You’ll have to excuse us for a moment as we drift a bit away from baseball.  And in honor of the man who inspired this piece, we’ll be using his trademark royal “we.”  If we’ve appeared to hijack his tone, we apologize.

There are only two mediums in which blogs can truly thrive: sports and politics.  This is because these are the only two large mediums in which opinions are central.  Sure, you could have blogs dedicated to coup d’états and natural disasters (and we would not be surprised if these existed) – but those are inherently fact-based situations.  Either the president of Turkey was overthrown or he wasn’t.  Either an earthquake struck Chile or it didn’t.  It’s hard to have a compelling opinion one way or the other.  But politics and sports are different.  Obama opted out of public financing – this is a fact.  But is this a good idea or a bad idea?  How do we think McCain will react?  Lloyd Carr called a screen on 3rd and 11 – did it cost the Wolverines the game?  Should he have called a slant-route to Manningham?  Politics and sports are ripe for debate and discussion – and thus their respective blogospheres were born.