My dad, a lifelong reader of The New York Times, emailed me a few weeks ago as the Yanks were amidst Spring Training. Did I, he asked, notice a decrease in the number of articles about March baseball in The Times Sports Section this year? Granted, The Times has never covered New York sports with the same vigor and thoroughness as the Daily News or The Post, but even by Times’ standards, coverage of baseball this spring seemed light.

At the time, I thought little of it. It was just another discussion point in the ongoing debate my family has over the future of print journalism vs. content and news delivered in real time on the Internet. If The Times didn’t see fit to saturate its Sports pages with Spring Training stories, so be it. Anyone interested in tales from the Grapefruit League could find plenty to read on numerous websites.

Apparently, though, my dad wasn’t alone in noted the decreased content out of Florida and Arizona. Over at Fangraphs yesterday, Marc Hulet surveyed the newspaper industry’s baseball coverage and found that coverage in his area was on the wane as well. Those who added their comments to the piece presented a mixed bag of viewpoints. Some felt that their local papers had ramped up coverage; others felt that print articles remained as they always did.

Upon closer inspection, though, nearly everyone agreed that the Internet is where the news now is. By and large, newspapers have expanded or maintained their sports coverage, but as newspapers decrease in size, that coverage remains online in the form of web-only features, blog posts or various other Internet-based analysis. Some larger sports outlets – ESPN, Fox Sports, Yahoo – are poaching local talent and providing them with a more maleable platform and a larger potential audience. Others – local newspapers – are pushing their writers to rely upon and use the Internet.

In New York, we’ve seen this paradigm shift unfold. Led by Peter Abraham in 2006, the New York papers ramped up their online presence. Today, Marc Carig, Mark Feinsand and the team at LoHud, among others, bring non-stop online coverage of Yankee news and analysis to the Internet long before their game-recap and news-capsule pieces appear in the next day’s print edition – that is, if the game ends early enough. If I happen upon a Daily News in the subway in the morning after a Yankee game, nothing in the sports section is news to me.

For us, the Internet has always been our primary medium, and although we complement beat writer coverage, we are, in a way, competing for the same eyeballs. We know that ESPN New York, for instance, is making a push to capture Internet-savvy sports fans. We know that New York’s cut-throat tabloids are putting more and more content up on their websites, and so we respond in turn.

This year, as our readers have noticed by now, we’ve changed the format of our game recaps. For decades, baseball game stories have followed a fairly static approach: Run through the chronology of the game, highlight the big plays, get a few rote quotes from the players, file story. Ours are trying to lend something more to the game and our understanding of it. We still highlight the big plays, but we are trying to do so with the assumption that anyone reading knows what happened.

With MLB.com’s replay offerings and numerous enhanced box scores and play-by-play applications prevalent online, fans know the minutiae of the game as it unfolds or soon after they arrive back at their computers. What we want to do is highlight aspects of the game that don’t always pop. A dramatic home run late in the game may appear to be the biggest play, but what of that key out earlier on? What of the two runs scored in the 1st? What of the run prevention in the sixth?

Beyond the results, we can look closely at the process as well. If a pitcher doesn’t have it, can we pinpoint what he was doing wrong? Was it pitch selection, poor scouting or a flat pitch? Player quotes add minimal amounts of context, and what we see at home with advanced pitch charting helps us bring you our reader a more nuanced and complete understanding of the game in context.

Baseball and the Internet have come together nicely over the last decade, and as I wrap up this meta blog post, I am optimistic that the next ten years will be just as productive. It’s an old sport long covered by traditional media adapting to a new and faster way to deliver information. That can only lead to positive developments for everyone involved.

With just under a week left in the decade*, the lists have started flowing. The Daily News has four of them today: best New York athletes, worst New York athletes, best New York sports moments, and worst New York sports moments. We’ll check in on the Yankees from each list, but as will become evident almost immediately, this is more of a “our favorite New York athletes,” rather than a measure of athletic ability.

Alex Rodriguez checks in at No. 4 on the best athletes list, topped only by Martin Brodeur (who doesn’t play in the Big Apple), Mariano Rivera, and, of course, Derek Jeter. On the worst athletes list, Kei Igawa holds the No. 7 spot, worse than Jerome James, but not worse than Eddy Curry. The list features many Mets, but two Yankees rank worse than any players from New York’s second team. Kevin Brown rates the third worst athlete, while Carl Pavano rates second worst. Only the unassailable Stephon Marbury stands between Pavano and the top spot. Again, the list is more “athletes we hate” than “bad athletes.”

On the best sports moments list, Derek Jeter’s flip play ranks No. 8, the 2001 World Series miracles rank sixth, Aaron Boone’s walk-off ranks fourth, the 2009 series ranks third, and the 2000 Subway Series championship ranks second. That’s a pretty Yankees-heavy list, though they didn’t own the top spot. That deservingly belongs to the Giants for beating the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. On the worst list, Clemens’s bat toss at Piazza rates the eighth worst moment, the 2001 Series ender rates sixth worst, and baseball’s steroids issue rates fifth worst. I won’t even make mention of the decade’s worst moment in New York sports. You all know what it is.

The lists are mostly for fun, but they do underscore just how much the Yankees own this city. They not only dominate the best of lists, but also the worst of lists. Hey, it’s tough to hate something if you don’t care. Also clear: the angst over the Knicks. But that’s a subject for another day, on another blog.

*No, there was no Year 0. If you want to go strictly by the calendar, the decade goes 2001-2010. But guess what? The year before Year 1 was…Year 1. We’ve come to celebrate decades from 0 through 9, so please, no decade bickering in the comments.