The Chinese Authorities Clamp Down

We are often told that they should not, but, of course, politics and sport frequently do mix, and when they do, it can make for delicious talking points. There are too many examples that spring to mind of the obsession of a national leader with a given sport that often outstrips their preoccupation with more pressing matters: see Fidel Castro and baseball, or General Franco and his love of Real Madrid, or closer to home, those of us in Ireland had the misfortune to see former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern appear as a guest analyst on the Premiership on RTE [and doesn't it just feel great typing the words 'former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern'? I digress].

In China, of course, many Western websites such as BBC.com or CNN.com are inaccessible, and certain keyword searches for politically sensitive issues will yield no fruit either. However, a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado, currently in Beijing to cover the Olympics, discovered that other more surprising sites are inaccessible too, with the oddest of these being Firejoemorgan.com.

Fire Joe Morgan is a blog which satirises the cliched culture of sports reporting in the United States [not just a British phenomenon], with a particular emphasis on baseball. The authors, some high profile comedy writers currently based in Los Angeles, are proponents of a sabermetric approach to baseball statistics, putting emphasis on the analysis of new statistics which more accurately describe a player's value [offensive or defensive production, or contribution to wins, etc] in different scenarios. This is opposed to the scrutiny of traditional statistics such as Runs Batted In, Batting Average, or Pitchers' Wins, part of baseball lore but woefully ineffective in accurately describing the performance of players in helping their teams win, or accomplishing the tasks set before them.

Naturally, a sabermetric approach tends to be completely at odds with the majority of baseball writers who peddle hackneyed cliches and are purveyors of crude and ineffective analysis. So the writers at Fire Joe Morgan savage them, hilariously and mercilessly [the website name comes from the leading 'analyst' for national sports broadcaster ESPN, who every week (for almost a decade) does a live chat on the ESPN.com website, where he tries his best to avoid answering questions from the public. Seriously].

The question then is this: are the Chinese authorities baseball traditionalists? In this increasingly deep and bitter schism between [crudely speaking] established newspaper writers and statistically aware bloggers, has the ruling party decided to take a decisive stance in favour of the former? We need to know.