I was thinking this morning about what baseball was like before the popularization of the internet. Remember those Cactus and Grapefruit League box scores in the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times, and for our older readers, Chicago Today? It was almost impossible to determine substitutions or discern what happened.
Digital accessibility and the omnipresence of spring training broadcasts have changed everything. Information arrives as it breaks and we can watch almost every game live from Arizona or Florida. The information highway has made analysts of us all, and though opinions tend to vary greatly, the responses in our comments section and on other blogs often help to create our next columns.