* ESPN and SI baseball previews: A head-to-head comparison

Bearing in mind that SI is a weekly, and ESPN a bi-weekly…

	Sports Illustrated	ESPN The Magazine
Cover boy(s)	“New generation of Stars,” featuring Ryan Braun, Justin Upton, Troy Tulowitzki, Jacob Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz, and Ryan Zimmerman	C.C. Sabathia
Lead Story	Tulowitzki profile	Sabathia profile
Sidebars(s)	Five future stars (Cameron Maybin, Ryan Braun, Jay Bruce, Justin Upton, Ryan Zimemrman; “Restocking a Rivalry (Red Sox vs. Yankees)	“Mamarama” (mothers of sports stars); Milkov Report, a take-off on the Mitchell Report on the demise of the National League; “Poison Ivy” (the Cubs’ 100-year slump)
Other features	Team scouting reports with projected lineups; “The Numbers Lie/Don’t Lie” on representative or misleading statistics for each team; “consider thiis,” and excerpts from previous SI issues as a way of promoting their new Vault archives	Buster Olney on the AL, Tim Kurkjian on the NL; Team reports with facts, projected lineups, and comments by each team’s local U.S. congressperson

It must be difficult to keep coming up with new ideas year after year. You would have thought, in the wake of the Mitchell Report and the Clemens-McNamee affair, the ideas would be falling off the trees, but that’s not the case here (except for the ESPN spoof).

Call me a traditionalist (or old fogey, depending on your POV). Usually I find ESPN is trying to be all things to all sports fans and covers too many sports I’m not interested in. There are too many mini-features, as if the reader doesn’t have a long-enough attention span for anything more. On the other hand, they often do a better job with their illustrations.

I’m a fan of SI’s editorial content. I find their stories more in-depth and investigative reporting, their graphics simple but elegant (they have a long tradition of using top notch photographers like Leifer, Iooss, and Sweet, among other iconic shutterbugs).

So, as if it matters to anyone else, I’m giving the nod this year to Sports Illustrated .