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Genre Analysis Of Baseball

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The game of baseball has been around for approximately 150 years and throughout its history there have been different genres used to discuss or write about the sport. The two genres are a blog post and a news article about win-loss projections for teams. Each genre will look at the sport and write about the projections in a different way because they have different authors, audiences, and purposes. The two different genres will also differ in the style and context because they have different reasons and goals for their writings. The blog post will attempt to prove how the preseason predictions made by the news article are unreliable. On the other hand, the news article will attempt to show how the predictions are still trustworthy. The genres …show more content…

For example, the authors write that multiple teams beat there preseason predictions by “double digits”. The use of these numbers and logic in the blog shows that the purpose of the blog was the authors attempt to convince the reader through statistics to convince that a growing randomness in teams’ performance in the MLB is occurring due to the increase in skilled young players. Since the preseason predictions were way off, the authors show just how off the predictions were for all the teams in the league. Also, the advanced formulas used in the blog also boost the authors’ ethos in that their complexity means that the authors have a high understanding of both math and baseball. This terminology also helps their ethos in that the reader is going to trust what they are saying. The article also includes links to other blogs and articles about the projections further establishing their ethos. The audience for the blog is people that pay attention and follow professional baseball as to anybody else the numbers and facts would not mean anything to them. The blog is successful in using logos and ethos as rhetorical appeals and using the conventions of the blog genre to prove to audience that the preseason predictions have become progressively unreliable in a way that the audience finds easy to understand and interesting to …show more content…

Following genre conventions, the use of “NJ math whiz” is an exciting and attention seeking way to say a math professor (Casey). Casey uses this phrase in order to entice readers to click on his article. The first sentence also draws readers in as it tells readers that Yankee and Red Sox fans “won’t be happy to hear” what the math professor predicted for their teams (Casey). Then, he describes the background behind the article that a math professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology uses mathematical formulas before every season to estimate the records of the MLB teams. The professor, Bruce Bukiet, uses models that “he developed in the 1980s” and these formulas usually rank in the “top 15%” of preseason predictions when compared to sports writers (Casey). Last year, Casey explains that the professor successfully projected four of the six division winners to make the playoffs. However, even the mathematical models cannot foresee the randomness that is included in the game of baseball. The author’s purpose for writing about the professors preseason predictions is to share his interests in statistics through his journalism. The author’s tone in the article comes from the fact that it seems Casey is fascinated with not only baseball but also with the professors’

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