I love baseball pundits. These are generally men somewhere in their 40s who like to talk and be heard. Much like politicos who you see and hear in all of the roundtable shows that cover Obama and Hillary and Bush the whatever and McCain, these guys like to be guests and they like to be hosts and they like to have their views heard over everyone else's. It's their job to be confident, pompous, arrogant. It's their job to be part of the landscape. They share the spotlight with the players and they love it.

You can tell I'm a little down on them right now. Sure, there are great, great guys who cover baseball, both locally and nationally. There are guys who really know their stuff. Some of them even still play semi-pro ball in their free time. But in my experience, those guys are few and far between. To be in the 21st century sports media, you need to be a certain type of person. You need to be aggressive. You need to be creative. (How is it possible to make someone read your column if you're writing about a last place team that's been in last place for a decade?) You need to be able to make relationships with front office people. You need to get scoops.

I have to see the media every day. There's radio, TV, internet, and print. In New York, we have loads of papers: the Bergen Record, the Star Ledger, the Daily Record, the Journal News, Newsday, the NY Post, the NY Daily News, the NY Sun, the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal (sometimes). We have our team website, the National Baseball League website, CBS Sportsline, Fox Online, ESPN.com, and a bunch more I can't think of. On TV, we have ESPN, our own network, NYS, plus national and local networks: FOX, TBS, WCBS, WNBC, WABC, the CW, My9, NY-1, News 12 NJ and more. There's national print too. Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News. So right there, I've added up 29 different organizations from this paragraph, and that doesn't include the AP, Baseball America, Yahoo! Sports and the 75-100 members of the Japanese media here to watch Kai Goto. This means, before and after every game, a whole lot of people get the opportunity to see me naked. Even worse, they also want to talk to me.

I've been good. I've kept my promise. I haven't spoken on the record to the media since January. I'm so great.

That doesn't mean they haven't quoted me, or quoted others quoting me. You've seen me quoted without my knowledge. Such is the life of a sports superstar. Or a guy like me.

My goal in writing this blog has been for the media to take my quotes from here. They do occasionally. I've read stories in various publications that are based upon the stuff I put here. That's good. It means my plan has worked at times.

But it's backfired more often than not.

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