Ortiz's coverage of international soccer.

Said it before and it needs repeating, the big factor the Mexican national team gets is that Mexican men, like every other nation on our planet save Canada and perhaps Australia, the men know the importance of a National Football Team. If the average Houston sports junkie, beyond our loyal Dynamo crowd and other soccer followers, if the common man knew the importance of soccer and backing the flag there would be sellouts in every city in the U.S. and no need to even give a second thought on el Tri attendanc/following. Personally I think Mexico, next to perhaps the heavy weights that have actually won World Cup's like Argentina, Italia, Germany and Brasil, is the most followed NT going. I like to say that if el Tri played on the Moon, Mexicans would find a way to get there to back them. Good on 'em. Ortiz just restates the extraordinarlly obvious fact. Which discloses how new he is to our sport and how baseball compass he really is.
Der Kaiser told the U.S. media circa 1980 that for association football to really have a foot hold in the U.S. sporting DNA, the concept and importance of backing a National Football Team must occur.

 

I realize that's the perception, but I'm making the observation that with a much more relevant game and star filled roster the Mexico match only outdrew the USA B/C team meaningless friendly by around 1000 fans.

 

It comes down to the opponent Torreon didn't fill up when El Tri played El Salvador in the last match neither. I mean who really is excited about wanting to watch Canada.

 

Of course you do neglect to mention that soccer fans here aren't dumb enough to be bent over for exorbinant prices on a glorified friendly, either, WCQ or no, if the opponent is Guyana.

 

or canada

 

at this point i don't even understand what's being discussed here....

perhaps a better discussion than 'USMNT rah-rah-rah vs. i hate Mexico booooo' would be a discussion about BBVA vs Reliant as venues for international events regardless of potential attendance.

 

I personally like how every conversation turns into 'WC is a racist' thread. Even if you disagree with 100% of what a person says, to want to silence that person instead of analytically reading his statements and trying to learn something just means you aren’t interested in challenging yourself and you ‘re NOT as open minded as you think you are.

Ortiz is a joke no matter how you look at it; it just so happens he is a joke and supports a rival club which makes him a target for some people.

 

i whole-heartly disagree with this statement or at least it must be framed as an opinion instead of a fact. every practice, scrimmage, press conference that i've ever been to Ortiz has been in attendance but some prefer to give him grief over pro-Mexico tweets or him being an avid baseball fan. you may not agree with his 'takes', but to state that he has missed more than 98% of Dynamo events, like some claim, in order to attend to other matters is just plain false. i see the dude everywhere, in fact i see him more than those who take to these boards to complain about him.

 

Except the people on the board are not paid to cover the team.

The fact he is present, is not the issue as it is his job. The issue I have with him, is his writing is lazy, he regurgitates information fed to him. He decides when and what to cover almost without logic but more based on his desires (see over age softball). Lets compare him to any other beat writer in the Houston sports arena. How come we don't know when important contracts are coming up? How come we don't know terms of deals that are signed? So many people have little knowledge of the budget and how it works, where is his piece on that? Frankly, when was his last analysis piece on how the team is shaping up or how players look beyond the mention of one guy on occasion? These are things a team's beat writer and expert on the sport and league should be providing to their readers. Again I simply point to his own colleagues. That information requires a little work, it is not easily published. But it is not published in any sport. The reason we hear about cap rules, and roster deadlines and salary cap hits is a direct result of reporters not league press releases. For MLS in Houston - we have to go to Big Soccer.

 

I find nothing challenging nor enlightening about some mans public vendetta against Ortiz.

 

you post a valid, reasoned out concern.

others, like westside, turn into a jingoistic witch hunt over tweets.

HUGE difference.

.....and there you have it. aren't we in the future already? where the big print dinosaurs will become extinct and the hairy mammalian bloggers will rule the earth for the next millions of years?

 

LOL to a certain degree we are in that new world. But he has access to people and information that most in the "forum" world do not. He doesn't use it and it comes off as lazy and unimaginative. Hey, if his writing was informative, peppered with bits of inside and educational information, the bloggers would never be able to take over the world.

Since, his paper is a for profit enterprise, I believe consumers have every right to criticize his coverage and product. Particularly when our sport fights for validity in this country; it would be nice to get the impression your dedicated media personnel took their position more seriously.

 

BINGO.

i'm not a member of haternation because i respect everyone's hustle.

 

1. He has bosses who decide what he has to cover. He has resources from his time covering baseball that his bosses like to tap into those resources on occasion. Can't blame him for that. You can make the argument that he shouldn't be so zealous covering non-soccer things or be more zealous covering US Soccer as the Dynamo beat writer, but those are different arguments.

2. We don't know squat about contracts because the league and the Dynamo provide ZERO information about contracts. We solely have to backdate from initial signing, guess that the player signed a standard 3 year deal with a club option 4th year and guess. Where is the coverage of this information from Darrell Lovell or Dynamo Theory or Keeper Notes or Glenn Davis or the Chron.com FanBlogger (haha) or anyone else covering the team? Dom and the team don't like talking about that information and therefore that information is generally reconstructed on bigsoccer via all of our collective efforts including yourself. I don't really see much of it via Ives or Goff either, but they have sources that give them information regarding these topics when critical issues arise that you do not see with Ortiz. B. Fallas didn't really provide much of this information as well.

3. The league is the huge problem regarding budgets/rules IMHO. There has been a long history of the league not reporting players salaries or allocation dollars used or even allocation dollars received. Not to mention the leagues history of creating shit as it goes along. Yet we expect Ortiz to provide education to others on this matter? We get some from Goff/Ives, but not that much IMHO because the league does not explain all of these things. At best we have to put together salary numbers based entirely on the Players Union updating their webpage with salaries.

4. I don't disagree with your criticism regarding his lack of information as to how players are performing. HOWEVER, you also have to consider to a certain extent that if he is too vocal calling out players or indicating poor performance that he upsets the apple cart a bit with regards to access to those players. I seem to recall B. Fallas putting out player rankings once and the players giving him a significant amount of shit about those rankings.

I don't want to defend Ortiz and everything he does, but there are bigger problems for Houston Dynamo fans than the beat writer for the Houston Chronicle and while B. Fallas blogged more regularly I don't know that there is much of a step down from Fallas to Ortiz. I like both of them about the same.

Ducking in response to the incoming artillery shells being lobbed my way.

 

OK I am going to address these in order:
1) fair enough, if that is the case, I don't think it is but so be it. However, I have a whole different issue with the passion he displays in his coverage and writing of things other than the Dynamo.
2) Time out on this one and the next several. None of the professional leagues in this country provide information on contracts. None. And yet we know what they are because reporters do their job. I don't expect him to tell me who is signed in Portland but to say he cannot find out the contract situation of the Dynamo players is absurd. Hell, there are people on here who know.
3) Yes, I absolutely expect him to report on how the budget works, what goes into the budget, and how allocation dollars are used. Reporters in other markets do that well (see Seattle and Portland as examples). Again, there are those on here who know how they work. I do NOT expect him to have an accounting of the exact number of allocation dollars as that is impossible to get. But if the average fan had a better understanding of how difficult and complex the cap is here, they would have a new appreciation for our team and FO. They would also understand personnel decisions. Again, this is reporting.
4) I never said he should call out players. But if you are not on BigSoccer, you have NO idea we even have trialists in camp. How about a piece on what we are doing to improve the team over last year. How we are dealing with a few player losses. Information does not have to be critical to be pertinent. I have seen not one piece on his blog talking about how the team is developing in the off season beyond an information piece on who we picked up in the draft.

MLSH - I mean no disrespect with my comment, but the bottom line is the "information is not public" is the PRECISE reason why he could be doing a better job. All the information you see on contracts, budget and cap concerns from other leagues like the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA come from reporters. That information is not made public by those leagues either. So the idea that it is hard to find is the exact reason we need reporters. If he cannot cultivate relationships to unearth that information and provide it to the fans as well as continue a lack of overview on how the team is actually performing - what is his purpose? seriously and without malice, why is he doing what he does?

 

I don't disagree with your general point, I just think he gets blamed for stuff when he does an ok job. Does he do a Goff level or Ives level job? No. He does better than some though. Would it be better if more went into articles and blogs? Yes. But his twitter + his blog + his articles = ok coverage IMHO.

http://blog.chron.com/soccer/2012/1...ad-into-offseason-with-plenty-of-flexibility/

Here he provides a list of players who will be out of contract heading into the off-season. Below is his tweet regarding Elliot.

Jose de Jesus Ortiz‏@OrtizKicks​

A year after declining a trial w/Dynamo, Scottish fwd Calum Elliot has accepted a preseason invitation with the #Dynamo. Big, tall, young.

 

I think Tweets are reporting when they are breaking new information. In an ideal world, everything would go into a blog/article but sometimes its better to tweet the information out first than to put it in a blog IMHO. It's partially Ortiz' lost as it would potentially drive hits to his site.

Granted it probably would have been easy to do a blog post about the "new faces" at Camp and include discussions regarding Chabala, the draftees, Elliot, Songo --- but if they are all covered in tweets --- I don't care.

 

Btw, the critical piece mentioned earlier by Bernardo was the away leg in Dallas for the 07 playoffs. He pretty much ripped into the team for how terrible they played. Surprisingly (not) he was ble to mantain his connections and continue doing his job at the same level as before the game (ie one of the best local writers of MLS in the country).

When the players were asked about it before/after the home leg, they all agreed that it was harsh but acknowledged they needed to do better. I'm pretty sure Bernardo did a long blog piece about it that the players liked and were able to laugh the whole episode off. I think he gave them over the top marks in the home leg for that piece but I may be misremembering that particular detail

The biggest difference between Bernardo and Ortiz is that, like Glenn Davis, Bernardo is a fan and his passion showed in his work and enhanced his writing (not surprising).

 

If indeed Ortiz is painted into a corner when going after Dynamo TEAM performances all because our soccer culture is more full of Cochrane Gag types over Waibel Ironsides types than that sucks. Sucks for him for doing his due effort and sucks for us to be reminded how often U.S. bred soccer professionals are so distant from our other pro ballers in our other sports. Going after college kids is one thing, ask Coach Gundy up at Okie State "I'm 40! I'm a man!" for reporters going over the line in player evaluations. But our Dynamo guys are in a big boy league. Pros for fuks sake. The big sport on Earth! The biggest and most scrutinized sport on the planet. Bradley was like that when Glenn asked him about the 3-0 beatdown in Costa Rica and Bradley got all types of soccer pu$$y hurt.
Thus, if our Dynamo coverage is to suffer for asking big boy questions then Ortiz can and SHOULD have a field day with Klinsman and our National Team. I mean those NT coaches take holy hell from their own nation's media and this is Houston, a working man's town, an oil town. If all things are true than he should be licking his chops to go long on his coverage and digs on our U.S. side. Just give me something fresh Ortiz, c'mon my man. We understand the scene, we've witnessed it with Glenn and with Bernardo. Just bring yo' A game partner. We are all hungry for coverage.

 

http://www.goal.com/en-us/news/114/...y-after-new-broadcast-deal-espn-is-now-el-tri

bolded emphasis mine.

 

Maybe it's just me, but I'd gladly play a decent ticket price to see the USMNT A team play pretty much anyone, particularly in a qualifier.

Unless ticket prices were oddly lower in Phoenix, it's strange to me that they got so many more people there for a meaningless friendly.