Sportsfrog.com

My annual hoping for Bert Blyleven comes to its yearly zenith tomorrow. Maybe this time will be different. I don’t know why I even care. It’s not like I was a particular fan of his back in the day. Maybe it’s just the fundamental unfairness of his omission due to the varagies of only having 287 wins instead of 300 that grates. And that difference meaning that the far less good Don Sutton is in while Blyleven still waits.

At any rate, Joe Posnanski with a great read in si.com on eight he thinks should be in eventually and those that do not make the the cut. I have never been on the Dale Murphy should be in train, but Posnanski makes a decent case for him. And bonus points to Pos for making a push for Alan Trammell.

Barry Larkin is on the ballot for the first time this year, and I am hoping he gets enough of a vote to make his eventual inclusion apparent. His greatness flew below the radar of too many fans, hopefully the voters will come to appreciate how good he was as the years pass and his resume gets examined more closely.

With all of the bloodletting at The Star in recent months, The Star was slowly dying as the sports section had lost their racing writer, the top women’s sportswriter in the country, a local columnist and had turned the Kansas State and Kansas beats into a timeshare with the Wichita Eagle.

The section was also merged with the classifieds, so if you were expecting an eight page Sports, you were actually only getting four and a half pages.

While The Star still retained an impressive array of talent, it wasn’t what it used to be just a couple of years ago when it could stake a claim to being the best Sports section in the country.

And now, they’re down another writer. A really big one.

I must admit, this was seen as inevitable by the people I’ve talked with. We knew that this day would be coming, and I had an inkling that it was coming sooner than we all wanted when Joe posted to his facebook yesterday that it was going to be a life changing day.

It’s a great hire for Sports Illustrated, who was already featuring Posnanski prominently on the front page of their website and the cover of the magazine when he did write for him.

And for The Star, well, I’m sure they’ll soldier on. But it does sadden me to see the product now after what seems like yesterday.

Honestly, it’s a miracle that Kansas City was blessed with the presence of a sportswriter of that caliber for 13 years. And hopefully, if SI and his book deals don’t take up too much of his time, many more years, if only on a part time basis.