"My goal when I started writing wasn't to create a lot of statistics," he told USA Today. "My goal was to create a field of knowledge." This alternative field was the "outside" view, "what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance." The outside view didn't require locker room access. It was there in the action itself, in the part of baseball the fans could see for themselves, or read in a box score.

I hope other journalists confronting the political puzzles of 2004 will read Adam Nagourney and Jim VandeHei and hear their defiant cry: Horse Race Now! Horse Race Tomorrow! Horse Race Forever! And I hope other journalists will ask themselves: must this go on indefinitely?

Meanwhile, the weblog world is starting to stir a bit with the idea of monitoring individual campaign reporters. Steve Gilliard: "I think it would be a really, really good idea to track reporters, word for word, broadcast for broadcast, and print the results online. Not just for any one campaign or cause, but to track people's reporting the way we track other services."

Atrios adds his vote: "We spend a lot of time focusing on the pundits, but it's really the journalists under the cover of 'objectivity' who turned the '00 campaign coverage into a travesty. We should have an 'adopt a journalist' program. As Steve suggets, people should choose a journalist, follow everything they write, archive all their work, and critique and contextualize it where appropriate." There is already one "tracking" weblog for an individual journalist: the Wilgoren Watch, which monitors the reporting of Jody Wilgoren from the New York Times.

Of course, you have to know what to watch for.

Jay Rosen"s weblog is PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Age.

Related post: PressThink, Politically Significant Cluelessness.

Read baseball writer Bill James on the Inside Out Perspective.