Only thing ESPN.com has going for it is up-to-date zone rating data. Besides their pay-for-almost-everything policy, their site is toooooo slooooooow to serve as a general purpose source of baseball info.

Plus, like ESPN itself, the site has become filled up with extraneous quasi-sport dreck; not nearly as much as the network, but just enough to remind you how far things have fallen.

They did pick up Uni Watch, though. Uni Watch is awesome.

I keep getting ESPN the Magazine as a gift subscription, and if you are a subscriber, you can get all of ESPN.com's Insider stuff for "free". If I may be so bold, I think another reason their readership is down is because of the advent of blogs. I like to think their are a few worthy ones around....

ESPN.com is definitely slipping. Dare I say that they are no longer the sports leader on the internet?

Over 60% of the time FoxSports.com or mlb.com will report roster news an hour before ESPN gets it.

Most of the content is designed to get you the most sensational stories rather than the most substantive. Who cared about BALCO Bonds's recovery in June? I'd rather have read about the surging Braves or the $200M bust that plays in New York.

I still check it almost daily, and I have to admit that their scoreboard is probably the best for instant updates (but it's not perfect, either).

Anyway, it's not like they care.

One of the thigs that has really annoyed me is the way they break up midsize articles into 4 or 5 pages. There's no reason for this; it just makes the site tougher to navigate and me less likely to read articles.

It is also really slow to load and the topbar ads are some of the most annoying that exist.

The sidebar is cool though, where you can put your favorite teams and get instant score updates and articles relevant to that team.

Matt, In case you hadn't figured this out, the reason ESPN.com breaks the stories up is to sell more ads.

Neyer and Gammons were never faves of mine, so it's no big deal for me that you have to pay for them. I didn't read them much when they were free. I agree with everybody that ESPN is often slow to load. The turnaround on mlb.com is consistently faster.

I do like ESPN's stats page. Lots of sort options, a ton of info. One thing they might borrow from the CBS sports site is minor league stats for every player.

While I'm plugging the CBS site, I like their scoreboard when it works. Too often it freezes, but when it instantly updates every pitch in every game, it's a treat.

An odd problem is that, if I'm listening to a game on the Internet, the scoreboard sometimes gets in front of the webcast. So I have to block out that area of the scoreboard with wordpad or I'll know what the announcer is going to say before he says it.

Another annoying thing about ESPN.com: the new scoreboard page is very buggy. It almost always defaults to the previous day and even when the right day comes up, I have to refresh a dozen times to get it to update. I'd be interested to know how many people pay for the over-priced premium content, which in effect made people realize that they can live without the columns of Gammons, Stark or Neyer.

ESPN has no real value. Baseball = MLB.com. I happen to be a huge hockey fan and ESPN has left the NHL for dead waaaaay before the lockout. Hockey = TSN.CA.

eh, the chats and columns provide enough decent content where it's worth $40/year. plus they keep sending me this magazine.