Sunday Discussion: To Fisk Or Not To Fisk?

Bit of a change here this morning, partly because this has been kicking around in my head for a while, and partly because I don't want to tarnish last night's ridiculous win with too much thinking about it. (Seriously, Pedro Ciriaco going 4-5 with a steal and four RBI?)

The All-Star Break's almost here, and with it come the standard first-half retrospectives, the beginning of trade speculation season, and various other media funstuffs. As you've no doubt noticed, I tend to take somewhat of a dim view of most media coverage of our beloved Red Sox. That's gone doubly so this year, with the stink of last year still hanging around the joint and a frustrating team leading to angry and sloppy reporting and analysis all around.

This presents a bit of a dilemma for me, as my natural instinct tends this way. When there's lousy writing, especially about my favorite team, I want to smash it into tiny pieces. But at the same time, I fear that this just hands out pageviews and attention to bad narratives and troll columns. I think we're all agreed here that the Boston media is, with several notable exceptions, unworthy of its audience, and something should be done about that. But is it useful to go after the dumber and meaner narratives running around, rather than simply maintaining a high standard here and being happy that we're providing something worthwhile?

So I'm going to ask you all, since you're the ones coming here to read thoughtful analysis on the Red Sox, is narrative-smashing something I/we should be doing more often here? Or at all? Is it actually useful to call out the billionth "Beckett's a selfish loser" column in hopes that its writer might feel some shame? If it's not useful, is it at least cathartic, or something you enjoy reading? Chat it up, I'm really curious to see what the sense of the community is on this.

And for those looking for something more baseball-focused today, I'll toss in a poll on Boston's latest out-of-nowhere savior, feel free to take the thread that way if metacriticism isn't your cup of tea.