Past The Press Box : Colin O'Keefe of The American Sportswriter : On Sportswriting, Social Media, Sports Blogging, Journalism, Sports Marketing

ESPN recently released a study saying that everyone is really overreacting to the notion that people might start going without cable television. According to their study, only 0.28% of American households have cut their cable cords in the past three months. This seems lower than it should be.

Plain and simple, I watch sports as much as anyone I know and I've gotten by just fine for more than a year without paying for cable. That said, I don't not pay for TV. Of the things I pay for, there's MLB.tv, NBA League Pass Broadband and an XBox Live subscription so I can watch ESPN3. I get what I want (aside from in-market MLB games), and nothing I don't. Taking all that away one can see quite a lot of sports for free.

"How?" you ask: ATDHE.net.

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As we've seen with many incidents in the past, it doesn't take a lot to in today's age to get a rumor rolling. A little more than a year ago, social media fueled a completely false Bret Bielema to Notre Dame story, only after Twitter exploded at every mention of Bob Stoops. This year, it's baseball's turn to completely lose its mind because of Twitter.

Now, one would think we'd all become a bit more sophisticated, capable of detecting what's real or what's fake. We, at the very least, should know better—we shouldn't get carried away because a single sourceless entity says something is so. Well, that's not the case. Now we're getting thrown off by single letters. 

Most in-tune baseball fans know that Ken Rosenthal is a legitmate reporter. He writes for FoxSports.com and, usually, is somewone we can trust. As a result, when we see something like that image above, or the same text come across on Tweetdeck or some other program, we'll trust it.

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Part of my job at LexBlog, a company that works with lawyers and law firms on social media, includes communicating with attorneys on blog designs. As anyone who's worked in web design knows, it's not the easiest process. I've never designed a site myself, but simply managed the project and acted as an intermediary between our creative team and the client. It's an odd process because, while they are coming to you for your expertise, they also have an idea of what they want. Attorneys, being very strong-willed, often times end up getting what they want. So, often times, ideas will be pushed that aren't necessarily the best ideas, or ones with even a consensus agreement behind them, but just because of certain interpersonal dynamics at play.

Now, I've seen some odd ideas and requests, often-times derived from things viewed on other sites. That said, none of ideas I've come across were as bizarre and unnecessary as FOX's decision to add in-game music to their Seahawks - 49ers broadcast. Why do I relate the two? Because running cheesy over-dramaticized music came out of nowhere and the over/under on how many people thought was a good idea is right at 1.5. This, as I said, is much worse than anything I've seen.

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I've been fortunate enough in my life that I haven't experienced a great deal of tragedy. For that, I'm both lucky and thankful. With that acknowledgement made—I want everyone to understand I'm fully aware how ridiculous this is—the day the Chicago Cubs were defeated by the Florida Marlins in Game 7 of the 2003 NLCS remains one of the saddest of my life. I was in disbelief. After game 5, and a 3-1 series lead, an NL pennant seemed inevitable. Honestly, I just about completely broke down. I couldn't deal.

With that said, my history made what I stumbled across late last night all that much better. This may have been the single greatest thing I've ever seen on Twitter.

Grey, of blog Tiger Transactions (or Twitter user spacemnkymafia) has decided to recreate and call the 2003 World Series as if the Cubs and Red Sox and pulled out their respective Game 7s. To recreate the games, he uses Baseball Mogul 2010, with statistics properly adjusted to reflect how everyone was playing at the time.

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As a fan of the 2010 Seattle Mariners, I became very familiar with the phrase "regression to the mean." In the realm of sports, regressing to the mean normally implies that an athlete performing far above their head will fall back to earth and start performing more on-par with their career averages. With the Mariners, it was the opposite. If the likes of Chone Figgins, Casey Kotchman and Milton Bradley started moving towards simply being average, that would be a good thing.

Now, with Tiger, coming back to the field would normally be bad. But in terms of public perception, Tiger Woods is as low as any athlete. Like the pitiful 2010 Mariners (I am the only person in the history of the world to make a Tiger Woods/2010 Mariners comparison), regressing to the mean would be a great.

What does Tiger need to do in order to regress to the mean of public perception? He simply needs to start acting a normal athlete would.That started yesterday as he used his Twitter account to interact with fans the same way every other athlete does: a simple Q&A.

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