and judges them based on complex statistical formulas; the latter analyzes players as players and judges them simply based on what they see. A 100 mile-per-hour fastball may seem like a gift from above to one, but to the other, it’s seen as an injury risk and nothing special.
Aaron Gleeman subscribes to the sabermetric way of thinking. He plugs statistics and numbers into formulas to get what he and other sabermetricians consider to be better stats than the traditional things like batting average or runs batted in (RBIs). In fact, Gleeman has made his own contributions to the sabermetric movement: on his web page, Rotoworld.com, he invented a new common statistic called “Gross Production Average,” a stat that sabermetricians think is a better way of evaluating a player’s true ability than previously used stats like batting average.
Gleeman’s web page is a blog and nothing more outside of a couple advertisements. On it, he posts his personal thoughts on his favorite sports team, the Minnesota Twins. Ever since he began his blog in 2002, his blog has grown from only friends and family to over 120,000 visitors a month – as has his writing load, since his writing was so good an online sports web site decided to hire him as a columnist after higher-ups began to notice his writing. Even with that job, he continues to post without pay on his web site, just so that he can continue to write about the Twins.
“It’s funny, because every year they sign two or three guys like that, and they ditch them around midseason and then call up prospects, and the prospects almost always end up doing well,” Aaron Gleeman said in an interview. “And the excuse is always, ‘Well, they needed the extra time at Triple A.’ Which could be true, but why waste the money on the veterans? Just go with the young guys.”
Aaron Gleeman loves talking about baseball – after all, he has been writing about it at least three times a week every week since 2002. He grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and graduated from Highland Park Senior High. While at Highland Park, he wrote for his junior high newspaper, and decided that he loved devouring newspapers.
In fact, that’s what his job is right now. Every morning, early in the morning, he combs through every sports section in every newspaper he can get his hands on and looks for news, updates, injuries, and anything relevant that’s been written about. Anything interesting that he finds he posts onto the Web site he’s a part of, Rotoworld.com, along with a short commentary about the move. For example, if the New York Yankees decide to release a starting pitcher, Gleeman reports that, along with a little comment saying something like, “this was a good move, as this pitcher wasn’t going to be helping the team anytime soon.” Every morning, everything gets posted onto the Web site.
Rotoworld is a site that focuses on fantasy sports news and information. NBC purchased the Web site in 2006. “The fantasy industry is a billion-dollar industry,” Gleeman said, talking about how much revenue the Web site gets. It’s not uncommon for Sundays on Rotoworld to receive more than 2 million hits, while people check out the information on their favorite players and fantasy statistics for those in leagues that give points for statistics of individual players.
In the mornings, Gleeman combs the newspapers. In the afternoons, he has RSS feeds so that he can scour anything happening that day that wasn’t printed in the newspaper. This is so that people who want to look at their fantasy players can get more instant updates. This is where things could get iffy: a columnist for a Web site run under the guard of NBC searches the Internet and finds information through blogs that have linked information that has come out that day. So, for example, a player was hurt at a game on a Tuesday night, and the team revealed injury information after an MRI the next day, Gleeman links to that information. Bissinger wouldn’t be too happy with Gleeman’s use of blogs for legitimate information – according to Bissinger, all blogs are “worthless.”
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After graduating from high school, Gleeman went to college at the University of Minnesota to study journalism. During the summer of his freshman year, he wanted to write about his favorite team, the Minnesota Twins, and had no way to do that. One day, however, he figured out a new, interesting way to write about them – a blog.
“When I first started out, no one knew what bloggers were. I know that sounds like I’m 300 years old when I say that, but in 2002 there was literally one other Twins blog,” he said.
Aarongleeman.com became functional and running on August 3, 2002. Gleeman took his thoughts and analysis and put it on the Web for anyone to see. He posted every single day – sometimes more than once per day. It’s not as if he wrote down quick news blurbs on injured players, either – Gleeman said that people in his early days used to poke fun at him for his “Gleeman-length entries.” He was on the new, revolutionized web; he could post thoughts as if he were a columnist without actually having to get hired by a company and work his way up to that status. He was online. He was a blogger.
Once the excitement started that summer, it leaked into the school year. He continued to pen (or type, depending on which way one looks at it) articles continuously while balancing his schoolwork. One day, during the school year, a man named Gregg Rosenthal e-mailed him saying that he liked his writing and wanted to recruit him to write 25,000 words for an upcoming fantasy baseball journal that was being produced by this up-and-coming web site called Rotoworld for the upcoming baseball season. Being a starry-eyed college kid dreaming of becoming a columnist, Gleeman took the job without hesitation, even though the pay wasn’t great and the columns interfered with his schoolwork.
He made it through the initial intensity of writing 25,000 words in a short period of time,. Rotoworld liked the job he did and asked him to work part-time for the groupwhile he stayed in school and studied journalism. Since his job was similar to what he’s doing now, and he got to write about sports some more, he agreed.
The columns were tough. Constantly scanning newspapers and doing research affected his schoolwork. Even during the job, Gleeman still wrote on his blog – while his hand was tied at Rotoworld to write about general baseball news and events, he still needed his outlet to analyze the Twins. Gleeman was taking a class with journalism professor Chris Ison that started early in the morning on some weekdays. Gleeman always stayed in the back of the room and was always tired from his work on the side every night.
“Like a year after I got done, I saw him at a party, and he said, ‘I used to figure you were hung over or something like that,’” Gleeman said. “But in truth, it was sort of similar. I’d be working. The night before I would have been up since the day before working on some column or blog entry.”
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“I grew up wanting to be a newspaper columnist,” he said. “It seemed like an easy gig to me, because you’d write 900 or 950 words three times a week.”
One of Gleeman’s favorite things to read while studying at the University of Minnesota was the school’s student-run newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. He applied, and applied, and applied, and applied – but he could never get a job in the sports department there. All in all, he said, he turned in nine applications, was interviewed four times, but never offered a job.
Even after his blog was featured in a Sports Illustrated article right next to famous sports columnist Bill Simmons, the Daily still wouldn’t budge. Even after he began his part-time columns over at Rotoworld, the paper still wouldn’t offer him a job. It’s the one grudge he has about his path so far.
That path became bumpy his fifth year when he had nothing left to take but math and science classes. Rotoworld was happy with Gleeman’s columns; it was only a matter of time before they offered him a full-time position. Gleeman decided to drop out of college before his final semester and land a full-time gig with an online news service. Of course, for Gleeman, writing about sports every day was a dream job, but his salary isn’t too bad, either.
“I started gradually working on my mom to try and convince her that it wasn’t so bad. Then when they started coming up with an actual dollar amount, it was a little easier,” he said.
Soon after he went on full-time, Rotoworld flew him out to Connecticut to shoot video shorts of all thirty teams – Rotoworld, like any other media organization, is making the change from the written word to video, be it streaming online or on television. He was in. After a couple of years on the job, he now has a setup in his house where he can post video feeds whenever he needs to. He loves his job – and he said he wouldn’t do anything differently.
“People always ask me, “Would you like to go back and get your degree?” and I say, “When that happens you know something’s gone horribly wrong in my life.” It’s not that it’s a bad thing – ideally I’d like to do that,” he said.
Gleeman doesn’t think he needs to finish up college – he’s doing exactly what he wants to.
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“There are so many blogs that are sort of like a mini Deadspin where it’s sort of, you know, pictures of guys drinking or random trade rumors. So it’s become not quite a substitute of being a columnist, but it’s become a way of sort of gaining prominence or making some money off of it. People aren’t necessarily looking to write for the sake of writing, they’re more about just getting hits to your site, and the easiest way to do that is post trade rumors or something,” he said.
One of the things that makes Aaron Gleeman Aaron Gleeman is that, while working a full-time job grabbing injury news and writing columns for his editor, he continues to write and blog on his own; Gleeman personifies the merger between newspaper and blogger. On one hand, he does not cultivate many sources, posts his information from news articles onto the Internet and not an actual paper, but on the other hand, he bases his columns on facts and writes for a legitimate organization that falls under the wing of NBC. He blogs, but he also writes columns.
He said that he gets asked all the time why he still blogs. “There’s no real reason for it. I feel like I don’t want to let people down who have been reading it for a long time just to quit. Also there’s no one who will pay me just to write about the Twins,” he said. “It’s kind of weird to write for a living and for a hobby.”
When Buzz Bissinger and Will Leitch faced off in the ring of Costas Now, they argued as separate entities. Buzz was white, and Will was black; Buzz was a granola bar, and Will was McDonalds. What neither party took into account is that the changing forms of the media are merging the two together so that the line between them is nonexistent. Gleeman thinks that this could be the best thing that’s happened to the media in quite some time.
“Half the newspaper guys have a blog on their newspaper site, so it gets kind of silly,” he said. “If I had a choice between reading their blog consistently or reading their newspaper column consistently, I’d choose the blog, because there’s so much more info. To me, there’s not that much difference – columnist, blogger, they’re all the same.”

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Brewer stuff, minnesota twins by Cody