Dear friend, please send baseball news

Dr. Uetz
My local newspaper is not good. It's really a horrible disappointment. How bad is it? They once ran as the headline and feature story the winner of CBS' Survivor. I'm dead serious. I woke up one morning and the front page was plastered with news of who had been the last one on the island. At that moment the Des Moines Register sealed the deal for me. It was officially dog shit and has only continued to get worse. And I was comforted by a story last week on NPR that used the Register as an example of greater concerns.

But before that story I had major concerns. And since the start of this year's Major League Baseball season I have been teetering on the edge of sheer rage. You see the Register now has decided that it only needs to cover baseball teams in the Midwest. Anyone who is a fan of a team other than the Cubs, Brewers, Twins, Cardinals, or Royals is on their own for information. Unless your boys happened to play a game against one of the Midwest teams you are shit out of luck. Yesterday the Mets, my favorite team since I was child, improved their record to 10-2 with a win over their rivals the Atlanta Braves. It was also Pedro Martinez's 200th career win. The Register gave me one sentence about the game, one lousy sentence. And it was the same for every other non-Midwest team. This is a crime. I'm a fan of the game. I want to know what happened throughout the league. But I guess I'm supposed to be grateful to get anything at all from this rag.

This has been the trend for the last few years but it has gotten ridiculous. Midwest teams get a paragraph and every other game gets one sentence. Real newspapers seem to find a way to give you good solid information about all major league games. I recently was in Baltimore for a bachelor party and was blown away by the coverage the Baltimore Sun had of the ENTIRE MAJOR LEAGUE. Obviously there are two MLB teams in the area, so I understand the in depth coverage of the Orioles and Nationals. But the Sun found a way to give me at least one solid paragraph about every game played the day before. And the really interesting games got two paragraphs of coverage.

The Register this year also drastically pared down the amount of information provided in the league standings and day's pitching matchups. Not so the Sun and numerous other papers across the country. And what truly amazes me is that the Register is owned by Gannett who also owns USA Today. The only thing I have ever liked about USA Today was the sports section. What the hell happened? The Register doesn't even list a team's win/loss streak anymore. They sometimes never run the box scores of late west coast games.

The Des Moines Register, of course, still claims to be the newspaper Iowa depends on. Don't believe it. We can do without it. The Register publisher interviewed by NPR used the recent controversy in Iowa over Touchply machines as an example of their hard hitting journalism. She claims they broke the story and changed Iowa's laws. But the gambling industry broke the story. And their campaign contributions changed the laws.

But I'm getting off track here and I have to get going. There's a lot I don't know about what happened in baseball yesterday. The Des Moines Register wouldn't tell me.