I was having a conversation with a friend over the weekend about the future of the newspaper business. He suggested that the print version of The New York Times will not exist in ten years. I don’t know enough about the future to know if that is correct, but the way things are going it wouldn’t really surprise me. Everything is in flux.

The Times is doing a good job with their baseball blog, Bats (their Diner’s Journal blog in the food section is tremendous). Sherman at the Post, Feinsand at the News and O’Brein at Newsday, Murti at the FAN, all have blogs to maintain along with their regular duties. Heck Pride of the Yankees has been around, and doing it well, forever. Blogging is part of the every day news cycle.

The fact that blogs as a medium have been co-opted by the mainstream press is not news. Nor is the fact that best Yankee information available anywhere now comes from a blog. But who would have thunk that the one-stop-shop for behind-the-scenes Yankee news would come from a Westchester paper and not one of Big Three? Pete Abraham will be scooped-up one day and be handsomely rewarded for his hard work. In the meantime, if his blog was the only access you had to the Yankees, you’d be well-informed. Pete’s site isn’t the end-all–other blogs, including this one and a host of others around the ‘net, have lots to add to the conversation–but he’s the starting point. It’s a sign of how things have already changed that the New York Times, Daily News and the Post are all getting their asses kicked by a paper from the ‘burbs.

This is good for us as fans because Pete has raised the bar, and now the rest of the papers have to keep up. That’s competition at its finest.