* The magazine industry’s decline has a long reach

Just ask Lenny Dykstra, according to this article from Folio, an industry publication.

Many of Dykstra’s financial woes stem from the failed launch of the Player’s Club, a monthly magazine for professional athletes he published in partnership with Doubledown Media—a publisher of magazines aimed at the Wall Street elite—which went out of business earlier this year. Before the title launched, Dykstra sued Doubledown claiming breach of contract. Doubledown filed a counterclaim alleging Dykstra owed the publisher more than a half million dollars.

The article reports that “In his petition, Dykstra claimed $50,000 in assets and between $10 million and $50 million in liabilities.”

* New reference source

Google Books now includes magazines.

A quick search for the phrase “baseball” returns almost 1,300 hits, including such sources as Ebony, Jet, Baseball Digest, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics (going all the way back to the early 1900s), and New York Magazine. Presumably more publications will be added.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting look to see how African-American publications covered the game. A May, 2001 issue of Jet features a piece titled “Black Baseball Players Reveal How They Stay On Top Of Their Game.” Forgive me for being flip, but I would have imagined all athletes pretty much go about things the same way, with variations based more on individual tastes rather than ethnic identity.

Read more about this new service here.

* Privacy, please

My daughter — my high school freshman age daughter — started receiving Hooah!, a quarterly publication produced for the National Guard. This leads to a couple of question, the first of which is how did they get her name on a mailing list. I’m 99.9% sure she didn’t request it, meaning they had to get the info from another source, the identity of which is unknown and therefore disturbing. I will not go into a long diatribe about invasion of privacy issues, but I sure hope the school (or anyone else) is not supply such information without consent (which they obviously have done).

Be that as it may, the cover of the Spring ‘08 issue features Boston Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett. I’m not sure why, although I am fairly certain it’s not because he has ever been a member of the Guard (where as another piece profiles Sgt. Jill Stevens, a member of the Utah Army National Guard as well as Miss Utah).

The article is written by Spc. Miko Holloran and features a quiz with such true/false questions as “Josh Beckett can throw a curveball faster than an M16 bullet” (didn’t know M16 bullets could through curveballs); “The Guard supports soldiers who are professional athletes”; “The Guard does not encourage its soldiers to stay physically fit after basic training”; and “Soldiers in the Guard do not get scored on how well they perform on physical fitness tests.” Oh, forgot to mention, it’s an on-line quiz, which means you probably have to give up even more personal data.

My apologies for the quality of the picture. It will have to suffice until I have a chance to scan my copy.

* Baseball in the latest issue of…

(May 19):

• Feature story on Elijah Dukes, the Washington Nationals’ “troubled” star
• Column by Tim Keown on the latest in the continuing soap opera that is Roger Clemens
• 8 Things to Know About Groundskeepers
• And the usual from MLB Insider

(May 12):

• Ben Reiter profile of Max Scherzer, rookie pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks

(May 12):

• The Next Generation of Yankees

* NY Daily News offers Yankee Stadium “collectibles”

The tabloid is including the six-part magazine supplement on the House That Ruth Built in its Sunday papers. They do something like this every so often to boost sales. Nice touch. I think it’s worth the price of the edition.

But remember, everything — commemorative magazines, thimbles, diner menus — is a “collectible” if you just collect them. They don’t have to have the official sanction of the issuing organization for it to be so.

* 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 .

* Enough with the rivalry already

The current issue of Men’s Fitness features a cover story on Red Sox’ pitcher Josh Beckett.

Meanwhile the current issue of Men’s Health features Derek Jeter as it’s cover boy. (They also have a brief piece featuring Jacob Ellerbsy of the Sox).

I’m not just saying this because I’m from the NY area, but Jeter definitely looks more buff. But we all know what a good art director can do with a picture.

“I’ve been waiting for a Web site like you, to come into my life”

With apologies to Journey.

Other publications have made their full runs available as either CD (New Yorker, Rolling Stone) or on-line, but this, this is an important resource. Coming Thursday to a computer near you.

“The Bible of Baseball” pulls up stakes

American City Business Journals has completed its acquisition of The Sporting News and moved its operations to Charlotte, NC. ACBJ also owns the Street & Smith Sports Group. TSN has been on a decline over the last several years. They recently made the decision to halt print publication of its annual baseball record book and put it on-line at no charge.

Review: Sporting News Baseball 2008

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: TSN’s annual has pretty much the same team information — rosters, schedules, transactions, farm reports, impact rookies, and projected lineups — as every other magazine, as well as regional covers.

A personal favorite feature is the statistical targets: Omar Vizquel is closest to 3,000 hits among active players with 2,598; the team-less Barry Bonds is just four ribbies away from 2,000, behind only Aaron and Ruth; Manny Ramirez and Gary Sheffield can join the 500 home run clubs if they follow form. On the pitching side, John Smoltz is 25 strikeouts away from 3,000; Randy Johnson and Billy Wagner will have to put in great seasons to reach 300 wins and 400 saves, respectively.

As far as the predictions go, TSN picks the Red Sox, Tigers, and Angels for AL division winners (Indians as the wild card), and the Braves, Cubs, and Diamondbacks (Phillies) in the senior circuit. Hell freezes over as the Cubs appear in the fall classic against the Red Sox. Typically, they’ll lose again.

What separates TSN from the rest of the glossies, however, is in its abundant and well-done feature stories. As should be expected from a publication historically known as “the Bible of baseball,” TSN prides itself on hard-hitting journalism (relatively speaking. This is just sports, remember).

A two-part examination of steroids includes an interview with Lance Williams, co-author of the seminal Game of Shadows, which brought the whole problem out of the “shadows” and into the light. The second story is a profile of former Orioles Brady Anderson, who smashed 50 home runs and drove in 100 runs in 1996. The closest he came to those numbers were 24/81 in 1999. Needless to say, he raised some eyebrows with his career year.

Another issue seldom raised in baseball is the pressure on teenagers to decide whether to sign with the pros or enter college. Mike Giglio weighs the options in “The Road Taken.”

Cubs fans don’t have to be reminded that it’s been 100 years since their team last won a World Championship, but Scot Gregor does so anyway in “100 Years of Despair.”

Other features include a critical look at game-winning celebrations, “The evolution of the Ejection,”and the turnover in general managers during the off-season.