With the face of writen media quickly changing from newspapers to the internet, blogs have increased exponentially in importance in the past few years. There are now bloggers making tens of thousands of dollars per month. There are now blogs breaking stories before the mainstream media does. Powerline Blog breaking the story on Dan Rathers falsifying documents about Bush during the 2004 election was an early example. In the sports world, the best blogs at breaking stories would include Deadspin and The Big Lead.

Last month, I broke down the top 100 most influential sports blogs. Today, I’m breaking down the top 20 posts by sports blogs and news about sports blogging.

1. Watchdog, Newsday: Rick Reilly to Leave SI Originally reported by Neil Best of Newsday’s Watchdog, The Big Lead had the most in depth coverage. TBL emailed Reilly to get the details on where he was going (ESPN), when he would start (June, 2008), and also found that ESPN was offering $2 million a year vs $1.5 million at SI.

2. The Big Lead: Colin Cowherd Shuts Down The Big Lead When the “mainstream media” (note: talk radio isn’t actually the mainstream media) gets mad at blogs, it’s always funny. Cowherd called for his listeners to hit bomb The Big Lead, putting too much strain on it for the servers to handle. The successfully got The Big Lead shut down for two days but not without ESPN and the entire blog community mentioning the story and increasing The Big Lead’s popularity.

3. The Big Lead: Perverted NFL Analyst Outted One NFL analyst took an X-rated picture and showed it to some uncomfortable women on his camera phone. The Big Lead found out that it was… Sean Salisbury.

4. AOL Sports Blog: Worst Sideline Reporter Challenge With help from Awful Announcing, AOL Sports put together a bracket to determine who was the worst sideline reporter, studio host, analyst, and play-by-play man in all sports.

5. Ballhype: Ballhype Study on Sports Blogging Landmark study proves that sports bloggers no longer live in their parents’ basement. According to the study, 30% of sports blogger own their own home to blog from the basement of. 5% blog as their job. But there is still a long way to go: a full 25% of them haven’t had their lives changed because of blogging.

6. The Big Lead: Jamie Mottram to Leave AOL Fanhouse for Yahoo! The Big Lead interviewed Mottram about his depature.

7. Blog Maverick: Mark Cuban Attacks the Dallas Morning News for Reporting Errors DMN listed Chauncey Billups as resigning with the Pistons. At the time, he had not resigned. The free agent season hadn’t even opened up for that matter.

Dallas Morning News Responds to Cuban

8. Ballhype: Journalists Turned Bloggers Ballhype interviews four bloggers who used to be mainstream journalists and has them compare and contrast blogging and newspaper writing. Interesting read for inspiration and to see where the future of journalism is headed.

9. Bugs and Cranks: Players Yelling at Reports Bugs and Cranks has the transcript of this legendary exchange between the Phillies Brett Myers and reporter Sam Carchidi. Sample lines:
BM: “Yeah, cause you’re a retard, you don’t know shit about fuckin’ baseball. You’re filling in for somebody.”

SC: “How do you spell ‘retard’?”

10. Deadspin: Deadspin at the Hot Dog Eating Championships Deadspin’s first hand account of the National Hot Dog Eating Championships. Note: Don’t read this if you are a vegetarian or are offended by meat.

11. DC Sports Bog: The NBA’s Other Artest Journalistic profile on Ron’s brother Daniel by Washington Post journalist-turned-sports-blogger Dan Steinberg. The Post is one of few newspapers doing a good job with new media.

12. Hardball Times: Pitch Identification Tutorial The Hardball Times with an insightful report on how to identify various pitches.

13. Deuce of Davenport: Actual Sports Cerials You Didn’t Know Existed Warner’s Crunch Time? Hokie Toasties? Moss’ Magic Crunch? Deuce of Davenport brings this report right to your breakfast table.

14. Bugs and Cranks: The All-Felon Squad Baseball edition. Sorry, Pacman Jones…

15. Awful Announcing: Reporter Cries Following Yankees Defeat Great example of professionalism brought to our attention by Awful Announcing.

16. AOL Fanhouse: Anonymous Blogging and Ethics AOL Fanhouse on blog ethics, profiling “Eklund” the anonymous hockey blogger who rose to fame during the lockout.

17. Awful Announcing:< CBS vs Fox: War of the Press Releases Awful Announcing finds it funny that Fox released a press release calling Cowboys-Giants “Super Bowl XLI¾.” So do I.

18. 100% Injury Rate: Your Chance to Destroy the Fox NFL Robot 100 Percent Injury Rate gets in a short, funny piece on how the Fox NFL robot is now an action figure. A quick hitter from a quick-hitting blog.

19. Dan Shanoff: SI Should Hire Leitch to Replace Reilly Well thought-out piece on why SI needs Leitch to compete with ESPN.

20. The 700 Level: A Brief History of That Hill in Astros Park The 700 Level tells you what the heck that stupid hill in center field of the Astros ballpark is there for.

UPDATE: KSK Pissed That They Didn’t Make It
Big Daddy Drew: “Why would you send us this list if we’re not on it, you heartless bastard?”

Matt Ufford also had something to say, apparently jealous of The Big Lead: “Not included: the the 1000 worst blog posts of the year. The Big Lead dominated that one as well.
Suck an egg, Mitchell.”

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