Debate over inclusion into baseball writers' association

There's quite a spat going on about the inclusion of internet journalists in the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA).

Before I make comments, here is one article that discusses stuff and names names. Here is an associated blog in which some of the issues are being discussed and the so-called "credentials" of many members of the BBWAA are being tabulated.

Recently, the BBWAA finally decided to allow membership (which eventually results in things like the ability to vote for membership in the Hall of Fame) to internet writers (in addition to newspaper writers). This should have happened years ago, but at least this oversight has finally been corrected --- well, sort of. Two notable nominees (Rob Neyer and Keith Law) of ESPN.com were the only two nominees rejected, despite their enormously high credentials and certain "luminaries" managed to get in without a problem. The "official" reason was that they don't attend enough games, despited the fact that they have written about baseball daily for something like 10 years. A fundamental problem with this so-called "criterion", however, is that most of the people who are actually in the BBWAA are not being held to anything remotely like this standard. The blog to which I linked is dissecting the list of BBWAA members ad nauseum. And guess what? Some of them write about baseball on the order of once a year or less. Basically, Neyer and Law were excluded because they're actually willing to criticize others in print. This whole thing is utter tripe. If you want an official standard, apply the fucking thing to everybody --- not just to exclude the people you don't want!

Ideally, the BBWAA will be faced with the choice of fixing this problem or becoming irrelevant. In any event, the story has really mushroomed over the past several days.