I'm 37 years old and a huge sports fan. From the mid 80s to the late 90s I watched ESPN Sportscenter and later BBTN regularly, but ESPN lost me as a viewer several years ago and they are making no effort to recapture my attention. ESPN couldn't care less about viewers older than about 23 or with an attention span longer than 10 seconds.

ESPN offically lost me when, in the middle of a week-long "promotion" about the "intersection between sports and music," they actually aired Alanis Morissette performing a song in-studio, IN THE MIDDLE OF SPORTSCENTER.

Adding Michael Irvin and Rush Limbaugh was bad enough, but I will never forgive ESPN for throwing Alanis Morissette at me. John Kruk was just salt in the wounds.

Bob, I completely agree. I'm 25 and remember watching ESPN Sportscenter, BBTN, etc. with my dad religiously. I was always allowed to stay up late on Sunday night to watch "the Big Show".

However, the channel has completely lost me. They have gone the same was as MTV, it seems. They built a huge following by appealing to all the sports fans. However, once they had the hard core sports fans, they decided they needed a broader audience. This led to more and more clips and then shows that were less about the sports and more about the anchors.

What happened to the days when ESPN was the leader in sports knowledge? Now they let guys like Kruk on to spout "old school" uninformed opinions that are not based in reality. However, I'm sure that there is some casual fan that would watch and just eat up the "analysis".

I'm just done with ESPN.

Unfortunately, because they still have things like Sunday Night Baseball, one can't really ever be done with ESPN. You can watch Sunday Night Baseball muted with the radio on, perhaps, but that's different.

ESPN is really disappointing. They're what's wrong with sports combined with what's wrong with CNN and MTV (disparate as that sounds, CNN and MTV don't have very different strategies).

Lately, I've started watching sports recaps on the spanish channel - the commentators sounds much more interested (QUADRANGULAR!)

I've pretty much given up on their website too - so much is Insider now, and Jayson Stark is apparently writing his Useless Info Dept once every three months. Also, even Bill Simmons has been mailing everything in lately. . . And Stark and Simmons (and that sports equipment/wardrobe bit on Page 2) is pretty much all that's left that's readable.

Don't watch ESPN much because I'm not a big sports fan beyond baseball. And Extra Innings takes care of that habit.

But this "good old days" criticism of ESPN doesn't convince me. If I recall correctly, Joe Morgan has been chattering over baseball games on ESPN for quite some time. Peter Gammons has fantasized about imaginary trades forever on Baseball Tonight. Various ex-jocks have stumbled through "analysis" for years and years.

So I really doubt that ESPN has declined in quality, in any measurable sense, since the supposed golden era. Does the network irritate some viewers now? Sure, and it probably irritated a lot of viewers ten, twenty years ago.

And by the way, I don't much care for the FJM blog. Oh, there's some humor, but it's labored, potty-mouthed, excessively personal (like the blog's name) and VERY unlikely to attract the attention of ESPN's senior producers...much less prompt them to do anything the blogger might approve of.

My 14 year old recollections of ESPN are probably skewed, but I still stand by my assertion that their website went from 'visit 4 times a day' to 'visit once a week'

And my problem with the FJM blog is the whole 'only team members can post comments' bit - that really sucks. There's so much in sports broadcast journalism that can be critiqued that I think they could open up the forum a bit.

My visits on the ESPN site go from pretty much daily during the baseball season to pretty much nonexistent the rest of the year. I like their stats and player pages, though I'll admit their scoreboard is lame compared to the CBS baseball site. I like Stark's goofball stuff, and the team pages are okay. MLB.com has better team coverage, though.

Another plus for CBS: minor-league stats for every player.

Oddly enough, about the only sport I'm following at all right now, besides baseball, is baseball's ancient and distant cousin, cricket. The Ashes series, the biggest Test series in cricket, is level at 1-1 after a wildly improbable England win against Australia. The difference in the victory was two runs...England 589, Australia 587. And the match ended on a bad call against the Aussies that nobody even suspected until they ran the replays a zillion times.

Cricinfo.com is so far ahead of all other cricket sites on the web that it's almost embarrassing. It's sort of what MLB.com should be. Not that MLB.com is all that bad.

I think people have problems with ESPN because more and more their stuff is behind "Insider" wall, and now cost money. It started with Neyer, and now pretty much anything you care to read is "insider stuff." But what do you expect. BBTN was good when it was Gammons and Reynold.

But it's still hard for me to find an alternative to ESPN. Any suggestions?

The two sites mentioned in my previous post, cbssportsline.com/mlb and mlb.com, are pretty good for basic player and team coverage. Of course, you're not going to find anti-Selig broadsides on mlb.com, but there are other sites for THAT. ;-)

For blogs I go to baseballblogs.org, which gets me lots of opinion and occasionally insight. Sprtspages.com is a good portal to newspaper sports pages.

Uh, that should be sportspages.com, as you probably suspected.

Oh, I should mention simple Google searches on players, teams, topics, etc.

Brings up interesting stuff sometimes.

Casey, I don't think that ESPN has changed at all in the past few years, and I think that's the problem. In the past 5-7 years sabermetrics has taken off and has become such a big deal, you'd think ESPN would at least give a nod to a different point of view. Hell, put Rob Neyer on once in a while--they employ the guy.

My frustration stems from the fact that the people who write into this website can articulate themselves, have better formed opinions, and generally more intelligent than the "analysts" on ESPN. You're right, that's probably been true since time immemorial; the difference is that we have an outlet now. You'd think ESPN would try to incorporate this point of view into their broadcast. I once got in a question with Gammons in a chat as to why there aren't more BP-style analysts on BBTN. His answer was that the other analysts didn't know what OPS was, and didn't think that stuff was important. Well, maybe this stuff isn't important to them, but I know this year's BP sold tens of thousands of copies and there's certainly a market for it out there if they wanted to go for it. ESPN's stubborn refusal not to is maddening.

I'll take your word on ESPN, because I really haven't watched it much since I started buying the Extra Innings package. Oh, I'll watch the yellfests once in a while - Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption - when they're talking about baseball.

Frankly, the level of commentary on those shows seem pretty similar to what I remember from Baseball Tonight and Sportscenter, except louder. So I really don't think there's been much of a falloff...or improvement.

As you say, it's just that the Internet has decentralized commentary so much, and old-line media people haven't reacted very well. Ask Dan Rather.