Futile disagreement

"Tennessee race in national spotlight" reads the headline in the edition of Monday, 25 July.
The story makes the not-very-profound observation that the U.S. Senate race coming up in 2006 will attract national attention, not too hard to figure out since the battle between the two old parties for control of the various parts of the federal government is ongoing, and each jostles fiercely with the other for any advantage.
Senator Bill Frist is retiring. Good.
He is just another big-government Republican, but he is, for some reason, important in politics, being the majority leader in the Senate, and being a likely candidate for president, which tells us something about the quality or lack thereof of old-party candidates.
In the story is discussion from one Larry Sabato, identified as director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, and apparently the only non-candidate ever applied to for discussion of American politics.
Not to take away from Dr. Sabato's expertise, but surely there are other people just as expert, SOMEwhere in the country, who could be interviewed at least once in a while.
The story, by a staff writer, contains this sentence: "Tennessee, Maryland, Minnesota and Vermont each have an open Senate seat in 2006 ..."
What is really puzzling is why apparently no "copy editor," if there really is anyone on the paper's staff who qualifies for that title, ever seems to know about noun-verb agreement. Reporters should get it right, of course, but certainly some editor should catch such errors.
Constantly, the Times Free Press publishes that kind of sloppy sentence with noun-verb disagreement, many of which we have referenced here.
It is reminiscent of Casey Stengel's asking, while managing the hapless early New York Mets, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"