Put Up or Shut Up

This is the part of the season when sportswriters are supposed to earn their paycheck.

Anyone can write the Super Bowl and NCAA Tournament stories. The Brothers Grimm would make a killing with credentials. They easily could have filed the stories you read about winners and losers and upsets and adversity. Cinderella this, David and Goliath that, slap on the byline and hit the buffet. (Just once I'd like to see a team that wins ugly referred to as the tournament's "Rumpelstiltskin.")

As we wait for the never-ending NBA and NHL regular seasons to shuffle into their never-ending playoff schedule, the NFL Draft and the start of the new baseball season dominate the heart and mind of the typical American sports fan. As luck would have it, expert journalists and talk-show hosts are standing by. They're the ones able to tell you about the kid's high-school career, how fast he ran the 50-yard dash, how he hit in the Turks & Caicos winter league and, of course, his marital status and mistress count.

That is in no way meant to devalue or denigrate the fan's take on these weighty matters of professional sport. There are people out there who can make Bill James blush when it comes to rattling off statistics. I know a guy who is four fish sticks short of being the Rain Man when it comes to his favorite player's vitals.

But if you've ever listened to sports talk shows, you know that the gap between most callers and the host is pretty seismic. I grew up listening to Art Rust Jr. in New York, and he had a very strict rule for callers: no hypothetical trades. He had to, because it got out of hand. You'd get Moishe in Yonkers calling the show every night, proposing Bobby Meacham for Nolan Ryan, straight up.

So yeah, this is the time for the pros to step up, shake off the lingering fallout from the Ryan Leaf predictions and hand in this year's draft forecast and preseason baseball picks.

For only a seasoned professional armed with a four-year journalism degree (five-year, if you wanted to learn more) and a host of custom spreadsheets filled with all sorts of algorithms and matrices can tell you to pick the stud quarterback in the first round. It takes a village of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed college interns with high-speed Internet connections and Android phones the size of a smart car to bring him to the profound conclusion that, yes, it appears the Yankees may win it all this year.

Somewhere in that great pressbox in the sky, Grantland Rice and the Brothers Grimm are munching on the complimentary popcorn and laughing.

Mark Vasto is a veteran sportswriter and publisher of The Kansas City Luminary.

(c) 2010 King Features Synd., Inc.