I think of sportswriting as having progressed through five generations in my lifetime. My descriptions of the generations are caricatures — how could they not be? — but I think this is true in the broad strokes.

The archetype of the first generation of sportswriting is the hardscrabble beat reporter who knew more than he, almost always “he,” let on. The reporter was ostensibly sent to cover the team — provide all the news that’s fit to print and all that — but in reality was more of a liaison between franchise and fan, a fiduciary of both. Some information was provided to fans explicitly; other times you’d have to read between the lines. Most of the juiciest gossip never made newsprint. Rarely did the writer adopt a stance hostile to the team he covered. Sometimes this grew from a desire to protect the team or its players — the prototypical “homer” reporter — but just as often the writer knew that he would be compromised in fulfilling the service he could to readers by exploring topics he shouldn’t. Some of the writing could be decent, but quick deadlines made it unrealistic that these writers would aim for anything beyond workmanlike prose.

At any given time, though, most fans are a frustrated lot. For every win is an equal and opposite loss, and few fans are satisfied with .500. Not unreasonably, many fans came to see this kind of sportswriter as an extension of the faltering team itself. Less pablum, they’d demand, fewer excuses; stop protecting these bums. Tell us what’s really going on. Who isn’t giving their all? Isn’t this head coach an idiot? (To be fair to the fans, the answer probably was yes.)

Into this void stepped archetype number two: the bombthrower. Jay Mariotti is a good enough stand-in for the type; most sports radio, especially early in the genre, fits this mold also (one mainstay of Chicago sports radio made it his shtick, or one shtick among many, to remind listeners that he’d never been in a locker room). Sometimes fans need to let off steam or want to read someone else letting of steam on their behalf. After the unventilated era that had passed, all that hot air could feel like a breath of fresh air.

Before long, though, the bombthrower style — the middle aged man with a serious face scowling day after day, year after year, from the same black and white picture in the newspaper — felt vaguely ridiculous. What is there to be so angry about all the time? How do you work up the energy to watch games after a while of this? Nor did it help that the group, for the most part, didn’t care much about the quality of work put out; like teenage poets, they figured it was the emotion that mattered most. (It also didn’t help that the anger wasn’t genuine; most of these guys floated from city to city, newspaper to newspaper, working up froth at whatever team was placed in front of them.)

Which led to archetype three: Bill Simmons. Again, it’s again easy to scoff now, but without placing yourself in the era it’s hard to remember how novel the whole blackjack-and-sports-with-the-guys thing felt. The writing remained sports-centric but was now situated within the broader theme of the average 30-something guy, living his life, thinking about sports but not consumed by it. Simmons could express anger or frustration, but unlike the bombthrowers, he rarely lingered there. It also helped, sacrilege as it is to admit it now, that Simmons wrote very well and seemed to care about the writing itself, something not true of the Mariottis of the world (flawed as the project was, it says much that Grantland, a forthright attempt at elevated sportswriting, was the brainchild of Simmons and not, say, Skip Bayless).

Simmons differed in another respect as well. The first two generations were defined by newsprint, even when the writing itself migrated online (remember how ridiculous all those one-sentence paragraphs looked the first time you saw them outside of a newspaper?). Bill Simmons, newspaper columnist, is almost unthinkable. The style he pioneered was only possible within the context of the adolescent internet, which, even at major properties like ESPN , seemed like the wild west compared to the newspapers that had come before.

Simmons so defined the style of a generation of sportswriters that his personal limitations became the limitations of the group that followed, with the added handicap that most of the followers couldn’t write half as well. Sportswriting had long been a heteromasculine domain but the new style often felt closed, even downright misogynistic. The need to present an opinion on everything, no matter how ill-informed, was grating. The pop culture metaphors wore thin.