In some circles, he’s Columbia forward John Baumann, the senior that leads the team in points. In other circles, he’s Columbia pitcher John Baumann, the second team All-Ivy hurler that led the Lions in strikeouts last season. To his fraternity brothers, he’s known simply as “Hard Hat” — the summertime construction worker keeps one in his room.
On Saturday, Baumann will make his final trip to the Palestra. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a great article about him that can be found here.
The DP’s interesting article from a few weeks ago about this “John of all trades” can be found here.
Tags: columbia, John Baumann
An RSS feed of The Buzz is available
March 7th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Love the links guys! Keep up the great work!
March 7th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Are you kidding me? Linking to articles (besides DP ones) sucks. I don’t come to the buzz to look at a bunch of links.
Online Journalism 101: the last thing you want to do is direct people AWAY from your site and that’s exactly what you’re doing by being lazy and linking to other news source’s articles instead of doing the work and reporting it yourself.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Buster Olney has a pretty good blog and all he does half the time is link.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
??,
I’m not going to talk about John Baumann today. I’m not going to take a question about the game. I’m going to talk about ??’s post right here. Anybody hasn’t read this post — I don’t read it, but it was brought to me by a mother of children. Think this is worth reading.
I want to talk about this post. Three-fourths of this is inaccurate. It’s fiction and this post embarrasses me to be involved with athletics tremendously. That post had to have been written by a person that isn’t a writer and has never had a writer that’s had their heart broken and come to the office upset! And had to deal with the writer when he is upset! And kick a person when he’s down!
Here’s all that kid did! He goes to class. He is respectful to the athletes! He’s respectful to the coaches! And he’s a good kid, and he’s not a professional writer and he doesn’t deserve to be kicked when he’s down.
If you are a writer someday, you’ll understand how it feels. But you obviously aren’t a writer. I am. If your writer goes down the street and somebody makes fun of him because he wrote a shitty post on the blog, or says he’s fat, and he comes home crying to his editor, you’d understand. But you haven’t had that.
Someday you will and when your writer comes home, you’ll understand. If you want to go after a writer — one of my writers — you go after one who doesn’t do the right things! You don’t downgrade him because he does everything right and may not writer as well on the blog! And you let us make that decision!
That’s why I don’t read the comments! Because it’s garbage! And the poster who let it come out is garbage! Attacking an amateur writer doing everything right! And then you want to write posts about guys who don’t do things right and downgrade them, the ones that do make good articles.
Are you kidding me? Where are we at in society today? Come after me! I’m a man! I’m 40! I’m not a kid! Write something about me! Or the editors. Don’t write a kid that does everything right, that’s heart is broken, and then say the editors say he was scared! That ain’t true! And then to say that we made that decision because the editors are lazy, because they threatened to quit! That’s not true!
So get your facts straight! And I hope someday you have a writer and somebody downgrades them and belittles them and you have to look them in the eye and say, “You know what? It’s OK. They are supposed to be mature adults but they’re really not.” Who’s the kid here? Who’s the kid here? Are you kidding me? That’s all I’ve got to say. It makes me want to puke.
March 7th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Not sure what to make of all of this other than clearly some people enjoy links and some people don’t. Links are commonplace on sports blogs, as fake Buster Olney pointed out. Thankfully, the DP has already done the reporting on this story (as you can see from the second link). The first link was just meant to be an interesting supplement to those that enjoyed the DP’s story. If you don’t want to read the links, that’s fine. Read Wheeling’s post below without links. There’s no test on the material; you don’t have to read everything. Some people like getting the links as a supplement. I’m not too concerned if people are directed away from our site after reading everything — we’re not exactly as big as ESPN.com. That said, your comments and suggestions are surely welcome, and ?? is entitled to his opinion.
March 7th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I think the complaints are arising because the DP is not posting links just to articles they’ve already covered. More and more frequently, the DP sports section is posting links in lieu of actually writing the material. For examples of this problem see: most Big 5 games, Harvard recruiting scandal, Cornell breaking the P’s 20 year stranglehold on Ivy League basketball, Penn recruiting, Mark De Rosa’s illness, Ibby Jaaber’s progress in Europe, etc. Links are nice to supplement your coverage. Links are not nice when used in lieu of coverage.
I sincerely hope that helps.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Lollapalooza,
I agree with you, and thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, as a student newspaper, we don’t have the resources, manpower, and time to cover everything that we find interesting relative to Penn sports. In those cases, the links to professional outlets with those resources or local outlets with a primary interest in these areas serve as a substitute. In my opinion, the links are better than nothing. We can’t go to spring training to break news about Mark DeRosa, and we can’t fly to Europe to cover Ibby. Penn’s sports information department didn’t even have Ibby’s contact info in Greece. When we can do things like go to Big 5 games in Philly or track down and call up recruits, we make an effort to do so. I’ll vow to try harder so that we don’t have to use these links as substitutes, but that’s often out of our control. And in those cases, I think that posting links is better than posting nothing at all.
March 9th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Ever heard of a telephone? Try picking one up.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
The DP has gone to spring training in the past. “Better than nothing” is a pretty poor standard. And Rational Thought is right: you don’t have to travel everywhere to write stories, often a few phone calls will get you enough information for a good story. Maybe if the DP weren’t sending it’s writers to games via Amtrak, it would have money to cover some of the more important stories they’ve been missing. So please, less excuses, more results.